Student Rentals / Water / Earth / Energy

On a Sunday morning walk with  @SolarTheSpokesdog  and #PresidentDave. 00:00 – Fairfield’s Blue-Collar DNA & Bridgeport Spine 01:30 – The 4 Waterways & Threat to Pine Creek Source 03:00 – Outdated Land-Use Maps, Flood Zones & District 6 04:15 – Corporate Water Heist: Bridgeport Hydraulic to Eversource & RWA 06:05 – Highway Runoff & The 3-Tiered Eco-Barrier Solution 09:05 – Lake Mohegan, Samp Mortar & Sasco Hill Zero-Setbacks

Transcript: This is pretty much what we got right here. We’ve got rentals to students on Gould flier fan, Jersey boy, beer pong table on the front lawn. We gotta fix this. So here we are. Come on, girls, going down to the Pine Creek open space, which is the subject of our topic today. And really actually, we’re going to talk about the neighboring river, which is mill River, the Keystone River for all of us, 250,000 people down here going back to Bridgeport Hydraulic and the development of Bridgeport as the Park City and America’s leading munitions manufacturer, the deepest port between New York City and Boston. Money. The growth of America is one of America’s first suburbs, which is Fairfield, Connecticut. You know where you could work in the city of Bridgeport and live in the country in a home that you owned in Fairfield. So all the development of Fairfield, the true DNA, or all those towns and neighborhoods that grew up along the spine of Bridgeport, like Tunks and Strathfield and Melville and Brooklyn and Sport Hill and Toilsome Hill and the, uh, did I say Strathfield, all those towns, not the Gold Coast, not the commuter railroad. All that came later. That’s the birth in DNA of Fairfield. Anyway, the the river is the birth and DNA of Fairfield. The water.

There are four major water sources coming in from our five miles of uninterrupted beach. They are Sasebo, which forms the Westport border, Sasco Creek, then Mill River, which is the mother of them all. That’s the Easton reservoir which supplies our drinking water to 250,000 people. Then it winds its way down to Lake Mohegan and then finally to Southport Harbor. Then there is Pine Creek, which I’m right here, which begins just the mouth, right over there on Thorpe Street, where the proposal, if you can believe it, is to build a building right on top of the mouth of Pine Creek. The source. Talk about ecological calamity. Let’s just. I mean, the Mississippi is one step long. You can step across it at the source. Can you imagine putting a building on top of the source of the Mississippi? Morning. Good job. Good job Jen.

And then Ash Creek, which becomes Rooster River, which is also a huge thing because that development going up around the train station. So you got four and it’s a big deal. Uh, but today I was at yesterday I was at Mill River and I saw, um, what the Trout Unlimited and those people up at Covenant Church did on the eastern border. It’s great. It’s phenomenal. They have recovered. Well, one of the ways we’re going to recover everything is by using the legitimate maps. Again, if you look at the open space map, it’s obviously a greenway along the rivers. But if you look at the use map now, it’s not. They’ve taken over and they’re building right to the waterline, which we just can’t permit. Obviously it’s a common sense. So the recovery of the real maps is a big deal for Fairfield. You know, we’ve got route one. We’ve got the FEMA flood zone map, which shows route one in a flood zone. Um. And the redistricting map one through ten, which abandoned the true neighborhoods of Fairfield. Want to restore that, which is the big deal. That was all done to create district six, the transit oriented district all around the train station. And they abandoned Tunxis, which is historically Fairfield’s second town center. And in many ways, as I keep saying, the true heart and DNA of Fairfield because we grew up as the child of Bridgeport, where you could work in the city and live in the country of Fairfield. So to abandon that for the sake of development is just unacceptable.

So, oh, talk about the water some more. The big, big deal. Two big deals is really, um, it was Bridgeport Hydraulic for hundreds of years, like I said. And they built the dam at Easton Reservoir to supply water to everybody in the city and a huge network that goes back to the 1800s. That is what was the origin of Bridgeport Hydraulic. In 2000, they went to Delaware to do what they call a name change. But it was more than that. They changed to be an entity called aquarium that was built around raising money and no longer filtering and dispensing water to 250,000 people. So they’ve been operating out of charter ever since then. That’s not their job. Their job is not to raise money. But that’s what they did. They did that for years. They became an acquisition spree. If you just focus on Fairfield County. They acquired all of the regional water authorities in Fairfield County, going all the way down to Greenwich and Stamford. then it became more and even a few out of state. But the core of it is Fairfield County. And then it was sold. The portfolio was sold to a company called Kelda in Great Britain. Then it ended up ended up with an Australian mining company. Don’t Eat that Babe… called McGuire. And mining companies in Australia are like oil companies in America. They’re just they don’t have a good reputation. And they set up a bank, a financing arm, just for Eversource out of Boston, who suddenly announces about 8 or 9 years ago that they’re in Water and they buy from an Australian mining company. No, I’m sorry, they buy from the financing entity that they set up just for this transaction. Aquarion water and

