Water, sewer upgrades on Essex Town Meeting warrant.
"Our infrastructure is already aging and that’s important for people to recognize.
The option to buy and install replacement grinder pumps for the town’s sewer system will be voted as article 12.
Article 9 asks to allow selectmen to hold properties for general use instead of leasing purposes.
The intention for 4 and 8 Conomo Lane is to have the Public Works Department put down gravel to make it a parking area for residents to use to when visiting Conomo Point.
The town may install picnic benches at the spot but don’t have big plans for the site, just that it’s town property that people could use, she said.
Appoint people to the Conomo Point Planning Committee.
Pay for the town’s fiscal 2018 operating budget.
Allow the Department of Public Works Commissioners to impose user fees instead of the town voting on it at Annual Town Meeting.
Give money to the Finance Committee’s Reservation Fund.

President Trump’s first 100 days have been devastating to environment, say green activists.
Out of all the groups in the liberal coalition, environmentalists may have had the worst of it during the first 100 days of the Trump presidency.
Leading green activists say President Trump has already done a full term’s worth of damage, rolling back Obama-era regulations and installing one of their chief critics as head of the Environmental Protection Agency.
Since his confirmation in February, the EPA has already started to dismantle the Clean Power Plan — federal rules limiting carbon emissions from power plants — and a host of other regulations.
Mr. Trump and Mr. Pruitt are intent on reversing eight years of EPA policy under the previous administration, transitioning the agency away from its Obama-era focus on climate change and expanding its regulatory reach, toward enforcing existing protections against air and water pollution.
“I would call this an extreme agenda that for someone who didn’t even win a majority of the vote is out of line with the values of the American people,” said Erich Pica, president of the environmental group Friends of the Earth.
He didn’t run on any of that, yet that’s what his extreme agenda is doing right now.” Rhea Suh, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, said this week that “the hallmark of the president’s first 100 days” has been a relentless “assault on our climate, environment and national heritage.” On the heels of the executive order reviewing national monuments, other environmental activists accused the president of using his first months in office to sell out the country to the fossil fuel industry.
Environmental groups also are suing the administration over virtually every move it makes on the energy and climate front, meaning many policies, ultimately, will be set by federal courts.
“The rules and the regulations will be litigated over the course of time, but it’s the budget stuff that could have the long-lasting impact on how these agencies operate,” Mr. Pica said.
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U.S. lawsuit accuses Gulfstream of discharging pollutants into canal.
The horse racing track could face fines of $37,500 a day per violation – or more than $50 million — for violating the federal Clean Water Act, said the lawsuit filed Wednesday by the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida.
Gulfstream Park spokesman David Joseph referred questions to the track’s attorney, Michael Fucheck.
He was out of town and could not be reached for comment.
According to the lawsuit, officials with the Environmental Protection Agency notified Gulfstream on Oct. 23, 2014 that horse wash water being discharged to a 24-acre drainage pond, and ultimately the nearby canal, was not authorized.
Gulfstream, which houses up to 1,100 horses year-round, was issued a notice of civil violation on Feb. 26, 2015.
“It does concern me,” City Commissioner Anthony Sanders said.
“It would concern anyone when you hear water pollution.” Hallandale Beach spokesman Peter Dobens was quick to point out that any pollutants that made their way into the drainage canal near the track posed no threat to the city’s drinking water.
When asked whether anyone swam or fished in the canal, he gave this answer: “I have no idea, but I would certainly hope not.” City Manager Roger Carlton also weighed in.
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ROCKINGHAM COUNTY, Va (WHSV) — After a recent report showing high pollution due to runoff from animal waste in Shenandoah River, farmers throughout the Shenandoah Valley are speaking out about what they do to improve water quality.
Craig Miller, a farmer in Rockingham County, recently planted 179 trees as a buffer to improve the water on and around his property.
This project was done with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation.
He also has cattle fencing to keep livestock out of water sources that could flow into local streams.
Cattle fencing helps prevent that kind of problem.
I think, by and large, the Chesapeake Bay would say we are doing a better job."
The water was cleaner when it left our property, than it was coming in."
These projects are also completely voluntary, and Cory Guilliams, District Conservationist, says, "Over the past five years, I looked at some numbers earlier, we’ve done several hundred, over 300 hundred projects with people."
Miller and Threewitts are just a few of the farmers that have made financial investments to try and better the environment.
Miller says, "Enough’s enough, let’s turn the tables, and tell people what we do and how we love our animals and how we love our land and we do the right thing in agriculture."

