QMC: Indian Point, Libel, Chief of Police Fingerprints Boy Scouts

BRONXVILLE, NY — 27 Sept 18

This is a "no-news" or "filler" week for Mayor Mary Marvin. Her Honor's 9/26 column is a lovely box of historical bonbons (but: unsourced), about Bronxville Village and Westchester County. Really? No news?

I have an idea to share with Her Honor, for whenever Bronxville's seven-term mayor finds herself facing a deadline on top of a "no-news week." This is an outright lift from Cato the Elder, but an effective one:

The famously focused Roman orator is alleged to have ended every speech with a hearty "Carthage must be destroyed!" That's the spirit. Because we have a Carthage, close by Bronxville, and it is daily putting us in far worse peril than Rome ever faced in rumors of Punic rearmament.

Bronxville's genuinely existential threat is called Indian Point Nuclear Plant.

Wait. You thought it was all over — "decommissioned"? No. Indian Point buzzes away still, only 30 miles up Sprain Brook from us. And it will be doing so, will Indian Point, at full tilt through 2020, until it is all supposed to go dark in 2021. That's a solid 1,000 days of burning remaining.

You know what they say about car accidents? How they become likelier the closer you are to home? Is that true? Is it also true of creaky old nuke plants on their way to the mothballs?

(Warning: The **two upcoming links** to Entergy® Corporation are HTTP NOT SECURE — which says it all, frankly, about Entergy®'s opinion of our security & well-being in general.)

So, Your Honor, given your amazing & permanent broadcast platform — how many Westchester publications run "From the Mayor" basically simultaneously?† — please consider always making your "no-news week" or "filler" columns be about **Indian Point Nuclear Plant**. About the fact this notorious nuke site risks literally everything we are working for, and have ever worked for, in Bronxville, so long as it remains **a profit center for a tiny handful of people** named Entergy® Corporation.

No one is paying much attention to Indian Point these days because we're all complying with the Official Story. Even Bobby Kennedy, Jr. has agreed to look away, ridiculously. Mr Kennedy wrote last year: "Finally, our recent victory in our three decade battle to close Indian Point, marks both an important milestone for Riverkeeper and a good time for me to leave the organization at the top of its game."

Problem solved. Except. It isn't. Indian Point is "being" "decommissioned." Not closed outright. As should have happened long ago. Indian Point is still running Units 2 & 3 at full throttle — because its owners at Entergy® simply must have their paydays into 2021, when Unit 3 is supposedly finally being switched off.

Indian Point could Chernobyl Bronxville in the space of a single afternoon, or at three in the morning. It could happen in the next three minutes, or sometime in the next three months, or not at all over the next three years. But why risk it at all, Westchester County? We're too clever & wealthy ourselves (and too clever-wealthy: you know what I mean), to believe that anyone in so-called authority has our backs. It won't happen, for certain — a night's undrugged sleep — the longer we continue to tolerate the almost total absence of regulation, across industries, here in the #FederalEndtime.

As Patch Mayor of one vulnerable Westchester community, I believe every Westchester mayor should be writing about Indian Point in any given "no-news week." Tell your constituents what they perhaps don't realize: Indian Point Nuclear Plant is a genuine, our-way-of-life-wrecking-forever threat through 2021.

Because: Why?! Why are we tolerating this terrible risk to, for one thing, our sacred real estate values, Bronxville? Why don't we join with other rich communities and organize the closing of Indian Point immediately? What's the downside to trying? If anything, our activism will make it clear to Indian Point's owners that they'd better not blow it now.

Or do you genuinely buy into Entergy® Corporation's assurance that New Yorkers still "need" Indian Point energy and so it is "worth" risking Fukushima-on-Hudson? Entergy®'s unsecured website says that "25 percent of the electric power used in New York City and Westchester" is generated by Indian Point — while employing "1,000 highly skilled, highly trained men and women, and approximately 150 contractors."

How much alternative energy development is being delayed, and how many "highly skilled, highly trained men and women" (and contractors) will never be trained in 21st–century energy careers because — 2021 is just around the corner, right? What is Entergy® doing for its employees and contractors, to prepare them for that fateful scheduled date (what is it, by the way?) of Unit 3's last burn?

Because Entergy® has this odd way of phrasing its own claimed largesse: "The economic impact [of Indian Point] to the surrounding community, through payroll and charitable contributions, exceeds $240 million every year." Really? Does it? Prove it.

Now prove, please, Entergy®, that you recognize your civic obligation to your employees, and to the communities from which you have so massively profited.

But first and always: Let's please examine the merely economic "impact" of a China Syndrome 48 miles upstream of Times Square.

Maybe it will all end fine, a thousand days from now. (Except that it isn't over when it's over: the actual decommissioning process, which involves figuring out what to do with radioactive waste dating to the early 1960s, is to be handled by a skeleton crew of 200.)

