Harry Potter can talk to snakes.

Remember when one of those crazy wizards shoots a snake out of his wand and Harry talks to it and the snake almost bites someone, and everyone freaks out at Harry?

I learned my first lesson about talking to snakes when I was in high school attending early-morning seminary with all thirteen of the other Mormons my age. They showed us a movie about a boy and a talking snake.

The story went something like this:

The kid meets a talking snake and proceeds to have a conversation with it! (At first this seemed incredible to me – then I realized that my run-like-the-dickens-screaming-like-a-little-girl-whenever-I-see-a-snake lifestyle may have prevented snakes from ever talking to me.)

The snake convinces the kid to put the snake in his shirt and carry it somewhere (there seems to have been a “no biting” clause in this verbal agreement). The kid carries the snake, the snake bites the kid, the kid protests “but you said …” to which the snake replies: “You knew what I was when you picked me up.”

The lesson seems to be that there are metaphorical snakes that we shouldn’t put in our shirts.

As Utahns we should close our metaphorical shirts to EnergySolutions.

We have trusted Steve Creamer (CEO of EnergySolutions) in the past. As a result of this trust dams have failed, highways have flung themselves through our windshields, and communities have been turned into toxic dumps (I’m not talking about Clive Utah: remember East Carbon County?) If you missed these episodes, allow me to refresh your memories:

Back in 1988, just when I was getting ready to greet my fifth new year, the $23.5 million Quail Creek Dam failed sending a 12-foot high wall of water over parts of Washington County. The dam failure killed livestock, flooded homes and apartments, destroyed bridges, ripped out roads, deposited silt on farmland, and ultimately wreaked $12 million dollars in damage. Who did Utah taxpayers pay to engineer this earthen dam? Steve Creamer’s engineering firm, Creamer & Noble, that’s who.

Note: The stuff that Steve’s current company, EnergySolutions, is holding in earthen berms is far more hazardous than water.

Then, just in time for me to turn six in 1989, Part of I-15 cracked, crumbled, and sent chunks of freeway flying up through drivers’ windshields. Who was behind our rocky roads? Steve Creamer. He worked as a consulting engineer and lobbied heavily for Utah to pave I-15 with Syn-crete, an experimental synthetic concrete. The project and clean-up cost Utah taxpayers nearly $3 million. Creamer was also questioned in a federal and state Grand Jury Investigation, which examined the possible misuse of federal funds and the misrepresentation of Syn-crete.

When I was ten and learning to clean up my room, Steve Creamer opened East Carbon Development Corp (ECDC) over the objections of East Carbon residents. The mammoth dump’s twenty-nine 80-acre disposal cells served southern California cities, General Motors, Ford, and Dow Chemical among others. Later, Creamer was accused of trying to create a monopoly on waste disposal in Utah. Other industrial contracts brought contaminated soils too hazardous for municipal landfills. Residents formed Citizen Awareness Now (CAN) and vocally opposed the dump; ECDC promptly filed a civil lawsuit against the group. Creamer felt the good name of his company was being impugned and his right to conduct business compromised. They didn’t impugn it before he had made his fortune dumping other state’s trash in Utah, mind you.

I keep snakes out of my shirt because I’ve heard about people being bitten.

Utah should button up its shirt and walk away from any organization run by Steve Creamer – because he’s been in our shirts before and by gum, we’ve been bit in the past.
Bit in the pocketbook!
Taxpayer money went to build the dam and pave the highway, then later fix the damage.

Since then, Steve has changed companies, bought off the Utah Jazz, and set his sights on buying off the state.
Oh yeah, and this new company is the kind of company they make movies about. The kind of company you can’t depend upon for a reliable definition of essential words like the word“contracts,” for instance (the video below gets good at about 1:19).

Word to the wise: Don’t make contracts with companies that struggle to define it.

So Utahans, button your shirts, put your wand in your pocket, and back away.

You know what it is – don’t pick it up.