Water Bottle-Gate
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- December
- 15
During the contretemps over the Westchester County budget, some taxpayers showed up to a legislative hearing on the eighth floor of the county office building in White Plains and were outraged to see that the 17 legislators were each supplied with a plastic bottle of water.
This smacked of hypocrisy since bottled water is anything but an expression of “green” environmentalism which is touted so much by the county’s pols. Various environmental groups, the Riverkeeper among them, have preached against bottled water which is really nothing more than selling municipal water in plastic containers. The Riverkeeper sells reusable, stainless steel water bottles and encourages people to fill them with good old tap water.
But here’s the real kicker. Every year, the county health department sponsors a municipal-water taste contest. It’s a fun little event. Employees stand outside the Michealian Office Building and hand out cups to passersby to get their opinions.
This year, the sample water came from Yonkers, Greenburgh, Peekskill and Croton.
Croton came in first.
So if the water from Croton is delicious and nothing is too good for our legislators, maybe they ought to ship them Croton water in 55-gallon drums and stop the orders of Poland Spring or Evian, or whatever it is they’re drinking these days.
This entry was posted
on Monday, December 15th, 2008 at 5:44 pm by Phil Reisman.
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Phil Reisman is a veteran journalist and native of Westchester County. He began his career in 1977 as the head copy boy of a startup New York City newspaper that quickly went belly up. Reisman was not to blame for the newspaper's failure, or so he claims.
There will be those who think this short essay is puerile, simplistic, and flippant. I’m not one of them. The short story of the water bottles and the Poland Spring perfectly exemplifies a myopic view of responsibility, exemplifies the blatant disregard of what we have been taught since grammar school, – what leadership is supposed to be made of, – the makeup of the people we choose to represent us. If they ever had a vision, they have lost it. It makes one more sad than angry.