COMMENTARY

Hogging their attention

I’m at lunch in Rogers, a three-hour drive from the raging insularity of the legislative session. I’m standing in the Elks Lodge before not quite a couple of hundred Benton County Democrats.

These folks are forever outnumbered in this Republican haven. That only makes them more fervent, more hard-core.

Don’t bring any Mark Pryor mushiness up here. If you’re going to live an alien existence in a dominant Republican culture, you may as well be a real Democrat.

But for the record, these are not the Benton County partisans publishing a newsletter with an essay suggesting shooting party mates over differences of opinion on public policy. That’s the Benton County Republicans.

I feel safe.

These Democrats listen carefully to my contrast of Mike Ross and Bill Halter. They grumble about Pryor and the atrocity of his vote against expanded background checks for gun buyers.

They chuckle when I say that Pryor’s weak vote won’t do him any good with gun nuts—that, actually, the issue had presented Pryor with that rare opportunity, a failed one, to do the principled thing.

They applaud when I say Pryor had squandered vital passion of support in that very room and others like it across Arkansas.

One young woman pushes back during the Q-and-A against my favorable commentary about Ross’ transactional politics and greater presumed electability, for governor in 2014, than Halter’s. Ross’s anti-woman voting record in Congress is an outrage, the woman said, adding, “You gotta be brave.”

These Benton County Democrats cheer loudest when I say national political trends are all in their favor and that it is high time for Hillary Clinton to become president.

I predict that a Clinton presidential candidacy in 2016 would solidify a new and transformational national Democratic majority, already developing demographically and generationally. It would do that by bringing back working people who have not been able to warm to Barack Obama.


All that is well and good. But what turns out to be uppermost on the minds of these Benton County Democrats is something I hadn’t addressed, something that has roiled up in the Ozark hills while I’ve been obsessing on Little Rock legislating.

It is … drum roll, please … hog waste.

A man begins the discussion during Q-and-A when he takes note of my comment that the greatest political liability of Nate Bell’s nonsensical tweet about Bostonians cowering was that it embarrassed Arkansas, our greatest fear.

The man asks: Are we going to wait to be embarrassed while we sit idly by and let hog waste flow into the nation’s first and most storied national river, the Buffalo?

The answer: It looks like it.

What has happened is that a large industrial hog-farming operation was applied for months ago on 670 acres within the Buffalo watershed. The farm abuts a tributary to the pristine river. Counting piglets, there could be 6,500 swine on the premises at times.

The plan is to spray the waste into grass, only by prescribed methods and only under favorable weather conditions. It is otherwise to fortify the property against runoff.

The farmer applied properly for approval through a Harrison-based agency of the federal Agricultural Department, which reported determining there would be no environmental effect and thus no need for a full impact study.

So the state Environmental Quality Department, saying it had no alternative, routinely granted a permit, conditioned on adherence to environmentally protective practices.

Financing has been secured. Money has been borrowed and spent. Construction is all but completed.

A food company, Cargill Pork, has the farm under contract so that plenty of pork tenderloin and pulled pork and slabs of ribs will remain available for our cookouts.

After the awarding of the permit, the superintendent of the Buffalo National River complained that he hadn’t been properly notified of the proposal. He enumerated 45 points of concern. One was that the rock formation underlying those hills might permit waste-infested water to seep and run off toward the river.

Environmental groups and tourism champions cried out in objection. The Fayetteville City Council passed a resolution of opposition.

The Environmental Quality Department now plans a public hearing May 8 in Jasper, which seems a touch late. The agency’s commission has publicly admitted that the public notification was woefully inadequate and must be improved.

A bill just got passed at the Legislature calling for improved public notification in such cases. But it’s entirely prospective in its application, as it had to be.


In Rogers, Fayetteville City Council member Adella Gray stands to announce to the Benton County Democrats that Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack would be in Fayetteville the next day to speak at the University of Arkansas Law School.

She says we’re having a hog-farm protest outside the law school to try to get on Vilsack’s radar, and she invites everyone to participate.

The broad issue is improved notification and regulation. The immediate issue is whether a permit can be revoked after a man has done everything required by law and spent millions.

This is not the classic economy versus environment debate. Any neglect of the river’s preservation would mean fewer floaters, which would mean a damaged regional economy dependent on tourism, perhaps as much as on hogs.

If there is a way to revoke or at least suspend the permit and reopen the debate for fuller airing, and to somehow be fair to the fully permitted proprietor in a way that wouldn’t have him suing the state for millions—massive ifs, yes—then we must do it.

If it’s too late for that, then we can only revert to our usual regulatory position for the Arkansas environment, which is to grant permits and then monitor and hope for the best, rather than to pre-empt.

As a poor, rural culture dependent on the land for a buck, one that only calls itself the natural state, a world-renowned pristine and nationalized river can seem about as alien as a Benton County Democrat.

John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

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