With regards to the Laclede Gas TIF

When St. Louis was being erected in the early 1900s, my family had already been living in rural West Virginia for more than 100 years. I, too, come from a region of celebrated history. Sure, our land may not have been the canvas of renowned architects, but we were still able to live off it. For generations, we were able count on the same fields to feed our livestock, and the same wells to quench our thirsts. The earth was our palette.

Hydraulic fracking has replaced nature’s subtle melodies with the growling of overweight chemical tankers that rumble down broken country roads. Rural families, like mine, still depend on these aquifers to deliver clean water to their homes; but because of drilling-induced contamination, many people have lost their earthly ability to sustain life on their familial farms. My Luzader ancestors sleep next to bubbling mud thanks to the suppliers of natural gas.

With all due respect to local history, what are we really getting from the Laclede TIF? Should this city, which takes its name from a saint, provide incentives to corporations that are destroying sustainable and otherwise viable communities? This TIF fuels the idea that profit is more precious than humanity and supersedes the inalienable pursuance of life.

David Scott  •  St. Louis

In response to:

The former General American building at 706 Market Street could be the next in a long line of historic and architecturally significant downtown buildings to come back to life. This iconic building, designed by renowned architect Philip Johnson, has been vacant for 10 years.
Without question, some of the very things that make this building unique and stunning also present operational challenges for potential inhabitants. Yet, to call this building a mistake ("Not so fast," Sept. 13) ignores its successful past and the role of historic buildings in downtown’s remarkable revival.

This building was General American headquarters for 20 years. The company did not move out because the building was inefficient or impractical. Rather, it vacated after an acquisition by MetLife. Redevelopment and use of the building has been impacted by market and economic challenges as much as operational issues related to design.
Like most of the 100-plus historic downtown buildings that have been redeveloped in the past 12 years, this project will require supportive funding through both TIF and historic tax credits. If operational efficiency and design practicality had been criteria for any of our redeveloped historic buildings, downtown would still be a graveyard of beautiful empty buildings.
Laclede Gas, one of downtown’s largest and growing employers, is considering calling 706 Market Street its new home. The Koman Group, which most recently redeveloped the historic, fully leased Cupples 9 building, is again investing in downtown with its bid to purchase this storied building.
What’s in it for the public? Securing a long-term home for a major employer that is choosing to reinvest in our urban core. Activating an architectural landmark whose vacancy once symbolized a city in transition but will now accurately reflect the vibrant and growing downtown St. Louis that we are today.

Mike Sondag  •  St. Louis
Interim president, The Partnership for Downtown St. Louis

Take Back STL from Coal Fired Collusion

The Take Back St Louis ballot initiative has clearly caught the attention of Peabody Energy, along with the 36,000 people who offered their signatures. Coming from West Virginia, I’ve seen the devastation left in the wake of the coal industry. Water is left undrinkable, properties unlivable, and communities in ruin. Peabody Coal has had their opportunity to dispute this in court but instead chose to settle on gag orders and feign altruism through a shameless campaign of green washing across the metro area. It takes a special anti-democratic corporation to silence cancer stricken communities of Appalachia, to commit racketeering against the Dine (Navajo), and to dispose of disabled retirees to enhance their portfolio- all the while pretending to care about the ecosystem at the zoo, and environmental engineering on campus at UMSL.

Despite the shady economic engineering and criminal practices of our local coal baron, the one member of the mining community we should really be watching right now is our dying canary- the arctic ice and glaciers that are quickly melting in Greenland, Alaska, and Antarctica. The only place that global warming is being debated anymore is in Washington DC. Perhaps if we, too, ascertained the services of lobbyists who frequent that revolving door between corporations and the capital we could impel our government to face the truth.

Local lobbyists blasting away at environmental regulations. Source: lobbyingdisclosure.house.gov 

Targeting these green house tax incentives through the Take Back STL initiative is part of a globalized moral imperative to preserve the future of our world as we know it. Incentivizing carbon dioxide is, no doubt, in direct conflict with every reflex, instinct and defense mechanism built into the human genome. Maybe reaching a CO2 level of 400 parts per million doesn’t raise the hair on our neck like a sudden drop of barometric pressure, but the danger is far greater than any single storm on the horizon.

