Rappahannock County Supervisors say...................
"Heck No..........We Won't Glow!"
The Rappahannock County Board of Supervisors expressed concern and opposition Monday to legislation on farm wineries and uranium-mining in Virginia.
By a similar unanimous vote, the board approved a resolution opposing pending legislation that would lift Virginia’s ban on uranium mining. A new corporation, Virginia Uranium, Inc., is seeking to lift a 25-year-old moratorium on uranium mining so that it could mine a large known deposit in Pittsylvania County.
The issue may have relevance to Rappahannock County, McCarthy told the board, because “there are known deposits of uranium in Warren, Fauquier and Madison counties” and possibly in Rappahannock County as well. Uranium mining is an environmentally damaging process that produces vast amounts of radioactive waste known as “tailings” which can leach contaminated drainage into wells, streams and groundwater.
McCarthy said the bill has been reported out of committee and will go to the Senate floor, where he expects it will be killled.
1 comment:
Rappahannock did NOT say "No to Uranium"! They passed a resolution -- simply an expression of "concern." It has no power, and will not achieve anything. It's meaningless.
Over a year ago, when Rappahannock County was the target of the sewage sludge industry, citizens asked me to speak to their board of supervisors about an ordinance -- a binding local law -- that would ban corporations from engaging in the land land applcation of sewage sludge. I did, and the citizens urged their supervisors to enact such an ordinance. County Manager McCarthy (who is not elected, but appointed by the board) wouldn't allow the supervisors to even consider it. Instead, the unelected McCarthy set up a "sludge study committee" (sound familiar?), which consisted of two concerned citizens, McCarthy and THE VICE PRESIDENT OF THE SLUDGE CORPORATION. Not surprisingly, the "study committee" decided they would hire someone (payed by county tax dollars) to monitor the sludged sites.
Contrast wimpy Rappahannock County with the mighty Town of Halifax, which last week enacted an ordinance -- a binding local law -- prohibiting corporate chemical and radioactive bodily trespass and stripping corporations of their rights of "personhood" -- those rights that allow corporations to assault communities and triumph every time. Democracy is alive and well in Halifax! In Rappahannock, not so much.
And McCarthy "expects" the bill (the study bill, I assume) to be killed in the state senate? Does he know something the rest of us don't know? I seriously doubt it.
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