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The ACREC Susan Bottcher Shovel Brigades
 | | Susan Bottcher arriving at the bagel shop - click to enlarge |
This morning, Susan Bottcher was meeting with some neighborhood folks at a bagel shop in her district. We thought that would be a good opportunity to remind voters that Susan told the Stephen Foster neighborhood folks that they could either pay more taxes or get a shovel and clean up the Koppers toxic superfund site themselves. We took some great pictures of the ACREC Shovel Brigades handing out buckets and shovels in front of the bagel shop. To further remind people, following is the letter that we originally ran two days ago from the president of the Stephen Foster Neighborhood home owners association. This letter needs no commentary from us. We will let the neighborhood residents speak for themselves. Everything below this point, in this article, was included in Sandra's letter, including the final commentary after her signature and Bottcher's original letter: _________________________ Current City Commission runoff candidate Susan Bottcher's March 31, 2010 letter to the Gainesville Sun (see below) caused a great deal of upset and anger among city residents whose lives and health have been damaged, in far too many cases beyond repair, by Koppers' toxic emissions. This letter displays Ms. Bottcher's lack of interest in residents' genuine distress as well as her deep ignorance about our local environmental debacle. Families find this complete disregard for their ongoing pain callous and demeaning. Ms. Bottcher's misuse of this life and death issue to rant at "anti-tax groups" belittles our community's efforts for a meaningful solution. She truly committed a disservice to my suffering neighbors and to everyone working for an effective cleanup- a twist of the knife for no good reason.
Significantly, Ms. Bottcher submitted this letter during last spring's mayoral/commission runoff campaigns, and did not reveal her role as political communications associate with a group (The Walden Group) that provides local campaign assistance to "progressive" candidates. Was this ethical?
Finally, she suggests that not every citizen or group has the right to speak out in disagreement with City Commission decisions. This is a serious cause of concern among residents who see it as an indication that Ms. Bottcher does not understand or respect the democratic process. Sincerely,
Sandra Watts Kennedy
President, Stephen Foster Neighborhood Association, Inc. Bottcher shows no understanding of the Koppers issue, no compassion for victims of Koppers' contamination. Her attitude suggests that she does not support residents' efforts for an adequate and authentic remedy to Koppers' contamination of Gainesville and the Floridan Aquifer. We do not believe that Ms. Bottcher has the best interests of local families at heart, if she has a heart: Pay taxes or clean up
Recently, blame has been placed on the City Commission that Koppers Superfund site hasn't been cleaned up. Critics say our elected city officials could clean up this 27-year-old mess, but chose not to do so.
In reality, the federal and state environmental protection agencies are the entities responsible for allocating resources needed to clean up Superfund sites.
Most of the environmental protection agencies' inertia is due to the success of the conservative agenda to shrink government to ever smaller and impotent proportions. Through the loosening of environmental regulations and continuous lowering of taxes, they have succeeded in stopping government agencies from doing their jobs.
For anti-tax groups to then blame government for not solving such community problems is hypocritical. If cleaning up the toxic mess left by private industry is government's job, then stop pointing fingers. Either gladly pay your taxes or get out there with a shovel and clean up Koppers yourself. Susan Bottcher,
Gainesville
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On Saturday, May 7th, we are hosting a Pirate Party in honor Alachua County's most prolific pillagers and plunderers, Mike Byerly, Paula DeLaney and Rodey Long. We doubt that they will show up, but we are going to honor The Taxing Three for their ability to simultaneously tax us into oblivion and create a $400 million road repair deficit at the same time.