Duke University Study: Fracking Isn’t Contaminating Ground Water.
It’s been the crux of their narrative against this sector of the economy that’s rapidly growing throughout the country.
The study was three years in the making, peer reviewed, and was recently published in the European journal Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta.
They did say that surface water might be impacted due to spills: Fracking has not contaminated groundwater in northwestern West Virginia, but accidental spills of fracking wastewater may pose a threat to surface water in the region, according to a new study led by scientists at Duke University.
“Based on consistent evidence from comprehensive testing, we found no indication of groundwater contamination over the three-year course of our study,” said Avner Vengosh, professor of geochemistry and water quality at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment.
”However, we did find that spill water associated with fracked wells and their wastewater has an impact on the quality of streams in areas of intense shale gas development.” “The bottom-line assessment,” he said, “is that groundwater is so far not being impacted, but surface water is more readily contaminated because of the frequency of spills.” […] The Duke team collaborated with researchers from The Ohio State University, Pennsylvania State University, Stanford University and the French Geological Survey to sample water from 112 drinking wells in northwestern West Virginia over a three-year period.
Samples were tested for an extensive list of contaminants, including salts, trace metals and hydrocarbons such as methane, propane and ethane.
Remember when the EPA dumped 3 million gallons of toxic water into Colorado’s river systems in 2015?
The clean up costs were projected to soar into the hundreds of millions, and it was completely avoidable.
The EPA’s clean up crew royally screwed up and released the water into the Animas River, which connects to the San Juan River.

West Virginia State University has sued Dow Chemical and former operators of the Institute chemical plant, alleging that the facility has contaminated the groundwater under the university’s campus.
University officials insist the contamination poses no health risks — the campus does not use groundwater for its drinking water.
The lawsuit, filed Thursday in Kanawha Circuit Court, seeks to force the companies to clean up the contamination, prevent future migration of the chemicals and compensate the university, a historically black institution, for harm to its image in the public and potential students.
“It is my hope that Dow will come to the table and take full responsibility for the mess it created,” Jenkins told reporters.
University officials and lawyers say three contaminants have been found at “elevated levels” in the groundwater 15 to 50 feet beneath the campus.
It was not clear which of the various chemical units that operated over the years at the plant led to the groundwater contamination.
University officials say they learned of the contamination about four years ago, when they took ownership from the state of the former West Virginia Rehabilitation Center, located between the campus and the chemical plant.
He said the administration waited to reveal the issue until it had conducted enough testing to be convinced there was no health concern and to be able to communicate that belief with its initial notification to students, faculty, staff and students.
Six years ago, then-plant owner Bayer CropScience eliminated MIC manufacturing, use and storage at the plant following a U.S. Chemical Safety Board report that was highly critical of plant operations and a major change in the company’s global marketing strategy.
Union Carbide, once a major institution in the Kanawha Valley, operated the Institute plant from 1946 until it sold the site to Rhone-Poulenc, a French firm, in 1986.