In addition to the warming arctic, the world has also witnessed the recent mass extinction of millions of species, the over-wintering of parasites and disease carrying insects, the slowing of jet streams, and the acidification of our oceans. Meanwhile in St Louis, we’ve seen both record floods and record low river levels over a four month span; we’ve seen record setting heat-waves and been surrounded by thousands of square miles of crop failure.

Because we live in a city with provisionally accredited schools and an aging infrastructure, we should look at other communities to see what those tax breaks have spelled out for their bottom line. For most of us, if we are robbed of our ability to generate income we go broke- which is exactly what happened to Detroit, Michigan. The corporate myth which dictates that you can tax-break your way to prosperity is alive and well despite 30 years of trickle-down economics and the resulting fiscal failure that tell us otherwise. We can no more count on Chrysler to return a favor and bail out the city of Detroit than we can count on Peabody Energy, a corporation that is continuing the oppressive Bennett Freeze against the Dine people, to pay their fair share in a city which is devastated by poverty and destitution.

Our city takes its name from a 13^th century French king who was a true servant to his people. St Louisans can no longer accept that corporate welfare is given to those who strip our Earth, incinerate our atmosphere, corrupt our water, and operate at the intersection of black lung and manifest destiny. This ballot initiative will enable our city to choose the sustainable future that the people of Germany and Spain have already determined for themselves.

Stranger to Blue Water

Mud tracks and erosion wind down the hill. Courtesy Doddridge Cty Watershed Association

June 20^th has always carried a special meaning for me, even before I moved away from my beloved mountain home.  Anyone from West Virginia can easily understand the ‘sense of place’, though few of us can actually explain it. This date reminds me of the lessons I’ve learned from my parents regarding family, dignity, heritage, and community. My father could drive through the entire state blindfolded if it weren’t so important to wave to oncoming traffic. My step mother, who sits along his side on the boards of numerous Ritchie County organizations, comes from a long line of Gilmer County farmers, woodsmen, and quilt makers. My mother, who taught me the only way to listen to Country Roads was at full blast with the windows down, has devoted her entire adult life to the growing population of people in need across the state. Despite my parents’ complete devotion to West Virginia, this date will always remind me of my Grandma Scott.

Winnifred Scott

This wasn’t just our state’s sesquicentennial anniversary; it was also the day my grandmother would have turned 99 years old. Though, as founder of the Ritchie County Historical Society, I’m quite sure she wouldn’t mind us all celebrating the biggest West Virginia Day of our lives. Her great-grandparents first settled western Ritchie County in 1834. Her grandmother, Caroline Tharpe, was one of the first native-born residents of Ritchie County. My great-grandparents operated a hotel in Auburn during the oil and gas boom, or as my grandma called it- the mud, money, and dust days. By a stroke of luck they sold it just months before the market crash of 1929. Grandma Scott would spend most of her life in Harrisville as a parent, teacher, and historian and leave a legacy that we are all very proud of and aspire to continue through our own lives. I can’t help mentioning that the best green beans and tomatoes I’ve ever eaten in my life came out of their garden on Church Street.

Courtesy Ritchie County Historical Society

The Ritchie County where Winnifred Scott grew up is a lot different than the one we are more familiar with- well, except for the mud, money, and dust.  Thanks to the departure of the garment and glass industries, and the arrival of the four-lane, the streets of downtown Harrisville on Saturday afternoon look a lot more like they do on Tuesday evening. The town isn’t the only thing that’s changed since my Grandmother’s youth; this is also a different kind of gas boom.

Fracking fluid spill on Buckeye Creek.
Photo courtesy of Doddridge Cty Watershed Association

As home to a ghost town named Petroleum, Ritchie County is no stranger to the natural gas industry. Due to the drilling practices of the day Ritchie escaped the water contamination that’s more common in the coal fields. I grew up chasing minnows in the Hughes River at North Bend on weekends and watched a family friend pull an unbelievable catfish out of a hole just upstream from the campground. While fishing on the lake seems to be normal to this point, I worry that the frenzy of drilling and fracking upstream will lead to future problems on the Hughes that have shown up in other areas. You have to look no further than Doddridge and Harrison Counties to find problems with contaminated well water and resulting illnesses.

