Nice to see the little gal win one once

Here at the Frontiersman, some of the people we hear from most, rarely make it into the paper.

Within that group of people are a select few who make it a point to attend every single Mat-Su Borough Assembly meeting they can in order to speak about a particular subject.

The late John Leiner was there every week for years to talk about Canoe Lake and the gravel mine that changed water levels there. He eventually saw action when the gravel mine was proven to have done just what he said it did.

Eugene Haberman has lately been a regular attendee at assembly meetings. His personal crusade is government transparency, and he doesn’t hesitate to let the assembly know when their meetings don’t conform to Robert’s Rules of Order, or when assembly members don’t make information available the way he thinks they should.

And then there’s Helen Munoz.

We have spent numerous conversations sparring with Munoz, sometimes acrimoniously.

Her cause? Septage.

Having spent her professional life as a septic pumper herself, Munoz has been so single-minded in her pursuit of a regional treatment plant for the Mat-Su Borough that she earned an offhand moniker from Gov. Sean Parnell, who referred to her the last time they met as “the Sewer Lady.”

The fight has been a long one, and Munoz has mostly been on the losing end, seeing schools and roads and ports and other borough projects take priority over septage.

One thing we don’t believe we’ve heard Munoz be is happy at decisions the borough has made. Well, that is, we hadn’t heard that until this week, when the Mat-Su Borough put the creation of a regional septic system at the top of the priority list it will bring to Juneau next year.

Munoz took the time to call us to say she was happy about that. And we’re happy to see such community-based perseverance pay off.

In this case, though, we are also happy because however cantankerous Munoz could be in trying to get us to pay attention to her cause, we couldn’t write her off as a crank. She was right. She is right. We do need this here.

Transporting septage to Anchorage, as we do now, is not sustainable, especially considering that our neighbor to the south has lately been making ominous noises about not being able to take that septage in the future. So however small this step is in the journey to a functioning treatment plant in the borough, it is the beginning of a solution to a problem before it reaches a crisis point.

Munoz’s victory, then, is a victory for all of us. We applaud her determination and community-mindedness, and look forward to following this story through to its conclusion.