Friday editorial

Yesterday when I was in Gloucester, I was talking to my sister (the one that lives in Malden) and my brother (I only have the one brother - only one that that I have any connection to anyway since I barely know my birth father's sons from his second wife) about life in Newburyport.

This is the only small town in which I have ever lived as an adult. You can't count the place in Mich. where I grew up because we lived way out in the county, not in the town.

One observation I have about Newburyport is that people don't want to read about what they perceive, rightly or wrongly, as "whiners."

This includes the neighbors of the landfill, neighbors of the sewer plant and now neighbors of the turbine. And, of course, everyone on Plum Island - unless Larry McCavitt is somehow involved.

Is there any neighborhood that isn't complaining about something? The people in Ward 6, perhaps ...?

While I do know that Mark Richey had every right to erect that turbine under the city law that some say was hastily written so he could do it, and wind energy is a great thing, I don't believe that anyone can dispute that it has had an adverse effect on the people who live in the Back Bay neighborhood.

I don't buy into the argument that the people shouldn't have bought houses near the industrial park if they didn't want industrial stuff across the road from them. Some of those people lived there before the industrial park, or the train station, was there.

A city councillor said to me the other night, "It's hard to visualize 292 feet."

Well there are these thingies now called computers? And there is software for these thingies that allow you to visualize 292 feet. Not to mention good old fashioned models that just sit on a table ...

And as for the landfill neighbors -which city was it that allowed residential development of a plot of land less than a mile from what was at the time a closed dump - a dump at which where heavy metal sludge had been deposited?

Land, I might add, that I am told is all clay and every basement in the neighborhood floods regularly. They've all got pumps in their basements, apparently. A double whammy.

Who knew about that? Who let that go forward?

People, especially anonymous people commenting on the Daily News website and blogs, are always saying that they don't want government interfering in their lives ... but I can't think of much worse than having government allowing projects to go forward without due diligence because government officials are dazzled by words such as "green," "grant," "tax base" and now "stimulus money."

(I'm not talking about the sewer plant, because I believe that has been examined from every angle.)

Oh, I forgot "soccer field," which is what was apparently dangled in front of the city by the landfill owner.

Newburyport is not going to have a reputation as good place to live, green initiatives or not, if the city keeps letting development go unchecked and city officials continue to get stars in their eyes from shiny baubles dangled by developers and others who know they can get away with it.