Photo courtesy Doddridge County. Watershed Association

These days, companies like Antero are using chemicals hidden by the proprietary rights that were negotiated and written during those infamous Energy Commission meetings at the White House. These chemicals, along with millions of gallons of valuable clean water, end up sitting in containment ponds in the open air all across north central West Virginia. I suppose these out of state drillers aren’t worried about the potential for flash flooding or leaching. Bone Creek might not have always run clear back in my grandma's day, but it certainly wasn’t in imminent danger of carcinogenic contamination.

Building a new containment pit in Doddridge County. Courtesy WV Host Farms

Failed lining allows carcinogens to leach into ground water. Courtesy Doddridge County Watershed Association

My grandmother taught out at a one room school house in Hazel Green at the foot of a hill where many of our relatives are buried now. I remember going on a picnic with her there in late spring; we all ate in the shade of an old oak tree. I’ve been there many times since visiting the graves of the Luzaders; the whisper of the wind and chirping of the birds have always offered a divine backdrop to such a solemn scene. Just around the bend of Spruce Creek they’ve recently built a compression station that will surely create enough sound and vibration to spin my Luzader ancestors in their graves. Teaching class in that old church would be impossible now, even for ‘the General’. They’ve also dug up much of the flood plane in this holler for a pipeline.

Wake up, Great Great Great Great Grandpa Luzader!

Hazel Green, WV

Pipeline ponding along Lynn Camp.
Courtesy of Friends of the Hughes

The chemicals and methodology may be 21^st century, but the infringement on property rights and water sources would leave any 20th century practitioner of laissez faire economics drooling at the mouth. People across the region have lost the rights to use their wells; they’ve lost the use of their farm land; their hillsides have been eroded, and they’ve been overrun by convoys of water trucks and noise pollution. The use of eminent domain, or mineral rights, in the name of cheap and convenient energy doesn’t fit the value system of the people I grew up with. The people I know in Ritchie County are hell bent on maintaining their rights to hunt and pray in school.  I’m still trying to figure out why property rights don’t fit into that equation.

Courtesy Doddridge County Watershed Association

I suppose someone should point out that there is the environmental aspect to all of this. How much benzene, radon, and whatever’s in the special frack sauce do we really want to introduce into what has been a pristine ecology? How much methane do Ritchie Countians want to release into an ever warming climate? I shouldn’t have to remind anyone of the persistent drought that occurred for several years prior to the building of the dam. We need to stop treating things like water and life as though they are just layers of unspecified rock that must be drilled away. Collateral damage they call it. Financial institutions like Citibank are advising their clients to invest in water; the days of taking it for granted are over. We are also warned about this in the book of Isaiah, chapter 24.

The earth dries up and withers, the world languishes and withers, the exalted of the earth languish. The earth is defiled by its people; they have disobeyed the laws, violated the statutes and broken the everlasting covenant. Therefore a curse consumes the earth; its people must bear their guilt. Therefore earth's inhabitants are burned up, and very few are left.

If we truly believe that this is West By God Virginia, then why are we so eager to permanently destroy its mountains, streams, and aquifers? Believe me, there is something much more loyal about moving away than there is to staying and destroying it for a buck. You know what they say, ‘Mountaineers are always free’, but sometimes we sell out for $25 an acre. The gas industry will be hiding behind a team of lawyers when the pipelines rupture, when the hillside gives way to the erosion, and when the well casings fail- as they eventually do, while neighbors and relatives help out with water and other needs- as we always do. 

Scott Family, 1976

All West Virginians have ancestors and beloved grandparents who grew up in these hills, and surely we all think of them as we sing along to Country Roads. There was nothing radical about most of our mountain mommas; they just valued their heritage and communities and gave it their all. If we want to hold on to this heritage and pass those traditions on to our future generations then we have to actively defend it. There are local groups in West Virginia who are doing this very thing. Please reach out to them and ask what you can do to help. Time is running out.

Doddridge County Watershed Association

Friends of the Hughes 

O.V.E.C.

Mountain Justice and RAMPS