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Happy birthday Tanner Riley Ragukas!

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Suzanne Marie Sikora and Neil Dymond Popko engagement

<p>It&#8217;s easy to blame administrators in Wilkes-Barre and Kingston for tax money wasted paying federal fines for failing to meet mandates spelled out years ago. The two municipalities have to fork over a combined $37,000 for non-compliance related to Environmental Protection Agency stormwater management rules.</p><p>It seems utterly avoidable. The question becomes obvious: Why didn&#8217;t they just do what had to be done?</p><p>It&#8217;s easy to blame them, but it&#8217;s wrong.</p><p>This is a problem as old as the sewer and storm lines running beneath Wilkes-Barre, Kingston and pretty much any other municipality &#8212; especially those along the Susquehanna River.</p><p>The issue: Stopping stuff other than water from getting into waterways.</p><p>For years this was about industrial waste: Stopping factories along rivers and creeks from using them like a constantly-running toilet that quickly flushes any waste, however toxic, out of site and thus out of mind.</p><p>Those problems have been largely mitigated because, frankly, they were the easiest ones to go after. There was a single point of discharge (the factory), a single entity to legally go after (the company running the factory) and usually a single solution (stop discharging toxic stuff into the water).</p><p>The next big problem was considerably more diffuse: Combined sewer outfalls. These are points along a waterway where storm water lines drain, which is fine, but where sewage also sometimes gets into the river, usually because municipalities originally didn&#8217;t separate storm water and sewer lines. If the two sources combined went to a treatment plant, heavy rains could overwhelm the system. The solution was and still often is to divert some of it straight to a river.</p><p>Municipalities have been eliminating outfalls in dribs and drabs, usually when grant money or low-interest loans became available from the federal government.</p><p>But even when you fix these first two problems and nothing but storm water enters rivers and streams, chemicals and pollutants still reach the rivers: motor oil some backyard mechanic dumped in a street drain, fertilizers spread by farmers on land near waterways, salts and chemicals just washed from the surface of roofs, roads and sidewalks.</p><p>Stopping these pollutants from reaching a river takes considerable work, and money. The problem is not that Wilkes-Barre, Kingston and other municipalities don&#8217;t want to stop them, it&#8217;s that they need serious help to do it &#8212; and that they have more urgent things on their agendas, things that very directly impact residents. You know, potholes, damaged catch basins, crumbling bridges.</p><p>Kingston Administrator Paul Keating put it bluntly, calling the rules the municipalities were fined for violating &#8220;the most comprehensive unfunded federal mandate we have been compelled to deal with.&#8221;</p><p>Clean water is a literal matter of life or death. Rules that assure clean water are essential. Those who impose such rules without providing clear guidelines &#8212; and money &#8212; to meet them are the ones to blame here.</p><p><ins>For other opinion stories, <a href="https://www.timesleader.com/category/opinion" target="_blank">click here</a>.</ins></p><style>
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Our view: Municipalities not to blame for these fines