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Hernando Today

DPW Cleanup Turns Into Creative 'English' Solutions

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The Tampa Tribune

Published: May 11, 2008

In society, when the pendulum swings to its extremes, it often hits an unsuspecting victim on the other side. In this case, the new victim is you and me - the taxpayers.

We've come a long way from the days of pouring the spent oil changed in one's car down the city drain. That's good. But this mountain being made out of a DPW molehill is just another "gubberment" boondoggle with the select few making the bucks and the original alleged victims left watching.

Justice would have been better served letting the several owners of the adjacent houses to the Brooksville MLK DPW site share the millions given to Creative Environmental Solutions and their two predecessors - even without proof of any real hazard, but just for having to live next to such an un-neighborly, rainwater-runoff, ugly-butt site.

And then after that I'd get a couple of loaders and dump trucks over there pronto to make short work of the problem. Call the dirt whatever hazard you want. Bring it to that part of the dump which handles the CRTs and TVs and everything else that's now called a hazard. We probably could have even put an equipped playground there for all that money!

Who the heck does Greg Sutton from Creative Environmental Solutions think he is for five minutes anyhow? Is this a job or a career? Does he expect a pension, too?

"Intermediate remedial action" - how long did Sutton take to wordsmith that one? Every word of that phrase scares me. Clearly CES is signaling that they've only just begun to milk the cow.

Eleven change orders! Are you kidding me?

To me, inherent in being the consultant/tester is recusing oneself from the actual recommended work, or "action" in Sutton's words. There's simply a conflict of interest. Don't get me started on that. For years as I've watched this saga unfold I have asked myself questions such as: Why has there been such a need for re-tests? Is the state mad as us?

Perhaps, our board of commissioners was slow to act. Or didn't CES do the job right the first time? And isn't a consultant expected to shepherd the process for you?

One hires a consultant to handle the technical or specialized details with success - not repeated bad news. But isn't bad news in CES' interests? If the samples/answers given by CES aren't good enough (blink, wink), doesn't that merely lead to more questions - that is, more sampling (read: another change order and more money to CES)?

Also, why all of a sudden can't we/he wait for the state response as we've done before? God knows the adjacent residents have lived next to that ugly site for decades. We have repeatedly given the state samples (via repeated change orders) to meet their list of re-tests. So now that it appears the last (of the last) of the samples have been collected, is Sutton now seeing the end to the cash cow?

Perhaps CES should have banked some of their "professionally earned" windfall. On the other hand, if Sutton needs money quick he might try taking his company in a new direction by changing its name to Creative English Solutions.

Jim Mastro

Brooksville

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