Ed Moreen, a project manger for EPA, working on the clean-up of the Silver Valley, is a nice guy. So is Terry Harwood, an employee of the Idaho Department of Ecology.

Sincerity oozes from both as they explain what government is doing to protect human health, and the flora, fauna and wildlife within a mammoth basin-wide Superfund site covering the full drainages of the South Fork and North Forks of the Coeur d’Alene River.

Both men, however, reflect the arrogance so many bureaucrats display----that smugness that comes from feeling they have the facts and all the answers. .

The ancient Greeks called it “hubris.” It was on full display last week when the agency conducted an informational meeting at the Medimont Grange Hall. Twenty of my neighbors and I showed up to listen and ask questions.

Like all the “chain lakes” that lie on either side of the Coeur d’Alene River between Cataldo and Harrison, nearby Cave and Medicine were swollen with water from the spring mountain run-off and unusually heavy rains. Adjacent fields in the flood plain were mostly underwater.

Therein lies the problem. Each year this seasonal flow brings new amounts of lead and zinc from historic waste dumps throughout one of the most mineralized and mined areas in the nation. EPA, under the Superfund Law and the Clean Water Act, is the lead agency in overseeing removal of the most contaminated soils and then remediation.

Funding this effort is $750 million extracted from Asarco, HECLA and other mining companies who historically contributed to the creation of the waste. By law the money can only be expended for clean-up in the basin.

But how clean is clean? And how much sense does it make to remove and remediate areas in the flood-plain that just a year later are flooded again with contaminated water? How thorough are studies on human health impacts in the area as opposed to studies about the white swans several of which die each year from ingesting excessive zinc and lead in the plants they eat.

EPA has divided the basin into an upper and a lower portion. Most work so far has been done in the upper basin, cleaning up in the 21 square mile “box” surrounding the old Bunker Hill site in Kellogg,. Now attention is turning to the lower basin and there are significant differences EPA best take note of.

Utilizing its traditional methods of public participation, EPA is forming “collaboratives” of interested parties. They claim these advisory groups will have real input into their “adaptive management” approach to clean up solutions.

People are justifiably skeptical. What they see is an agency hell bent on spending $750 million on clean up whether it is justified or not. Despite having been in the Silver Valley 20 years, the agency has no real time-line nor any real cost numbers for its plans in the lower basin, or so it claims.

Despite federal law clearly defining EPA’s authority to be limited to just navigable waters with ground water management left to the states, they see and read about an agency that proposes legislation to do away with that distinction and give them control over ground water also. Just to the north, in Bonner County, they see where EPA tried to deny property owners the right of judicial review of EPA’s decisions to decide what is and is not a wetland.

They also see an agency whose subcontractors tell property owners if they don’t submit to soil sampling they’ll never be able to sell their property because while they of course won’t inform title companies which properties are clean and/or remediated, they will of course have to answer questions that lenders inevitably will pose. That of course is not a threat.

What Ed and Terry don’t get is folks around here don’t like the sense of money being spent just because it is there to spend. They want to know just what goes into the cost benefit formulas and whether the models constructed allow for empirical data, or just some bureaucrat’s calculation of what the variables are.

Ed and Terry’s arrogance really showed at the end when they dismissed as a “pipe dream” a question regarding Congress possibly accessing the settlement funds since federal appropriations for NPL clean-ups are declining under other pressures. “Never will happen,” Ed said.

Ed and his agency ignore at their peril this flag. The suggestion that their “storebox” might be raided came from none other than Idaho Second District congressman Mike Simpson, the chairman of the appropriation subcommittee over-seeing the EPA budget.

Yes, EPA is offering short-term jobs without benefits to those contracted with locally to undertake clean-up activities. My neighbors are trying to tell EPA you have created such a stigma by over-playing the health threat that it is going to be impossible for the current mining operations, which offer long-term jobs with benefits, to ever again flourish despite there being plenty of minerals left to be extracted compatibly with the environment.

Especially noteworthy and sad to this observer was the meeting had no moment of silence or any mention that the day, May 2nd, was the 40th anniversary of the Sunshine Mining disaster that took 91 lives from the valley.

Believe me, the people of my home valley understand risk as well as reward, productive work as opposed to make work, benefits that outweigh costs, humility as opposed to arrogance, respect as opposed to benign tolerance. EPA still doesn’t get it.