Who would have thought water, the Earth’s most abundant resource, could cause so many problems?

When Sycamore Water Superintendent Donald Smith announced that 2,000 unpaid water bills were lost by the post office, people in attendance at Monday’s Sycamore City Council meeting either gasped or chuckled.

It’s hard for me to imagine how that happens, but they do deal with a lot of letters, Smith said. Regardless, the post office will redeliver all the letters free of charge, and the bill will now be due at the end of the month.

Discussion over the city’s radium-contaminated water continued the theme.

Sycamore resident Peter Barick expressed his concern about the radium. He held up a half-liter bottle and said, “I drink four of these each day. The radium content is alarming.”

But is it?

City Manager Bill Nicklas responded saying, “You would need to drink 12 of those [half-liter bottles] a day for 40,000 days” to be susceptible to the cancer radium causes.

To further his point, Nicklas said one Brazil nut contains more radium than what the average Sycamore resident ingests through water in a year.

For five years the city, among over 100 others in Illinois, has not met Environmental Protection Agency standards. Nicklas called the standard a bad law but one that must be followed. By this fall, additions to the water system should be active and solve the radium problem.

Beyond the issue of water, the council voted unanimously to approve the location of a new business, American Aviation Supply, LLC., within the mezzanine of the Sycamore Center, 308 W. State St.

According to the plan between the city and business, sales tax revenue from the company will never fall below $360,000.

In other news, the Sycamore Fire Department will fill its ranks with the addition of a new firefighter. The department did not have the funds to hire anyone new, but the council will now appropriate the necessary funds.

Likely to start in March at just under $40,000, the new recruit will help alleviate the stress of overtime shifts on other firefighters.