Dear Editor,
Sleazy government landed a triple whammy on East Tennessee’s environment this holiday season. At a time when we thank God for the Earth’s riches and for the gift of his son, three federal agencies mounted an attack on our regions forests, air, water and on our public land.
First, on the day before Thanksgiving, the Tennessee Valley Authority announced its intention to auction public land that is home to a grove of historic beech trees and the TVA’s Johnson City Service Center.
Despite the fact that the TVA has historically given at least 30 days for citizens to respond to agency actions, it closed public comment period on this issue on Dec. 15, even though two of the 12 working days in the period included Thanksgiving and the Friday after.
Then, rather than meet in public to consider citizens concerns and to debate openly whether a federal agency should even consider transferring to private ownership land, which the highest use for would have been a veteran’s memorial park, the TVA bureaucrats hid behind the holidays, too. Apparently, the TVA board thought that private profit outweighed the public good of a veterans’ park. So, the TVA bureaucrats, with uncharacteristic hardwork over Christmas, compensated the development company that wanted the land before the year ended.
Pity that neither Congressman Jenkins nor the agency that wastes almost $5 million a day rebuilding the Brown’s Ferry Nuclear Plant couldn’t find a way to protect the average citizens interest and keep that corner in the public domain.
Bad government’s second sleazy attack on our environment occurred on Dec. 5 when the Forest Service announced that it was going ahead with a nearly 1,000-acre clearcut in the Flatwoods Road area of the Cherokee National Forest.
By law, citizens are given 45 days to appeal these decisions. But, by announcing this huge logging project during the Christmas season, this Grinch-like government has robbed citizens of about a fifth of the time they would have had to prepare their appeals if the service hadn’t hidden behind the holidays.
The administration’s third stab happened on Christmas Eve when the Nuclear Regulatory Commission allowed Nuclear Fuels Services to submit its third license amendment application for its BLEU project.
Maybe NFS and the NRC considered themselves godlike and they thought the gift of more radioactive and toxic pollution for our region was appropriate for this time of year.
The TVA, Forest Service and the NRC attacked our local environment under the cloak if Christmas. But, they weren’t the only grinches in government this season.
Just before Christmas, the Bush administration cut timber corporations loose on the Tongass national forest in Alaska – the largest temperate rain forest in America.
Nevermind that over 250,000 citizens asked for protection of all roadless areas and that development of the Roadless Area Conservation Rule resulted in more public involvement than any other program in the history of our democracy.
Nevermind that over 4,000 residents in the Johnson City area petitioned the TVA to donate the land around the beech tree grove for use as a memorial park.
Nevermind that for decades hundreds of area residents have complained that the NRC and TDEC regulation of NFS is lax.
Nevermind that the Cherokee National Forest provides our mountain communities with pure drinking water and is home to declining wildlife populations. I guess comments are being treated by the agencies like the polls the president so vocally disdains.
So, if comments and letters from citizens and from public interest groups like the Sierra Club are disregarded by the agencies of this administration, which public are our representatives and public servants serving?
The short answer is the corporate supporters of the administrations like timber, paper and development and energy companies that were granted their wish including continued avoidance of jail time for the Chief Executive thief of Enron who instead of being invited to the White House to write federal energy policy, should have been invited to spend the rest of his life in a federal penitentiary.
Has integrity been restored in government yet?
Linda Modica
Chair, State of Franklin Group
Sierra Club

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