QUALITIES OF LIFE, CAPE GIRARDEAU; SPECIAL REPORT: SOCIAL/NATURAL ENVIRONMENT; ENVIRONMENTAL INDICATORS DIFFICULT TO FIND IN CAPE

When the Chamber of Commerce set out to measure the quality of Cape Girardeau's natural environment, the committee that worked on the task had trouble finding indicators of how clean the local environment is.

The committee found no indicators of air quality and its only measures of water quality tracked water usage and whether the discharges from the city's wastewater treatment plant met two federal standards.

Water consumption is not a measure of environmental quality, but life in a city could get difficult if the demand for water ever exceeds the water system's capacity. That hasn't happened in Cape Girardeau, and the city is taking steps to make sure it won't.

Had the committee checked with the Missouri Department of Natural Resources it would have found that nearly all indicators about the local natural environment are good. The air and water are clean, as the story on Page 8B will show.

The Chamber collected statistics from the city about the solid waste generated. They showed that when the city implemented its curbside recycling program in 1991, the amount of waste the city's Public Works Department sent to the landfill dropped. It dropped again in 1995 when the city stopped servicing commercial accounts.

When the Chamber set out to measure the social environment, it ignored several important factors. It did not address poverty questions -- how many people work for poverty-level wages, how many people receive government assistance, the distribution of income. And it didn't relate those questions to race and gender -- are African-Americans or women disproportionately represented among those working for poverty-level wages, for example.

It also placed some measures of the social environment in different categories -- crime rates, education levels.

The Chamber did ask a few questions about race and gender. For example, it looked at the proportion of public school teachers and administrators who are minorities and women. In the Cape Girardeau Public Schools, where 18.6 percent of students are black and 20.4 percent minority, only 3 percent of the certified staff are minorities.

It found that 9 percent of Southeast Missouri State University's employees are minorities, but didn't sort out the janitors from the professors. According to figures supplied by the university, 2.4 percent of the professors are black and 11.3 percent of the executive employees are black while the student body is 3.8 percent black.