Patagonia’s Clean Color collection features plant-based dyes.
In a radical move away from synthetic dyes, the Clean Color line features soft earth tones made from food waste, silkworm excrement, and dried beetles.
Take a quick glance at Patagonia’s new Clean Color clothing collection, and you’ll notice that there’s not a lot of variation when it comes to color.
All the pieces are either green, brown, pink, gray, cream, or a combination.
This is because they’ve been dyed with natural ingredients – palmetto and mulberry leaves, pomegranate rinds, citrus peels, cochineal beetles, silkworm excrement, and leftover fruit – which restricts the color palette but produces beautiful soft hues that are cleaner and safer than their synthetic counterparts.
Patagonia has always been one to push the limits of innovative and environmentally responsible manufacturing, and this is just one more example of its forward-thinking approach.
In the company’s 2016 guide, “The Responsible Company,” founder Yvon Chouinard wrote about some of the problems with the dyeing industry: “The textile industry is one of the most chemically intensive industries on earth, second only to agriculture, and the world’s largest polluter of increasingly scarce freshwater.
The World Bank estimates nearly 20 percent of industrial water pollution comes from textile dyeing and treatment.
"Wastewater that goes – often illegally – untreated or partially treated returns to a river, where it heats the water, increases its pH, and saturates it with dyes, finishes, and fixatives, which in turn leave a residue of salts and metals that leach into farmland or settle into the viscera of fish.” Patagonia currently uses a company called Swisstex California to dye its fabrics, with a special process that uses half as much water as an average dyehouse in the United States and treats all wastewater fully before releasing it.
But clearly the company wants to take it further with their introduction of these natural dyes.

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President Donald Trump’s budget blueprint calls for the closure of two EPA offices — and officials in Chicago are worried they could be on the chopping block.
So far, nothing’s definite.
Chicago Sun-Times columnist Michael Sneed cited an unnamed city source in an April 17 article reporting that the regional branch office in Chicago could be closed and consolidated with one in Kansas.
An EPA official told CNN that’s false information.
“If true, this report is shocking and I would strongly oppose the closing of the Region 5 office,” Rep. Fred Upton, R-Michigan, said in a statement.
In Chicago, those cuts could translate into more contaminants in the Great Lakes.
The EPA’s Region 5 has been criticized for its delayed response to the lead crisis in Flint, but, as the Detroit Free Press points out, in the end it “was EPA officials who learned that the state Department of Environmental Quality had not required corrosion treatments when Flint switched to using the Flint River for its water, resulting in lead leaching from aging pipes.” The paper adds that the “city has since switched back to Lake Huron water and is treating its water, though lead levels remain a concern.” A new Chicago Tribune op-ed by Frank Corrado, the first director of public affairs for Chicago’s regional EPA office, sheds some fascinating (and potentially devastating) light on what the agency has accomplished locally since its creation by Richard Nixon (“yes, that Richard Nixon”) in 1970.
The pollution problems were staggering — massive discharges from the northwest Indiana steel complex, the Wisconsin paper industry in Green Bay, the taconite tailings in Lake Superior, emissions from automobiles produced in Detroit, farm wastes in northwest Ohio, and sulfur dioxide from power plants in southwest Ohio, not to mention those right here in Chicago.
Leaking gas station storage tanks, discharges from Dow Chemical in northeast Michigan, waste contamination in the Mahoning Valley in eastern Ohio and outdated sewage treatment plants everywhere were part of a long list of problems created during the heydays of Midwest manufacturing.
The laws put in place to curb that kind of mind-bending pollution are laws that “the Trump administration is now attempting to destroy.” “To your peril,” he adds.

Chinese anger over ‘acid pollution’ images.
The images, taken by a drone, show a cluster of dark red and rust-coloured pits occupying a big patch of land in a village called Nanzhaofu in Hebei province.
Volunteers told Chinese media that similar polluted land could be found in other provinces.
‘I thought it was coincidence’ After the images were published on the NGO’s social media accounts last week there was an outburst of public anger.
"My aunt is from that county in Hebei, she died from cancer two years ago.
In Hebei, authorities blamed local people for the contamination, saying they had been illegally dumping acid waste for years.
But on social media, people are asking why, if the suspect has been arrested, nothing had changed and the land is still contaminated.
In its annual report this week, the environment ministry said water standards in some areas of northern China had declined since 2015.
Environment Minister Chen Jining said water samples found 36.3% of heavy polluting industries’ land and the surrounding soil did not meet government standards, according to a report by South China Morning Post.
Many have been asking whether it’s right for China to begin developing a new area if it can’t keep the existing one clean, and whether the necessary environmental protections really will be put in place.