Bring the records to City Hall by Tuesday, or forever hold your
peace.
That was the message that Menifee Mayor Scott Mann delivered to
Planning Commissioner Mark Matelko a week after he said he possessed records
contradicting information presented at a city-organized sludge forum.
Neither Matelko nor his wife, Janine -- who’ve vehemently opposed
local sludge application for more than a decade -- attended a public workshop on
the issue earlier this month. A week later, Matelko said from the dais during a
Planning Commission meeting that “sick people needed to start looking in their
own backyard.”
Now, Mann would like Matelko to bring his proof to City Hall by 5
p.m. Tuesday.
“Ladies and gentlemen, that’s the reason why we had our workshop
and that workshop was approved by the council,” Mann said at Tuesday’s City
Council meeting. “ … I want to respect Matelko’s comments and offer him one more
chance to provide these documents to City Hall.”
Asked after Tuesday’s meeting if that was an ultimatum, Mann
didn’t back down.
“We would ask that (after March 26) if he hasn’t produced
anything, hold your peace -- forever hold your peace,” Mann said. “The burden of
proof is now on you. We just provided a forum for him to bring forth matters and
(he) failed to do so.”
Matelko said during a March 12 Planning Commission meeting that he
and his wife didn’t attend the public workshop on the region’s historical
application of sludge -- a mixture of human, household and industrial waste
treated at a sewage plant -- because threats were made against his wife at a
Quail Valley Environmental Coalition meeting in January.
Reached by phone Wednesday, Janine Matelko said she wasn’t
interested in complying with Mann’s request to have their records delivered to
City Hall because she said previous city managers had dismissed them. And she
said the three minutes that would have been allotted to Mark Matelko to speak
during the sludge workshop wouldn’t have been nearly enough time to discuss
decades of the spreading of sludge as a fertilizer on the region’s farmlands.
“If they want to have
another public meeting, or provide a public forum, (Mark Matelko) will provide
the documents to the public … if we are given unlimited time to produce them,”
Janine Matelko said.
Mark Matelko has said
he had procured records from the county -- before they were destroyed per its
retention policy -- indicating that sludge had been applied to more land than
the city acknowledged at its March 5 workshop when a number of experts concluded
that the region was a safe place to live.
“The rumors going
around town that no records exist, that people have to prove what’s going on in
Menifee, is totally false,” Matelko said at the March 12 meeting. “The records
do exist.”
Some city officials
said they were stunned to see an appointed official publicly speak out against
the city. But Councilman Tom Fuhrman, who appointed Matelko to the commission in
2011, said he took no issue with what Matelko said from the
dais.
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