If you live on Brookside Terrace, Brookside Terrace Chest or Duffy Drive, consider yourself lucky.

Erie County Legislature Chairman Charles Swanick and Tonawanda Mayor Alice Roth just may care a little more about you than your fellow citizens on the eastern end of Fletcher Street or Alliger Drive or Cordes or Kibler Drives.

How else can you explain the decision by Mr. Swanick to host a closed door meeting last Thursday night to update residents of the Brookside Terrace and Duffy Drive about uranium found down stream from them in Rattlesnake Creek? Mayor Roth attended the meeting but didn't advocate for the excluded citizens.

Some residents of the first list of streets above actually live closer to the confluence of Rattlesnake and Two Mile Creeks than those residents on Brookside.

We realize the offending waste may have migrated upstream, against the current, but the chances are slim. If the meeting was about some other toxins flowing in Two Mile Creek, we need to know that as well and it certainly is a general community concern.

We don't know what went on in the meeting. Afterward, Mr. Swanick came out and spoke to a reporter He was contacted by phone Friday morning and was cordial, assuring us that no new information was disseminated.

Mayor Roth told our reporter she would host another meeting for citizens if there was enough interest. That was interesting, given that she had done an about-face from a few days before, when she told reporter Joelle Gresock from the NEWS she was welcome at the meeting.

When Joelle asked for the day off, we sent reporter Robin Cooper instead. Mr. Swanick wouldn't let him in. That's OK, he was treated the same way as other concerned citizens who showed up and happened to live on the wrong streets.

Because no quorum of an elected body was present, it is easy to contend it was a private meeting and that, even if Mayor Roth and Swanick were ethically corrupt fog excluding affected citizens, they had a legal leg to stand on.

Mayor Roth claims the meeting was Mr. Swanick.'s, not hers, but that logic falls apart when you consider the event was publicized by city employees on city stationery.

It might be easy to think the presence of some environmentally concerned members of the public could be difficult to deal with as well, but Mr. Swanick is chairman of the Erie County Legislature. His job is, in part, controlling meetings filled with hot heads who spew rhetoric thicker than flies on a horsefarm.

Mayor Roth and Mr. Swanick need to make an about face and do what should have been done in the first place: Hold a meeting for everyone concerned. Until they do, there will be a great number of citizens with way too many unanswered questions.

Those unanswered questions will grow out of proportion. The sort of overreaction and panic that Mr. Swanick feared in the first place will happen.

When it does, he and the mayor will have no one to blame but themselves and a closed meeting that should have been open.