April 7, 1997, California Regional Water Quality Meeting

This meeting heard a presentation by the two town councils of Agua Dulce. The Proposal by the legitimate town council headed by Tana Lampton is on this website and may be viewed. The letter by Lillian Smith and her group of cronies has not been made public.

Smith has consistently refused to provide a copy for the community to see. What we understood her to say was the usual drivel "Well we’re just a bunch of little people in a rural community, we can’t do anything, we don’t have the facilities and we haven’t collected enough money so therefore and bear with us". The same do-nothing that has been going on for the last 10 years.

The real Agua Dulce Town Council pointed out that Lillian’s group has done absolutely nothing for the last ten years. They had the opportunity in 1989 to join into the Interim Policy, which were secured for Acton by Brink and others. This policy requires houses in new subdivisions, to be on one acre or more for private septic deposal.

This same policy (or 2.5 acres to match the exisiting disrict ) could have been implemented in Agua Dulce. Lillian Smith stood up at that meeting nearly ten years ago and said we don’t need that in Agua Dulce, we don’t have a problem. Now the community is facing new restrictions to be imposed upon it by Regional Water Quality.

The most probable restricting will be a moratorium on all construction of private septic systems. That means either an enhanced sewage disposal system for new homes, or a community sewer system must be installed for growth. The group of crazies, led by Lillian and the pro-growth Chamber of Commerce, seems to think that people will vote for an assessment to build a sewage plant to allow more people to build homes in the community.

My estimate would be if that were on the ballot, it would lose by at least an 80% vote against it.

Smith and the Chamber of Commerce have no plan except doing everything they can to put a water and sewer system in the community to promote growth for the businesses and her "newspaper". Her methods of doing this is to do nothing towards protecting and monitoring the groundwater.

The real Agua Dulce Town Council tried to start a groundwater monitoring program which would ask people to voluntarily have their wells tested. The purpose of this would be to find out if their wells are being contaminated by the toxic waste that Party dumped at the pig farm, or other sources of toxic waste dumped in Agua Dulce. The data from these tests will be encoded by latitude and longitude of the wells, to be entered into a data base which will then be used to determine any pollution occurring from these toxic waste dumps or from other sources in the community. In this method, the people who participate in this program will be able to know their wells are safe and their children and families are safe. Cost to participate will be about $120 dollars a year to pay for the necessary tests on on at least quarterly basis.

This is the program that Lillian, of course, has refused to implement for at least the last three years.

Additionally, the trash removal group in the community, A.V. Rubbish, had made an agreement that was put in place by Howard Carlip to pick up horse manure at half the regular rate. This offer has been squelched by Lillian Smith, and according to Mr. Carlip she even called A.V. Rubbish and had the deal cancelled because, "We don’t need horse manure pick up in our community."

You can ascribe your own motivations for her actions. Our position is that she wants a growth enhancing sewer systrem and she will do everything she can to get it. New readers may ask why your Realtor didn’t tell you about the nitrate problems in the area. Why didn’t they disclose what they have known for ten years that there is significant nitrate pollution in some areas of the community.

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