Stockton dumped on by the state

By what lapse of common sense did the City of Stockton allow the state, through one of its contractors, to dump thousands of pounds of water hyacinth in a city park?
The small, decomposing water weed has been piled at Louis Park for weeks. It was yanked from the nearby Deep Water Channel as part of a state cleanup of the noxious weed that clogs Delta waterways.


A mess when it's in the water. A mess when left to rot in a Stockton park.

Much of the cleanup was piled at the Port of Stockton by state contractor Rick Hatton of Hayward-based Aquatic Harvesting. Those piles were quickly cleaned up and hauled away to be recycled. But the piles at the city park were simply left to rot. And smell. And become a convenient place for some people to dump additional waste.
For reasons that are still puzzling, the park is one of five sites the state's permits allow to be used to stockpile the harvested weed. That arrangement was supposed to be temporary, a word that seems to have taken on a somewhat elastic definition. So far, temporary has meant three months.
"It's a new program, and we're still working out the details," Gloria Sandoval of the state Department of Boating and Waterways told The Record.
Don't you think disposal would have been one of the details -- like an end-date for temporary stockpile -- that reasonable people would have worked out in advance? Even in a new program?
City officials say, yes, they gave permission for the state to pile the weeds at the park. They also claim to be working to have the waste removed. We can only hope the cost doesn't come back on city taxpayers.