Next time you’re at the grocery store, stop by the dairy section. Open one of the refrigerators and take a look at one of those big, plastic jugs of milk. That’s a gallon.

Now, and this is where it gets gross, imagine it’s full of wastewater, stool and urine. Imagine there aren’t just 30 or 40 such containers staring you back in the face from behind the chilly glass and plastic but about 1,000 of them.

Pretty disgusting.

That’s what the City of Poulsbo was looking at last weekend. Of course, the gallons of untreated sewage it dealt with were not sealed in plastic jugs, they were running up manholes and down into Liberty Bay. Turn the clock back to Sept. 29.

Now imagine 553,000 gallons of nasty foulness.

Too much? OK, try Sept. 18, 2003, that was only 350,000. The point here is that no matter whether we’re spilling more than a half million gallons into Liberty Bay or less than 1,000, the City of Poulsbo needs to put this problem at the top of its to-do list. We suggested it take care of the problem soon after the September incident, the one in 2005. It didn’t happen.

Gotta wait for the 2006 budget, the city council reasoned.

While a power outage was the crux of the problem, Poulsbo Public Works Director Jeff Lincoln partially blamed an employee for a mistake that led to the latest spill.

We disagree. It’s the council’s and mayor’s fault.

As the governing body of Poulsbo, we feel they failed residents by not acting sooner. The money could have been pulled out of reserves or pooled together to pay for the project. Are we to believe the city does not have $75,000 in an emergency fund?

If they had acted sooner to provide the city with the environmental safeguards it obviously needed following the greatest sewage catastrophe in its 120-year history, this latest tragedy could have been averted. The public works department should have been directed to immediately review any and all potential shortfalls in the system, not just the ones that led to the 553,000-gallon spill.

By doing this and expediting improvements by a few short months, things certainly would have gone differently. At the very least staff would have known how to react to the spill, having recently reviewed procedures and possible problems.

Apparently, the health of Liberty Bay isn’t a top priority of the city council and mayor. It might be for Lincoln but he gets his orders from them.

In the meantime, the environment has taken a back seat to development plans (i.e. Olhava, a new pump station and a new city hall) in Poulsbo. It’s a shame but the delay until budget time seems to prove that any claim that the city puts the health of the environment first may very well be full of the same “stuff” Liberty Bay is.