The California Association of RV Parks and Campgrounds, which represents owners of recreational parks and campgrounds, has come out in favor of government regulation.
That is, government regulation of the businesses that sell certain products used at RV parks and campgrounds, not the owners and managers of those facilities.
Assemblyman Bill Monning (D-Santa Cruz) has introduced AB
1824, which would ban the use of recreational vehicle holding tank products containing bronopol,
dowicil, formaldehyde, glutaraldehyde, paraformaldehyde and
para-dichlorobenzene.
Those chemicals have proven
to be capable of damaging various types of septic systems while posing
significant threats to groundwater supplies, according to Debbie Sipe, executive director of the California Association of RV Parks and Campgrounds, who suggested a story on Monning's bill would make a great Earth Day piece for the Weekly.
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“We fully support this legislation and think it will encourage
businesses to step up their marketing and distribution of
environmentally friendly holding tank products in California,” Sipe says in a press release.
In fact, she discloses she sent letters to Wal-Mart, Camping
World and other retailers and distributors of RV holding tank products
early last year and asked them to carry environmentally friendly holding
tank products instead of chemically based products.
None took her up on her suggestion, she laments.
If approved, the Monning legislation may show the companies “they have more to
gain, economically and otherwise, by marketing and distributing
environmentally friendly holding tank products,” according to Sipe.
Look, I don't want to be sucking up bronopol,
dowicil, formaldehyde, glutaraldehyde, paraformaldehyde and
para-dichlorobenzene with my groundwater the next time I'm visiting an RV park or campground any more than the next girl.
And I'm all for business groups, chambers of commerce and Daddy Warbucks of the world giving a damn about the environment.
For once.
But Sipes' letter does make me wonder how she would have reacted if Wal-Mart, Camping
World and other retailers wrote letters to the California Association of
RV Parks and Campgrounds asking that RV parks and campgrounds engage in
more environmentally friendly practices . . .
. . . or else they''ll sic Bill Monning on 'em.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.