THIS ARTICLE BY SALLY  ANTROBUS TELLS THE WHOLE BAYPORT STORY.  WILL YOU HELP ME SPREAD IT TO HARRIS COUNTY RESIDENTS?  MOST OF THE ARTICLE WAS PRINTED ON THE EDITORIAL PAGE IN THE CLEAR LAKE CITIZEN THIS WEEK.

The Blunderbuss and the Olive Branch
Sally Antrobus

Perhaps you read that the chairman of the Port of Houston Authority, James Edmonds, has said he wants to hold out the olive branch to those opposing the Port's plan for a giant container terminal at Bayport.

 Olive branch, schmolive branch.

We know what greed is. Greed is what drove Enron into the ground and now has executives dancing fandangos in courtrooms to try minimize their jail time. Bayport is also about greed.
 After many months of reading Enron fallout and six years of fighting the Port of Houston Authority over Bayport--fighting for the health of the bay and the quality of life in our small towns--we have learned a little something about what a destroyer greed can be. Here are some suggestions for that olive branch.

Five Things to Do with an Olive Branch
1. Burn the branch, and sprinkle the ashes over the bay as a requiem if the last large natural site on the upper western shore of the bay becomes a container port. A thousand acres of wild wetlands and coastal prairie would be lost if this port were built. The place cries out to remain green space as greater Houston's population continues to swell. But no, the Port Authority rejects alternative sites and is burning to award Bayport construction contracts worth millions of dollars.

2. Wave it at Morgan's Point, a community already bisected and sadly degraded by Port development at Barbour's Cut. See how keen the people of Morgan's Point are to accept an olive branch after their experience of thirty years of broken promises by the Port Authority. Consider the promised park that never happened, and the promise that port facilities would not expand south of Bayport Boulevard.

3. Use it as a divining rod to detect a Superfund site, one of those grim places where industrial contamination makes most kinds of land use impossible and requires expensive remediation. The Port of Seattle chose such a site for its new container port, called Terminal 18. The new port has a capacity similar to that proposed for Bayport, yet it occupies only 200 acres (not 1,000). It was built at an existing container terminal, which remained in operation throughout the new construction--and a Superfund site was capped in the process. Now that's an olive branch!

4. Photograph the bough in golden evening light, alongside a gorgeous Greek salad festooned with gleaming black olives, to use in the next series of Port ads featuring that warm fuzzy public relations theme "The Port Delivers the Goods."

5. Feed it to the wildlife that will be displaced if the Bayport terminal is built--the roseate spoonbills, white ibis, brown pelicans, and the migratory songbirds that use the coastal wetlands and woodlands and prairie potholes. See if an olive branch does them any good.

-- $$$ --

Where does the blunderbuss come in? This is a short-barreled firearm with a flaring muzzle to facilitate loading. It was Judge Vanessa Gilmore who mentioned the blunderbuss. When a series of local cities and conservation groups challenged the permit issued for the proposed Bayport project, her judgment in the lawsuit upheld the permit. She concluded her opinion by describing the Bayport opposition as "a blunderbuss salvo of quibbles."
 Pardon me? Quibbles? Is it a quibble when 10,000 people living within two miles of the Bayport site are scared of the carcinogenic diesel exhaust of 7,000 rumbling container trucks per day?
Is it a quibble when all those people are threatened with declines in home value because of the degradation a gigantic port would bring? Good portions of most people's savings are tied up in homes. Dropping home value is a close relative to the effect that the Enron stock collapse had on people's 401k retirement savings.

Five Things to Do with a Blunderbuss
1. Fire a salute at noon every day to bolster the absurd ongoing pretense that all the many problems the community has identified at Bayport are nothing more than "quibbles."

2. Blast away with the blunderbuss to drown out the primal screams of all of us who know we have decent environmental laws, but nevertheless have to watch major government agencies like the Port of Houston Authority and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers working so hard to flout those laws.

3. Point the flaring muzzle at any conservation agencies that originally identified Bayport as the most environmentally damaging site for a port--but then later caved in when presented with mitigation plans far away from the coastal prairie. There's a phrase for that. It's called being bought off.

4. Mount the blunderbuss as a mascot over the gate of a port that can't operate, like one newly built in California but hung up in legal actions brought by furious neighbors. (The construction contractors all got their money, of course.)

5. Keep the blunderbuss loaded in case of a need to perform mercy killings on any sick brown pelicans that turn up, like the ones found inexplicably dead and dying a few miles south of Bayport this past winter. This threatened species is facing mysterious die-offs just as it begins reestablishing a nesting presence on Galveston Bay.

Various other possibilities spring to mind for what the Port might do with their olive branch and the judge might do with her blunderbuss, but they are not fit to print. The Port's arrogance over Bayport is the same kind of arrogance that brought Enron low, born of the twin notions that rules governing society are made for other people, and that money always comes first.