The Gerrish Lyon Utility Authority and its township board enablers are on the defense for a change. It was recently announced that a new study is being commissioned by Higgins Lake pro-sewer forces to evaluate the water quality of the lake. This comes largely because water quality experts at the Tip of the Mitt Watershed Council (TOMWC) appears to have concluded that the ‘science’ used to justify their STEP SEWER was inadequate to justify a mega-infrastructure sewer.
The concerns are that faulty project science is financial death for obtaining loans and public bonds that residents will be forced to pay back one month at a time, forever. They persisted in trying to convince people otherwise, but there just wasn’t any meat on their “science” bones.
At first, the pro-sewer crowd bad-mouthed the TOMWC report and then bashed the local Higgins Lake Land Conservancy for sponsoring it. When that didn’t fly, they finally concluded that a new study is needed to try to rescue their plans to spend $130M of the public’s money, or more!
With the huge expenses for residents at stake, one would think that they could have done their homework from the outset, unless they felt that doing so would disrupt their plans to ram this quickly through the legal process before anyone could effectively object.
You can learn more and more about how flawed this STEP project has been by reading documents posted at places like HigginsLakeUnited.com and HigginsLakeSewerFacts.com. The good news for the public is that several local groups of citizens did object, and the whole process for ramming this through before anyone could do anything failed big time. People who object are not giving up the fight to keep from urbanizing Higgins Lake.
David Hobson
Roscommon
