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Statement Of Ellen Stern Harris
Environmental Protection Agency
Aging Initiative Public Listening Session
Los Angeles, California
April 29, 2003
Ellen Stern Harris,
Fund for the Environment
Thank you very much. I appreciate this opportunity. It is my hope that you will have a website with information about today and to know who the panel listening to us is. Please send us contact information on each of you. The Aging Initiative is one of the most wonderful innovations, however, while we are sitting here the greatest threat to our health in California is taking place. In Sacramento, I was supposed to be there today testifying at the Recycling Water Task Force. It was a bill created by industry. The industry dominates as it has its own appointees. The report comes out and says “full speed ahead and maybe we will do a little research later.” Now thanks to Candidate for Mayor James Hahn, they never opened a $55 million recycling facility in the San Fernando Valley and his statement was “lips that touch recycled water will never touch mine.” So we have on the other hand, the county of Los Angeles -- greatest promoters of recycled water, inadequately treated, inadequately tested water. I took a Cal Tech grad who is a physician out to meet them, and he said they are 30 years behind the times. So the problems we have with the elderly – we have impaired immune systems. No one disagrees with that. But the recycle task force is going gung- ho because a judge sitting on an opinion about the Newhall Ranch (a huge development) said “you may not proceed until you have a 20-year assured supply of water. Then an excellent state senator codified that by putting it in legislation. However no one said you have to drink inadequately treated, inadequately monitored and hazardous water. Not only that but we are bathing in it. Your dishes are being done with it. Now what is in the water that they cannot get out?. We all know about NASA and the astronauts drinking their own urine. Small group to begin with. We knew what they were taking in and we had the highest monitors possible. The difference is we don’t have pharmaceuticals that we cannot filter out, we have endocrine disruptors. I live next to West Hollywood, and I have to wonder did that have anything to do with all the confusion over sexual identity, because that is what happened to the fish. So, it just seems to me that we should not allow this to continue. I am perfectly comfortable with landscape applications such as golf courses and freeways, however, they want to insert this into our aquifers. As you already know, 1/4 of the aquifers in the San Fernando/San Diego Valley have been totally polluted. So we have to safeguard our drinking water. I know someone here is with the county. I know the county sanitation district is gung-ho for doing this. But they don’t track what happened to the people who were drinking the water as youngsters and have no idea what happened to these people. I pray you will safeguard us against this terrible thing they are about to ram through the legislature. They already have a billion dollars, and they have not even adopted the report. Does that tell you anything? I think it does. Please visit my website: BeverlyHillsCitizen.org