Big ol' permit loophole

Let's head back down to that Mount Judea hog factory the state wrongheadedly allowed to begin spraying millions of gallons of swine waste on acres that border a major tributary of our precious Buffalo National River.

Joe Nix of Arkadelphia, a prominent water chemist, environmentalist, naturalist, and professor at Ouachita Baptist University who's widely considered the senior watchdog of Arkansas streams and lakes, sent a revelation of sorts the other day.

He described how Cargill Inc. (the factory's supplier and chief customer) and the family that owns and manages it received regulatory approval to operate in the Buffalo watershed with relative ease.

Nix said they achieved their goal by using an odd loophole in the state's "General Permit" that was designed basically to accommodate smaller farms with limited resources rather than mega-factory corporations.

While Nix's point might seem a tad tedious for some, it demonstrates the pretzel twists I believe our state Department of Environmental Quality (cough) performed in order to approve this factory.

I'll start at the beginning. Nix said our state, like others, requires a permit to discharge waste into natural waters in various regions. Ordinary applicants with larger farming proposals may be required to prepare a review of technical aspects of the project. That usually has meant a "Use Attainability Analysis" and/or an "Environmental Impact Statement" could be required, he said.

But the full permit process is expensive and regulative overkill for some very small projects, Nix further explained. "In some cases the water quality standards may be unreasonable since the standards for each region are based on chemical characteristics of a stream in that region which has not been impacted. For this reason, [Pollution Control and Ecology] developed a way for small operations to bypass the expense of a full permit review. This 'General Permit' was intended to help the smaller operator ...

"But unfortunately," Nix continued, "a mistake was made and it can be used for larger operations, too. Cargill and [C&H Hog Farms] took advantage of this and used the General Permit approach to obtain their operating permit. This loophole needs to be closed."

Yes, it most certainly does. As a result of this loophole, the seriously larger operations commonly known as concentrated animal feeding operations who apply under its provisions basically get a pass on jumping through safeguard processes contained in the full permit review.

That's especially interesting, since I've wondered from the beginning of Mount Judea's hog horror why Arkansas didn't demand exhaustive waste-flow dye studies (as well as others) before even remotely considering a hog factory in this treasured area.

Did no one at the agency notice its own permit's loophole at the time? Why not? Who wrote and approved the permit? This Grand Canyon-sized "oversight" smells half-ham intentional to me.

So when Cargill and the factory owners insist they have been legitimately approved under the General Permit and never violated a single permitting regulation, they technically are correct because of the way it's written.

Today the C&H hogs are doing their business in a karst-riddled region where they never should have been permitted. That's about the 60th of so verse of that same song that I and so many others have been harmonizing on since this factory set up shop.

Nix said several weeks back that Mike Luker, Cargill's president of pork production for Arkansas, called him and said he and others realized Cargill had made a mistake in originally locating this factory near the hamlet of Mount Judea and "it was Luker's job to find a solution."

The corporation announced its solution Monday: It was staying put and making some modifications to ensure the factory would not wind up contaminating the Buffalo River.

He also said Cargill would not be placing any more such places in the watershed. And the crowds across Arkansas and America screamed "Hooray!"

Nix responds: "Now we find ourselves with a very large swine feeding operation situated in an area that has karst features below ground and which has the capacity to deliver minimally treated waste into Big Creek and on to the Buffalo River. Yes, Cargill did 'make a mistake' and the only real solution is for one of the world's 10 largest corporations to cancel any contracts, make the C&H owners financially whole, and remove the operation that serves it from the Buffalo River watershed."

A pat on the back

Dana Gardner and Krystal Love, both employees at the Basin Park Hotel in Eureka Springs, deserve much more than a shout-out for discovering and helping extinguish a fire that started in a room in that historic downtown hotel in mid-August.

Hotel Manager Jack Moyer told me he couldn't be prouder of the pair, who likely prevented the relatively small blaze off the kitchen from quickly becoming an inferno and catastrophe in the crowded business district on a Saturday morning.

After smelling smoke, Gardner and Love opened a closet door and doused the growing flames they discovered with water. Meanwhile, the smokey hotel was being evacuated and the fire department arrived. All ended well. But what if they hadn't discovered the fire and acted when they did?

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Mike Masterson's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at mikemastersonsmessenger.com.

Editorial on 09/13/2014

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