Letters To The Editor Week Of 10/11/2021

Successful silver
anniversary event
To the editor: On Sept. 25, despite the rain, the Silver Anniversary of Clean Your Streams Day was successful thanks to the efforts of 465 dedicated volunteers, who cleaned up over 50 sites around the Toledo and greater Toledo area.
Interesting finds included an office chair, a traffic cone, 70 empty teddy graham plastic cups, a tow hitch, a pool noodle, a decoy goose, glow sticks, fake flowers, a car grill, three flip flops, and a City of Toledo Astro e-scooter.
Like previous years, food wrappers, cigarette butts, plastic bottles and plastic bags were the most common types of
trash found throughout the area.
Thank you to every one of the volunteers that showed up on Sept. 25 or participated virtually from Sept. 18-25. These volunteers truly made a positive impact on our waterways for our communities and wildlife. Special thanks to Toledo Early College High School, which brought the largest group - 105 volunteers to help clean our waterways.
Clean Your Streams Day is a Northwest Ohio environmental tradition of removing marine debris before it gets to our rivers, streams, and Great Lake. Clean Your Streams (CYS) brings the community together for environmental service, water stewardship and good fun. Volunteers clean up dozens of high-profile stream bank sites along five major waterways, plus tributaries, creeks, and ditches throughout the region.
Volunteers of all ages remove and record what they find on data cards, which Partners for Clean Streams sends to the Ocean Conservancy for inclusion in the International Coastal Cleanup, a worldwide effort to track and remove marine debris.
Clean Your Streams Day is hosted in September, but if you would like to do a Clean Your Streams clean-up any other time of the year, check out Partner’s for Clean Streams year-round sister program CYS 365.
Partners for Clean Streams Team
partnersforcleanstreams.org

Saving wetlands
a major battle

To the editor: I became aware of the Save Our Wetlands (SOW) group earlier this summer through articles in The Press and from the signs popping up around my town. I wanted to understand what it was all about.
What I found was that the City of Oregon was attempting to change a very large area at the southeastern city limits from farmland and wetlands into a site for heavy industry.
A group of landowners and neighbors in the Jerusalem, rural Oregon and Curtice Communities (JROCC) didn’t want to see it happen out of concern for the environment and the quality of their lives.
I began searching for the facts and found that along with significant noise and light pollution, air quality suffers greatly surrounding a facility that big.
For example, the seemingly innocuous Oregon Clean Energy Center, which appears to emit harmless steam, enjoys a permit issued by the EPA which allows an alarmingly large number of tons of nine different types of air pollutants to be released annually.
It's what the EPA classifies as Criteria Air Pollution or ground level pollution.
The EPA advises against outdoor activity in the vicinity of Criteria Air Pollution. Especially for children.
The acreage of the proposed new industrial park was projected to be more than 10 times larger than that facility.
I encourage SOW to continue their ongoing efforts toward keeping any new industrial development in the City of Oregon, in the already established industrial zones of the city. Their defense of virgin wetlands and environmental treasures are viewed as a just and noble cause by those of us possessing the capacity to recognize the true value of these priceless assets.
More valuable than a pirate’s chest full of carbon credits.
And thank you for your efforts to enlighten our community concerning the entire scope of these visions of others that were about to be arbitrarily imposed upon us.
The potential air pollution permitted from a large scale industrial development in the southeastern city limits would directly impact me, JROCC residents, and the numerous wetlands currently being restored throughout eastern Lucas County.
Meanwhile the city administration of Oregon has no obligation to consider non-resident concerns.
The SOW group faces a monumental battle to achieve their goal.
Randy Kania
Curtice