Toxic tales in LaSalle

There is a city council meeting Wednesday night.

Some items on the agenda, for example, the annual spending plan for Community Development Funds, may be legitimately scrutinized. Where those annual funds are spent is an endless source of scrutiny.

As of 6:47 a.m. today, not supporting materials for the meeting have been released. We still don’t know how Mayor Robert Restaino plans to pay $4 million of our money to Niagara Falls Redevelopment for his proposed Centennial Park project.

Also, you can anticipate the regular zoo that is a city council meeting to repeat. The same crew of gadflies will take to the podium to mewl with plaintive wails about things that offend them, whether the dog shelter, Centennial Park, raw sewage being dumped in the river every time it rains hard or hazardous waste buried on Cayuga Island or allegedly seeping from a capped landfill at Griffon Park boat launch.

The Buffalo News on Monday published an article about the State Department of Environmental Conservation investigating hazardous waste used a fill in the 1930s and again in the 1960s to expand the western end of the island along Rivershore Drive after workers for Clark, Patterson and Lee, an engineering firm the city uses to augment its own staff, smelled something nasty during utility line work.

What was dumped when that end of Cayuga Island was expanded is a loosely held secret but if you look at the list of corporations that contributed to the expansion of the Island from 1958 to 1962 it is easy to assume the worst. The waste disposal practices of companies like Carborundum, Union Carbide, Hooker Chemical Corp., Olin, and Pittsburgh Metallurgical, especially in that era, engender warm fuzzy feelings in not one.

And so it is Wednesday night, some angry folks will be standing at the podium for the good of the community, shaking fists at the clouds, raging for 3-minutes each at the city council which can’t change a thing about what has happened on Cayuga Island our how the DEC investigates it.