My letter to the editor of the Saginaw News was published. I must admit I had some mighty fine company! To Ms. Henry who believes that dioxin has depreciated the value of our property, I would just like to say that the amount of dioxin on any one of our properties is probably pretty low. Did anybody measure the dioxin in your backyard? Nobody checked mine and we've had floods every year since I moved into this house 48 years ago. How many backyards were evaluated? How did DEQ choose which places to measure the dioxin? Why did they choose to pick an arbitrary number of 90 ppt as a danger level when the EPA has been studying this problem for years and came up with 1000 ppt? Do you know how big a part per trillion is? Do you realize how tiny 90 is compared to 1000? Do you realize how beautiful is the dream of environmentalists concerning combining your property and mine and all of our neighbors to make a big wildlife preservation empire?

Ms. Henry and Mr. Cox, do you realize the dangers involved in dredging the Tittabawassee River are probably greater than leaving it alone? Dioxin does not exist in water... it exists in soil and fatty tissue of animal life. Stirring up the river bottom would require pulling that soil out and depositing it somewhere else. Where would you have them deposit it?

Ms. Henry, you said I don't have to join the lawsuit. Well that's not the way the environmentalists want that to work. They want Judge Borrello to include all of us living on the River floodplain to be included in a great BIG class action suit. If I don't want to be in it I have to go out of my way to get out of it. People being what they are, many of us will probably stay in it and make that class bigger by default. That is not what I call a fair way to go about things in a democracy, do you?

Mr. Varner from Public Health Department said it best... noboby knows what levels of dioxin present a health risk. What all of us 'old-timers' on the flood plain know is that we are not sick! As far as I'm concerned we just have to remember these words..... 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it!'