One thing we do know for certain. We Bronxville Villagers are sucking up excessive amounts of Entergy® energy. Because we insist on inflating house-sized spooky cats and jolly snowmen on our lawns, Halloween into New Year.

So how about a "From the Mayor" column discouraging not only conspicuous energy consumption by our Village, but grotesquely conspicuous energy consumption by our Village? Especially in light of this dreadful (but hardly unexpected) news out of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) yesterday.

Finally, as to yesterday, and yesterday's "From the Mayor": One of Mary's local history bonbons deserves special attention, I feel, in our traditional QMC — Quizzing Mary's Claims — format.

Mayor Marvin claims: "John Peter Zenger wrote an article about an Eastchester town election that heavily criticized the New York governor. Litigation over the article led to the immortalization of freedom of the press in the Bill of Rights, hence the name Bill of Rights Plaza at the intersection of Mill Road and Route 22 in Eastchester."

We quiz: A quick skim of the relevant Wikipedia entry puts the emphasis where it ought to be. Why is this 1733 persecution of a government critic (i.e., a journalist) — Zenger was jailed for eight months — so important? Because it established that truth-based "libel" isn't libel at all. If someone is doing something wrong, and you publish the fact of that wrongdoing in the public interest, this is not libel.

I have accused Mayor Mary Marvin and her Village of Bronxville Board of Trustees (or, "Vobbots") of doing many things wrong — their year-long lying about the safety of cured-in-place piping, or CIPP, in particular — since I formally commenced observing them as a journalist in November 2017.

In response, Her Honor immediately shut down all public inquiry during the public's one opportunity to directly question its duly elected (but never by anything resembling a quorum) leaders: at the monthly "public" meeting of the Board, much of which the Marvin Administration spends sealed in scheduled executive session.

Mayor Marvin has called me "rude" and "uncivil." As recently as 10 September, the mayor described me — to a roomful of Boy Scouts (there to earn merit badges in "Civics") — as an attempted "hijacker" of Her Honor's government. By reporting on its actions, with rigorous honesty, in a newspaper.

Was I libeled by Mayor Marvin? I couldn't care less. It was a disgraceful thing for an elected official to say about a journalist while talking democracy to young people — and presenting the Chief of Police, in full uniform and fully armed, as her one and only guest speaker.

But thank goodness Mary did, because Chris Satriale confessed — on the record — to having fingerprinted the Boy Scouts. With their parents' written permission? Where are the fingerprints being stored now? In the same Village system that runs an HTTP NOT SECURE website?

Chief Satriale is refusing to answer any of my questions. Perhaps concerned parents of fingerprinted Boy Scouts will have better luck getting a straight answer out of him: 914-337-0500 or chief@vobpd.com

I do note that Mayor Mary Marvin has never called me a liar. Not once. Because that would definitely be libel. I take seriously reporting the facts accurately, and with the utmost professionalism. I also have kids living here in the Village. They will suffer the Marvin Administration's unconscionable decisions and consequent cover-ups for years to come.

As with the planned total redo of the "new" (but always nonsensical) Meadow entrance to the Bronxville School, Village kids will be wondering how such obvious stupidities — and other blunders — got approved by us grownups in the first place.

Answer our questions, please, Mayor Marvin — also you do the same, please, Village Administrator Jim Palmer — about where and when toxic cured-in-place piping (CIPP) was installed in Bronxville Village, and where it will "hopefully" (Jim's incredible adverb) be installed in the future.

You are destroying Bronxville Village property values, Mary Marvin Administration, along with our kids' health, by exposing all of us to the cancer-causing compounds and endocrine disruptors released into Bronxville's air and water during installation and over the life (which isn't long) of a cured-in-place pipe. And why are you doing this, Mayor Marvin? Because it keeps taxes low, is your winning theory.

So we have our own Indian Point, in fact, right here in the Village. Now there's a topic for a "no-news week" column, Your Honor: Defend CIPP! If you can. Say, as Cato the Elder might have, "Cured-in-place piping must be installed!"

~

†We read, in a protected area of a separate PC, **the Mayor's column** at HTTP NOT SECURE MyHometownBronxville — which tends to post "From the Mayor" before we do here at Bronxville Patch. I am looking into speeding up our own HTTPS SECURE posting of Her Honor's column.

Image credit: Brer Abbott's rendering of Tony Fisher's "Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant."

This article was updated soon after publication to establish "**" for HTTP NOT SECURE websites and to note that New Orleans-based Entergy® Corporation's "decommissioning" plan is far from being fully fleshed-out. In other words: What happens at Indian Point, or doesn't, is going to matter to Bronxville and Westchester well past the 2021 deadline for Entergy®'s ending active burning at the plant.

EMAIL US!

Mr James M. "Jim" Palmer is: jpalmer at vobny dot com
Mayor Mary Marvin is: mayor at vobny dot com
Brer Abbott, Patch Mayor is: thebronxville at protonmail dot com