Printed From Acorn-Online.com
Briefing Book
Apr 17, 2008
Nobody died in the wetlands
Sometimes you don’t need a long stay in the passenger terminal of American Airlines at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport to make you appreciate the well-intentioned, if misplaced, priorities of government regulators. Sometimes all it takes is a letter to the editors from a Lewisboro building inspector. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, you get both. This is one of those times.
According to The Wall Street Journal, the hundreds of flight cancellations last week, which disrupted the travel plans of tens of thousands of passengers (including yours truly), had nothing to do with flight safety. Instead, The Journal reported, the issue was American Airlines’ compliance with some complicated federal rules regarding spacing between the wiring on its MD-80 jets. As a spokesman for the company put it, “These inspections — based on Federal Aviation Administration audits — are related to detailed, technical compliance issues and not safety-of-flight issues.”
But, hey, we can’t take any chances, right? Better safe than sorry, right? So the bureaucrats acted and chaos ensued. And as it goes at the national level, so too at the local level, where Lewisboro’s bureaucrats emerged in the wake of the ruling in the wetlands lawsuit to justify their existence with an assortment of inflammatory non sequiturs.
Deputy Building Inspector Peter Barrett so objected to Briefing Book’s opinion on the merits of the wetlands lawsuit that he wrote in last week to remind homeowners of the need for — fire safety. “Typically building and fire codes are developed after a disaster. Think of the MGM Grand fire in 1980 with 87 people dead or The Station nightclub in 2003 that left 100 dead,” Mr. Barrett wrote. He concludes: “That is why I do what I do.”
Here at Briefing Book, we think Mr. Barrett showed great restraint — after all, why not link us to the tragic but equally irrelevant Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, which killed 148 immigrant garment workers in 1911? Our second reaction was to notice that Mr. Barrett had his facts wrong.
Reading Mr. Barrett’s overwrought missive, the reader might conclude that the fires at the MGM Grand and The Station must have started because the buildings were too close to a wetland. In fact, what contributed to the disaster at each establishment was not the lack of an appropriate building code but, as with the wetlands law, the failure of local bureaucrats to apply an existing code in a common-sense fashion.
In the case of the MGM Grand fire, the local building inspectors decided that a hotel with 2,000 rooms housing 5,000 guests didn’t need a sprinkler system. In The Station nightclub tragedy, building inspectors believed that the club was exempt from having a sprinkler system. It wasn’t.
It is illogical for Mr. Barrett to suggest that opponents of the town government’s environmental extremism must also be opposed to legitimate measures to maintain public safety. If there is anyone threatening the consensus on public safety, it is the bureaucrats charged with administering the law. Unable to distinguish between a remote risk and a genuine threat, these bureaucrats left sprinkler systems uninstalled while needlessly grounding airplanes and ticketing tree houses as environmental hazards.
The town government, in its fruitless quest to find a “user-friendly regulatory process,” now intends to educate homeowners on the wetland laws. Wetlands Inspector Bruce Barber told The Ledger: “We want to encourage people if they’re working on their site, to think, ‘Do they need a wetlands permit?’”
Since the town government has never mapped wetlands, it’s difficult to understand how anyone can reasonably answer that question, much less educate anyone else on solving the riddle. The Lewisboro town government continues to act as if Lewisboro homeowners are, at best, uneducated simpletons in need of a crash course in environmental law and, at worst, sleazy nightclub owners trying to save a few bucks on a sprinkler system. Telling homeowners that some activities are prohibited unless they’re not, in which case you might need a permit unless you don’t, suggests that the town government believes the problem with environmental regulation is homeowners, not the law.
Still, it’s almost touching to watch the zealous, if ham-handed, commitment of our bureaucrats to public safety, be it the FAA forcing travelers to tank up on Starbucks or the Lewisboro town government ticketing treehouses. When you finally get back to your home late at night, you sleep better just knowing that you live in Lewisboro, a town where hotels, nightclubs and non-union sweatshops will not be permitted to operate. At least not without a sprinkler system.
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