Published: December 31, 2008 08:19 am      

A Reader's View: Letter addressing RLCD’s broken water policy right on target

Editor:

The letter to the editor written by Mr. Gary Wallace concerning a broken water policy in Jefferson County is right on target. Franklin County politicians, with help from officials of Mt. Vernon, have controlled the policy for the past 40 years, and as Mr. Wallace states, the broken policy continues.

As a present victim of the policy and as the former water superintendent for the village of Belle Rive, I can speak with some authority on the subject.

As a victim, I live in the southern third of Moores Prairie and am one of the 75 families that do not have potable water. I don’t need to tell you how inconvenient this can be. It is something my family and I have had to live with for more than 30 years.

As I type this letter, I can look out my back window and see a Rend Lake water tower to the south that is not much more than a mile away from my house. To the north at about the same distance, I can see a water tower owned by the village of Belle Rive. Not much further away, the village of Dahlgren maintains a water line running south to the main RLCD line running from Ewing to McLeansboro. Any one of those lines could serve Moores Prairie if allowed. Mr. Wallace’s assertion that the water policy is broken is nowhere more evident than in our area of the county. It’s just wrong that families of the Moores Prairie area are not served with all this proximity to water.

On at least two different occasions, all the families of our area have had their hopes up only to be disappointed. In one instance, RLCD promised to bring water to our township. Engineering plans were drawn and hook up fees were even collected from many of us. For some reason, unknown to me, the RLCD board changed its mind and the project was abandoned.

On another occasion, our hopes were once again raised. The village of Belle Rive was planning to run a water line south from their community through our area with the expectation they would hook into the main RLCD Ewing-McLeansboro water line. Those plans also fell through when Mt. Vernon objected because it would violate the exclusive contract that gave the city the right to sell water to Belle Rive. When Mt. Vernon threatened to turn the village’s water off, Belle Rive backed out of the commitment to deliver water to us.

In my present capacity as water superintendent for the village of Bluford, I also see the same RLCD flawed policy that gives Mt. Vernon exclusive right to sell Rend Lake water work to the extreme detriment of other communities of the county. With a monopoly on the supply of water, Mt. Vernon can dictate the terms and the price for which we must pay for the water, and they certainly do.

As Mr. Wallace says, the time to fix the problem is now. We cannot afford another 40 years of the same old thing that allows the powerful to dictate the policy at the expense of others. Rend Lake Conservancy District, do your job. Eliminate the restrictive clause for the sale of your water. If Bluford or any other community wants to buy water from Mt. Vernon, that is acceptable. However, if they choose to buy directly from the district, they should be allowed to do that also.

Jim “Bud” Parkhill

Belle Rive