August 21, Asheville City Council will be considering new stormwater and erosion control ordinances. City staff has been struggling with the issues for some time, and they will hold three public forums before the scheduled date of adoption.
The problem is, when it rains in Asheville, the water mixes with the dirt and forms a substance called mud. It runs into the rivers and turns them brown. This upsets environmentalists who like clear, pristine water in the streams. If you don’t believe me, the taxpayers actually paid for a small plastic model on which a city engineer can sprinkle some dust and then pour water to show that the dust turns to sludge and runs downhill. As anybody wishing to obstruct development knows, environmentalists can be hired to identify habitats for rare species of salamanders or butterflies that could be compromised by mud and silt!
What is worse, pervious surfaces, like those used to pave the greenways we need, collect oil, paint, and other toxic substances that don’t have a chance to percolate (pronounced per-Q-late down here) through the soil in a gully washer.
The proposed solution is to prohibit persons owning riverfront property from building, not even porches or sheds, within fifty feet of a river’s edge.
There is another option. We could build what my friends from Paraguay refer to as “European rivers.” By blocking up the sides with concrete, we could turn them into long in-ground swimming pools like the Seine. That would be a more reliable way of keeping Mother Nature out of the rivers than asking a bunch of rubes like us American citizens to memorize a bunch of new rules. (Yeah, I know. The rivers’ rights would be even more secure if we built enough cell blocks to contain us rubes.)
