March 29, 2006

SHORT TAKES

With Rubber to Burn

A request for a two-year temporary permit by Lafarge Cement to burn whole tires has been given the thumbs up.

Granted by the Puget Sound Clean Air Agency on March 17, the permit allows Lafarge, located on W. Marginal Way, to use whole tires as part of the fuel that will keep its kiln running. Along with natural gas, coal, petroleum coke, and waste oils, the plant currently uses chipped tires — roughly equi valent to 600 to 800 tires a day — to generate the necessary heat to create cement. The changeover to whole tires could more than quadruple that amount, along with lessening the percentage of the coal-coke-waste oil mixture. The temporary permit also allows for Lafarge to burn the whole tires through a system known as “mid-kiln tire injection,” requiring the plant to make changes to the kiln presently on site.

The Clean Air Agency granted the temporary permit only after the end of a public comment period that spanned from mid-December 2005 to mid-February 2006. Nineteen written comments were garnered during that time. Coming toward the latter part of the comment period, the agency also held a public hearing on Jan. 24, wherein 18 community members expressed concern over Lafarge’s request. Inherent to most comments was apprehension over the new process and its potential to cook up a stew of toxic emissions — among them arsenic, nitrous oxide, lead, sulfur dioxide — that would adversely affect the health of residents in Highland Park, South Park, and White Center. In granting the permit, the agency will require Lafarge to complete a series of tests to demonstrate how the kiln’s whole-tire consumption will affect emission rates.

The agency will also be conducting semi-annual community workshops to offer progress updates. Communications specialist for the agency Amy Warren says the workshops, the first of which will occur within the next six weeks, will help to establish neighborhood dialogue.

“ It will be an opportunity to meet face to face with the community, to walk them through concerns, and show why our agency feels this permit is a valid request,” says Warren.

More information on the temporary permit can be found on the Web: www.pscleanair.org/news/2006/03_20_Lafarge.shtml.

— Rosette Royale

Your papers, please

While Hispanics march nationwide to stop a bill that would criminalize illegal immigration, a Mercer Island resident is taking a different track here at home.

On March 15, Bob Baker filed an initiative requiring public agencies to verify a person’s legal status before providing any services or benefits, such as food stamps or welfare, that aren’t federally mandated.

The Protect Washington Now initiative is modeled, in part, on Arizona’s Proposition 200, an initiative passed in 2004. To get on the November ballot, Baker needs to collect the signatures of 224,880 voters by July 7 — something he says people are calling left and right to volunteer for.

Baker says illegal immigration isn’t fair to taxpaying Americans or to the people who come here. Elected officials just don’t get that “the people in this country are overwhelmingly for controlling our borders,” he says.

What Baker doesn’t get is that, documented or not, immigrants work in service jobs that few Americans would take and pay the state sales tax like everyone else, says George Cheung of From Hate to Hope, a coalition of 60 groups that formed last year to fight a similar initiative (I-343) that failed to get enough signatures.

The new measure isn’t about fairness, says Cheung, whose parents immigrated from Hong Kong in 1974. It’s about limiting who is an American and who should be included in our society.

— Cydney Gillis