Letters on city water contract, climate change, earthquakes

Questions about water contract

The Wichita City Council is about to vote on a contract with a private company to assess our water system. A local coalition that includes the Peace Center, Sunflower Community Action, Food and Water Watch, and Corporate Accountability International is asking the council not to approve this. Our questions include:

▪  How is it possible to get a balanced assessment of our water system’s needs from a company with a financial interest in the results of the study?

▪  If the City Council has not yet decided to go forward with the second phase of the project, as council members say, then what alternatives are they investigating? And why does the city’s request for proposals say that “this project will be broken up into two phases” and that “a new management model will be developed to create a long-term partnership with the selected firm”?

▪  Have council members looked into why the city of Tulsa recently decided against this type of plan in favor of improving the municipal system?

▪  Have council members educated themselves about the promising new ways several U.S. cities are working out public-public partnerships, in which cities work with other cities and towns and nongovernmental organizations to plan and implement stronger and more sustainable water systems?

Can’t control

Al Gore’s global warming theory has been renamed climate change. After all, who can argue that things change?

Now more than 80 companies have piled aboard, with carbon credits bought and sold, and billions of dollars collected. Guess what? The climate is still changing.

As the government and liberal media browbeat skeptics by calling them “deniers” and “flat-earthers,” no mention is made of reparations (with interest) if they’re wrong. Climate has been changing for 4.5 billion years, long before man graced this planet. Will all that money be refunded if the true culprit is solar radiation?

Climate change is undeniable. The fantasy that it can be controlled by greedy politicians incapable of simply balancing a budget is the real “inconvenient truth.”

Prevent big one

In the 1960s in California, they drilled deep wells along big faults to prevent big earthquakes. Earthquakes occur where stress has built up. So maybe we are preventing big quakes here with our fracking disposal wells and are getting small ones instead (“State extends limits on wastewater from drilling,” Oct. 30 Local & State). I’ll go for that.

This story was originally published November 2, 2015 at 6:04 PM with the headline "Letters on city water contract, climate change, earthquakes."