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Read transcripts from July's public hearings on the Delaware River dredging
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Read transcripts from July's public hearings on the Delaware River dredging
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| Neal Santos |
On July 13 and 14, the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control (DNREC) held public hearings on a topic that may or may not ever go away: the dredging of the Delaware River. Why, you ask, is the DNREC still holding hearings on the project, after the Army Corps of Engineers already finished deepening an 11-mile segment of the river just south of the Delaware Memorial Bridge and ending at the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal? Well, the Army Corps applied for permits from Delaware in March of this year, in order to deepen additional parts of the channel that our neighbor state ostensibly has some modicum of jurisdiction over; the project is pointless unless the whole thing is dredged.
The DNREC just released the transcripts from July 13 and 14's hearings — you can download them by clicking here and here — and, for the most part, they're exactly what you'd expect. In the most black-and-white fashion imaginable, Teamsters line up on one side and environmentalists shuffle to the other. But there's one point that both sides should read, made by William Moyer, a member of the advocacy committee of the Delaware Nature Society. He bluntly asserts that the hearings are a big sham, and the Army Corps is going to do what it wants, when it wants — a charge that Teamsters and environmentalists alike should, in theory, care about:
Our presence at this hearing will have no effect on the outcome of this permit application, and no amount of public testimony in opposition to the deepening project is going to be utilized in making a permit decision. DNREC is in the proverbial lose/lose situation with respect to this application. If it denies a permit, the Corps of Engineers will return to Federal District Court and ask Judge Robinson to again give her permission to proceed with completing the dredging in the Delaware, as she did for the dredging that the Corps recently completed in Delaware waters in reach C.
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If DNREC issues a permit with conditions which cannot be met, the Corps will simply proceed with the dredging, arguing yet again that it really doesn't need a permit from Delaware, and that they only applied in, quote, "a spirit of comity."
To quote from Colonel Tickner's December 4, 2004 letter to then Senator Biden, Senator Carper, and Representative Castle … "I really think they meant to say they applied in the spirit of comedy."
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