At the 14 June 2021 Sterling Annual Town Meeting, in a surprising move, Marion Larson, President of the Sterling Land Trust, a purported land conservation entity, took to the microphone and announced her support for reducing in size, arbitrarily, the North Sterling/Wekepeke Aquifer Protection Zone corresponding exactly with Massachusetts DEP’s current Wellhead Protection Zone II for that area. Ms. Larson said that reducing in size that protected area would not jeopardize Wekepeke Brook, a coldwater fishery, or its native brook trout population. Of course, she provided no scientific underpinnings for her bold assertion. A majority of Town Meeting voters, soon thereafter, voted to reduce in size, arbitrarily, the aquifer protection zone.
Ms. Larson failed to mention that humans drinking well water from that area may be jeopardized if new industries, now able to move into the Light Industrial-zoned portions of that aquifer now that the protected area has been reduced in size, spill industrial solvents or other industrial chemicals into the ground and, hence, into that aquifer. Such spilled chemicals would migrate and spread with the groundwater flow pattern. Ms. Larson, clearly, prioritizes trout over people.
Of course, Ms. Larson and the other Sterling Land Trust folks have their hands out each year for Sterling taxpayer-funded handouts, as in this year’s Town Meeting Warrant Article 5–https://www.sterling-ma.gov/sites/g/files/vyhlif1266/f/uploads/2021_atm_final_warrant_june_7_2021_003.pdf When you get taxpayer money, repeatedly, courtesy of the Sterling Municipal Building Crony Cabal, you become one with them in attitude. Ms. Larson, by the way, subsists off Massachusetts taxpayers as spokeswoman for MassWildlife– https://www.mass.gov/info-details/masswildlife-staff-directory#information-&-education—field-hq,-westborough-
Over the years I have made several not-insignificant monetary donations to the folks at Sterling Land Trust but NOT ONCE did I ever receive a “Thank You” note or even an acknowledgement. There is a word for people like that–ingrates. Sterling Land Trust has seen my last donation.
MORAL OF THE STORY: Never trust a Double-Taxpayer-Funded-Public-Mammary-Gland-Feeder.
J.G.
STERLING, MASSACHUSETTS, OVERWATCH 