By Sen. Judi Guthertz
For Variety

It seems that the hardest problem this government has ever faced is figuring out how to take care of our trash. We don’t seem to have any problem making trash. In Guam, we manage to create about 3 pounds every day for every person. Using the 2007 CIA Factbook population estimate of 173,456 people now living in Guam, we throw away more than 260 tons of refuse every single day of the year, and that’s a conservative estimate.
With the expanding military presence, including support staff and dependents, we’ll have 200,000 people living in Guam in just a few years, perhaps as soon as 2012, and nothing can keep our trash problem from growing.
We should have gotten really serious about our trash problem years ago, but we haven’t been able to get past the posturing and politics. Even common sense can’t seem to stand up to those that are so convinced they are right that they will risk the health and welfare of the people of Guam to prove their point.
Now we are spending a lot of money on road construction for a landfill that should never be built. We are expending public funds on privately owned property. If we don’t own the property on which the construction is taking place, and if we haven’t even reached agreement with all of the many landowners to acquire their property, common sense tells us that we should not have even started. So why are we moving forward?
Common sense should tell us that building a landfill over a future source of fresh water is just crazy, but many people are not using their common sense.
That is the crux of our problem. We were told and we believe that science should make the decision. We put aside our common sense in favor of the scientific view. But how can science make the right decision if it doesn’t have all the information? How can science be right if it is prevented from evaluating every possible option?
When Dandan was selected, scientists and engineers did a fairly good job narrowing the list of possible sites. But experts didn’t have all the information they needed. When they picked Dandan, they couldn’t consider sites on federal property. Who knows what the inclusion of those sites could have meant to the selection process? When they said Dandan was the best, they didn’t know that the Guam Waterworks Authority was going to decide that the Inarajan Watershed would be needed for future freshwater development.
Guam’s important water resources were automatically eliminated from the list of potential sites, including the northern aquifer and the area surrounding the Ugum River, the two major freshwater sources located on non-military land. If the Inarajan Watershed had already been listed for future development, I am certain it would have been crossed off the list of potential sites.
And who is to say that the federal government, which is so anxious to get us to close Ordot, would not have traded a piece of their property to speed up the process? Their trash will also be going into our landfill. I believe that the Guam Environmental Protection Agency did Guam a disservice by eliminating possible sites located on federal property. We should have looked at EVERY corner of our island to find the truly best place for EVERYONE’S trash.
We need to get serious about trash. We need to investigate the construction at Dandan. And we need to take Dandan off the list and bring common sense back into the site selection process.