The Big Zero spent $34 million to save $300,000 a year on water.
The latest battlefront in the Democrat War Against Sanity is the Reflecting Pool on the National Mall.
Barack Obama renovated it in 2012 and left a big mess when he left office because instead of using city water treated with chlorine, he brought in brackish water from the Tidal Basin and treated it with a product called Ozone.
He called it green technology. That’s true because his convoluted method of filling the pool with dirty water that left it green.
Obama brought life to life in the reflecting pool in the form of algae. That is another reason liberals call it green technology.
Money of course is the real green technology. Charlatans posing as environmentalists con (and likely bribe) politicians into buying into their schemes.
We turned thousands of square miles of farmland into Turbine Farms for the sake of saving the environment, an environment they ruin by installing large windmills that will last at best 25 years and cause a disposal problem because they cannot be recycled.
Meanwhile, politicians are banning plastic straws because somehow they magically escape from the landfills and pollute the sea with plastic. Every time I hear a climate change conmen, I think of the tailors in the the Emperor’s New Clothes, who convinced him to go buck naked in public.
President Trump cannot be bought. In his second presidency, he has become the new sheriff in DC—cleaning up crime, graffiti and the Reflecting Pool.
Every year, the pool is drained and cleaned up. Trump went deeper than usual as workers performed a deep clean/scrub of the granite surface, grouted joints, fixed leaks, and then applied the industrial-grade Old Glory Blue coating on top.
Taxpayers will pay $7 million on the project. The Tidal Basin will remain the source of water because the project is an emergency operation ahead of the 250th anniversary of American independence.
Naturally, Democrats are appalled and filed a lawsuit to stop the project. Ronald Reagan was right when he said every day is the Fourth of July for Republicans but every April 15th to Democrats.
A group sued over President Trump’s Reflecting Pool project on Monday, arguing the renovation at the National Mall violates environmental and preservation laws.
The Cultural Landscape Foundation and its founder, Charles Birnbaum, said the blue paint coating is “altering the historic character” of the Reflecting Pool without authority.
Blah, blah, blah. Here’s the good part:
It has undergone several renovations since its dedication in 1922. Former President Obama’s administration requested $34 million in stimulus funding to renovate the site in 2012, and the National Park Service drains the pool for cleaning and upkeep projects on an intermittent basis.
The lawsuit asserts the National Historic Preservation Act required the government to conduct consultations before changing the historic property, and the project also is not meeting the government’s obligations under the National Environmental Policy Act.
Trump’s announcement is one of his latest efforts to beautify the nation’s capital and pursue new real estate projects.
That’s right. We spent $34 million to stop paying the city for 30 million gallons of water each year as water evaporates and the pool has leaks.
30 million gallons of city water costs $300,000 a year. Plus the water is chlorinated. Tidal Basin water is not.
People don’t like chlorine because when they swim in a pool, the chlorine may sting the eyes. What they overlook is chlorine in drinking water—which is far less than in pool water—has saved millions of lives as it nearly eliminated deaths in the USA from typhoid, cholera and dysentery.
The lawsuit claims Trump needed the permission of various government agencies.
Those agencies—Environmental Assessment (EA), the Commission of Fine Arts (CFA) and National Capital Planning Commission (NCPC)—took nearly two years to approve Obama’s project, whose lowest-bidder contractors then took another two years to complete. That adds up to 44 months.
On top of that, the project these agencies approved turned the pool into a sewer.
No, we don’t need the approval of these idiots to clean up Obama’s mess.
Trump is cleaning this mess up in two months. He used his emergency powers to give a no-bid contract to Atlantic Industrial Coatings of Virginia, a firm he used for pools on Trump’s properties. In other words, he knows the company is a good vendor.
This situation is reminiscent of Wollman Rink project in Central Park. The Wollman family donated $600,000 to build the rink in 1949. The rink opened in 1950.
The city of New York had bungled a renovation starting in 1980. What was supposed to be a 2-year, ~$5 million project dragged on for 6+ years, ballooned to $13 million spent with nothing functional to show for it due to design errors like faulty Freon refrigeration in copper pipes that leaked, poor concrete work, flooding, etc. The rink stayed closed, becoming a symbol of government inefficiency.
Mayor Ed Koch faced being mocked by Trump repeatedly in the news media. He boasted that he could get the job done in 6 months for $3 million in exchange for a concessions contract with the profits going to charity/public works.
Koch caved and Trump brought the project in ahead of schedule and $750,000 under budget—the opposite of how government works.
He hired CIMCO Refrigeration, a Toronto-based Canadian firm with deep expertise in ice rinks. At the time, they handled refrigeration for major venues like Maple Leaf Gardens and the Montreal Forum (home of the Montreal Canadiens).
CIMCO diagnosed the core issues quickly (wrong refrigerant system and copper piping) and switched to a reliable brine solution with durable plastic pipes and new refrigeration units.
By the way, thieves kept stealing the copper. Plastic pipes cannot be cashed in.
Democrats have a reputation for dreaming big and creating even bigger messes.
Trump cleans the messes Democrats make and gets things done because he hires proven companies that know what they are doing.
You can subscribe to Don’s Daily Substack Here.
This article first appeared on Don Surber’s Substack. Reprinted here with permission.
If you enjoyed this article, then please REPOST or SHARE with others; encourage them to follow AFNN. If you’d like to become a citizen contributor for AFNN, contact us at managingeditor@afnn.us Help keep us ad-free by donating here.
Substack: American Free News Network Substack
Truth Social: @AFNN_USA
Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/afnnusa
Telegram: https://t.me/joinchat/2_-GAzcXmIRjODNh
Twitter: https://twitter.com/AfnnUsa
GETTR: https://gettr.com/user/AFNN_USA
CloutHub: @AFNN_USA