Sherry Chandler

Kentucky HB 164, The Stream Saver Bill

The good news is this:

After years of withering in an unfriendly legislative committee, a bill that would stop coal mine operators from filling valleys and creek beds with toxic excess waste jolted to life Tuesday.

House budget committee chairman Harry Moberly, D-Richmond, inserted language from the so-called stream saver bill into a decoy measure that would have given tax breaks for camels and heard 90 minutes of testimony on the proposal from various proponents.

Believe it or not, there are a few camels in Kentucky and with the droughty summers we’ve been having they may become more popular.

Be that as it may, this “decoy measure” was necessary because Jim Gooch, the chair of the House Natural Resources and Environment Committee has refused to let HB 164 out of committee for three years. You remember Jim Gooch, the man who holds committee meetings on global warming and invites only the wing-nuttiest opponents, the man who wants political cartoonists declared lobbyists, the man who sells mining equipment to coal companies. No conflict of interest of course for such a man to be chair of the Natural Resources and Environment Committee.

Decimation of our mountains is bad enough, but as House testimony showed yesterday, the fallout of mountaintop removal mining effects water quality for a large part of the state:

Two university scientists testified in favor of the measure, saying the industry’s practice of pushing spoil and overburden over mountainsides and into the valleys below is harming water quality, increasing the potential for floods and destroying aquatic habitat.

“The increase in metal concentrations is particularly alarming because of their toxicity to humans and wildlife,” said Nathaniel Hitt, a research associate in the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife Sciences at Virginia Tech University.

As a result, many of the small streams that now flow into tributaries of the Kentucky River, which supplies water to 800,000 Kentuckians, are “as colorful as a fall Oak tree,” said Democrat Don Pasley of Winchester, the sponsor of HB 164.

“While questions about Central Kentucky’s water supply have divided us in recent years, we should at least be able to agree that it should be clean,” Pasley said.

This bill may come to a committee vote today (March 5). Kentuckians for the Commonwealth and the Central Kentucky Council for Peace & Justice are urging us all to call House Appropriations and Revenue Committee members before 1:30 today in support of this bill.

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In other good news, Dennis Kucinich won his Ohio primary bid yesterday.

AND

BRATTLEBORO, Vt. (AP) — Voters in two southern Vermont towns passed articles Tuesday calling for the indictment of President Bush and Vice President Cheney for violating the Constitution.

More symbolic than substantive, the items sought to have police arrest Bush and Cheney if they ever visit Brattleboro or nearby Marlboro or to extradite them for prosecution elsewhere — if they’re not impeached first.

via

1. More on Gooch
2. Oh for a tongue like Molly Ivins’
3. Chicken Little and the Ostriches
4. KY SB152
5. Tiltin at them windmills

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