So at mill River this morning. Yesterday. Sorry. Uh, it was amazing. What trout unlimited and the commitment up there at Covenant Church and the people have done to recover the mill River. They’ve created trout fishing tidal pools, like eight of them or something, but more importantly, just cleaning it all up. And our plan for that is to extend that all the way down to Southport Harbor, here, the Mill River, and there’s a lot of stops in between to keep it clean. Starting with Department of Transportation. The Merritt Parkway runs right next to it and Congress Street to depositing all its junk. It’s, uh, or, you know, oil, grease, everything rubber on to the side of the road there. So unfortunately, the solution is not that hard. All you got to do is plant a sort of three tiered eco barrier. Not all you have to do, but this is a big thing. Start with switchgrass in the front, which has deep 8 to 10 foot roots absorbs all that nutrients. All that stuff right there. Then you put some, uh, native perennials behind that which not only look beautiful, but they, uh, do the same thing, absorb all the effluent. You put the right ones in there, and then the final row is a barrier of trees, which is not only a sound protector, but things like dogwood and willows really absorb the bad nutrients. Crazy. So you’ve created this eco buffer, and then when you walk into the park on the other side there, you’re in another world and you’ve got a sanctuary. So that’s the vision. We’re going to close the, uh, gas station right there, which is poorly engineered in any way. It’s dangerous to get on and off. And, uh, also that there are deals that the Department of Transportation has with the concessionaires where they’re getting a piece of the take. And we can’t have that. That just drives up prices. It makes us look bad. You know, they got to get their fingers out of the register, out of the till. Department of Transportation. So we want to clean up that whole stretch along five miles along the Merritt. Everywhere. Every highway on both sides and the Meridian 95 local roads. You can address just all of that. And it will go a long way, because Fairfield is in a horrible smog triangle with the water, which is known to collect the pollutants in its own set, the highways and the roads, which you can hear right here in the background. That’s 95. And not to mention local roads like route one, and then the soil and the water here and then the air. It’s just really, really compressed with the congestion here. And we’re feeling it. So we need to actively take steps to improve our environment, environment, meaning not only this environment, but our living space and our air and our water. It’s good to see some people here once in a while. Ooh. Let’s go over here.

So, anyway, getting One. So? So anyway, speaking of Mill River, then, uh, moving down to Mr. Shapiro’s proposal on the Easton Trumbull line, which is like crazy town, so he can take the lead and build the animal causeway over top of the two major roads to connect with the entrance to the park, which will be the converted gas station, and make himself the hero, and also create and leave the open space. So he gets that contract for concessions as a concession for abandoning that debacle, which is actually an Easton on the Trumbull line. So he plans on putting it on these buildings that Trumbull approved. And then, I mean, that Easton approved. But then Trumbull’s sewer system, it’s crazy. It’s like, no, you can’t do that to us. But, uh, and on top of which, you know, so then he gets to preserve the mill River preserve that open space, gets the concession for the entrance ecotourism. There’s a lot of money there and everybody’s happy.

Then going down the river, we can go to the Mohegan and swamp water and opening that up more. Do you know what swamp means? That’s like. It’s a recipe. An Indian recipe for ground up corn. So swamp mortar, you know, like mortar and pistle where you grind up your corn at the waterfall there. That’d be cool to sell that there. The Lake Mohegan needs better access from right up above it. Starting to jump ahead, and then I want to get all the way to the bottom, which is 10 Sisco Hill Road and 54 Sasco Hill Road, and the Porsche dealership, where they’ve built right onto the river, which they’re not allowed to do with zero setback and our green space and our open property and doing heavy construction. And that has to be paused immediately. The vision is to have the Greenway and the path go all the way down Southport Harbor, and then open up to right to the sound at Sasco Point.

So Eversource acquires Aquarion Water from McGuire Financial in Australia and brings it back to America, all at the behest of the company. Really? That was working on the sidelines the whole time in their ear, which is the regional water authority out of New Haven County. And you have to remember that there’s always been a competition between Fairfield County and Bridgeport and New Haven County and New Haven and Bridgeport wins the largest city, the economic driver, the, you know, traditional home of Fairfield County. And there’s always been so that was their goal all along. Regional water authority, it appears, conspired with Eversource to manage the siting council, impure and all these other entities that were get in the way in upstate Connecticut to acquire it and eventually get it over to RWA, which is what they did two years ago. So this was all prearranged what you see now?

Oh, the other big problem. Aside from operating out of charter is it’s Easton’s Water and the mill River. It goes on their property, the reservoir, and by the laws of humanity and civilization for thousands of years, it’s theirs. Aquarian will tell you now. They’ll say it’s ours and this and that, and the lawyers will twist you around all day long. But it’s not right. They have a right to. They have the license and the honor and the obligation to properly filter and dispense the water and maintain the pipes, not to make money, not to acquire the companies. The water belongs to Easton, and similar to they get the right to use it first, basically. But they also have a responsibility to other towns and neighbors saying, hey, we all got to use it. And it’s like, fair enough. You can’t block access to the water because that’s an act of war. Look at the Strait of Hormuz. It can be you can’t steal it and take it for another watershed, which is what they’re doing now, and taking it from east and diverting it to the Saugatuck River in Westport, which isn’t as big or nice, or the infrastructure isn’t as good to supply them. That’s theft of water.

So all these reasons, we can’t allow it to happen. And I’ve talked about that two years ago in my Wayne’s World basement, telling them it’s not going to happen and I’m on to them. I was the only one from Fairfield County to be there. What does that tell you? It tells you that despite this summit of all the water people and WPA people, Aquarian already has it all sealed up. And as long as they’re there, it’s all covered for all the other towns. And I’m telling you, it’s not in Fairfield County’s Fairfield County. It’s not the regional governments, it’s Fairfield County. And we are not going to allow our water to get taken away. Hey, let us stop.