Northrop Grumman breezed into town a couple years ago promising hundreds of millions in investment and high-paying jobs. Waynesboro leaders clearly didn’t do their homework about how much the deal we made with the military-industrial devil would end up costing us.
We knew already that we were giving Northrop Grumman – market cap: $76.9 billion – up to $8.5 million in tax breaks over the next 10 years to set up shop here, which was mighty nice of us.
That’s how $76.8 billion companies become $76.8 billion companies, incidentally.
They play every city, town and county in America against each other to get our tax dollars to help them build their facilities, then they get government contracts to build stuff that they can then sell back to the government.
It’s the fever dream of the 1 percent: make a lot of money without having to invest a dime of your own.
The fine print on the local deal suggests to us that the $8.5 million that we’re gifting the multibillion-dollar entity is pennies on the dollar for the final price tag we’re going to pay.
ICYMI
- Northrop Grumman announces plans for $200M manufacturing facility in Waynesboro
- Waynesboro: DEQ needs to grant extension on Northrup Grumman SOP
- Waynesboro: DEQ to set public hearing on Northrup Grumman permit request
- Waynesboro: DEQ sets public hearing on Northrop Grumman permit request
- Locals gave Virginia DEQ an earful on Northrop Grumman permit request
- Waynesboro: DEQ says it’s OK for Northrop Grumman to pollute our environment
Waynesboro City Council, which came under fire for negotiating the deal with Northrop Grumman in secret in 2023, would have had to have known what the company was planning to manufacture at its local facility.
Right?
We can all agree, that could not have been a secret.
So, now that the news of the day involving this Northrop Grumman project is, the company needs a state permit to be able to account for the tons of hazardous pollutants they’re going to be releasing into our air, which is a big part of the cost of them doing business here, is it OK for us to feel like our city leaders sold us out?
I can understand why only one member of the City Council was in attendance at the Virginia DEQ public hearing held at Waynesboro High School on Thursday night, as speakers far and wide brought up and various and sundry issues with allowing our local environment to be poisoned.
I wouldn’t, if I were on the City Council, want to be there without a police escort.
It’s not going overboard for me to say here, local residents are going to die because of this manufacturing facility coming to town – not today or tomorrow, but certainly years down the road, from the daily intake of hazardous pollutants going into our air, and going by the maxim that what goes up, must come down, eventually making its way into our groundwater.
It shouldn’t be acceptable for a manufacturer to emit any amount of hazardous pollutant into a local environment anywhere, but seriously, right there in the main business district of a city of 25,000, literally a mile from our water treatment plant?
Local activists raised a stink when the local Northrop Grumman facility was first announced because of the company’s work in the war industry, which, fine, all well and good.
It’s one thing if they were using their new Waynesboro facility to house their mission solutions operations, having staff on site to design new ways to kill people, launch drone attacks on enemies of the West, whatever else it is the boogiemen there do under the cover of darkness.
Turns out, they just wanted a place to do the really dirty work, involving putting chemicals on things, which is part of what needs to be done so that they can do what they do – and that they wouldn’t want to even try to do in more populated areas, because the locals in more populated areas already know better than to allow them.
Basically, they were looking for rubes in the backwoods willing to turn a blind eye to the damage they need to do to the environment to get their products to market, and we’re the rubes.
This Virginia DEQ approval process is nothing but the donest of done deals, as we all know, so, congratulations to us, 24.9 tons of hazardous pollutants per year for us going forward.
Gotta love how they’re getting us to pay them $850,000 a year so they can pollute our air and water.
That’s master class trolling right there.
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Chris Graham
