Environment notebook

Pollution board: End permits how?

The Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality will look into how it can discontinue the farm permitting program that it announced Thursday it would no longer offer, department Director Becky Keogh said Friday.

Administrative Law Judge Charles Moulton of the Arkansas Pollution Control and Ecology Commission asked Keogh at the commission's monthly meeting Friday whether the department would pursue a rule-making effort to remove the permit from its established regulations.

Currently, Moulton said, Regulation 6 provides for the statewide general permit for concentrated animal feeding operations.

Changing regulations requires the initiation of rule-making by the commission, which then sends the change out for public comment and review by the governor's office and the Legislature, and then it must vote on final adoption of the regulation change.

The department announced Thursday that it would no longer offer the statewide general permit under Regulation 6, which refers to the federal pollutant discharge program, after receiving only one application for it since its creation in 2011. That application came from C&H Hog Farms in Mount Judea, which received approval.

Moulton said that in 2011 the commission was told that the permit would be necessary to get the state on par with the federal government's less strict permitting process. The permit was designed to mirror a proposed similar permit by the federal government that would be less stringent and would cut down on paperwork and make the permitting process easier.

But the federal government never implemented that type of permit, Keogh said, which made the state's version unnecessary.

Keogh's and Moulton's exchange was a small part of a more than two-hour meeting Friday that consisted of comments denouncing the department's approval of C&H Hog Farms' permit application in 2012, which many argued at the time was done without adequate public input.

Several who commented urged the department on Friday to look into whether the hog waste ponds at C&H Hog Farms are leaking into the terrain in the Buffalo National River watershed. Newly obtained research has caused them to suspect that the ponds are leaking.

Bill add-on cuts $1 special landfill fee

The Arkansas Legislature's Joint Budget Committee amended the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality's budget bill for fiscal 2017 to prevent the department from collecting an extra $1 landfill tipping fee that funds electronics recycling.

The special language, added this week, asks that the fee not be levied from July 1 through June 30, 2017.

The bill remains in committee.

The department sought special language to prevent the landfill tipping fee from rising by $1 after projecting that the landfill post-closure trust fund would drop to $15 million sometime this spring, which would trigger the extra charge.

C&L Landfill in Fayetteville is the only current user of the funds, department spokesman Kelly Robinson said. The landfill was authorized up to $3.4 million by the department and its appellate body -- the Pollution Control and Ecology Commission -- for repairs to its landfill cap near where the city wants to build a park.

The balance of the post-closure trust fund has not yet dropped to $15 million to trigger the fee. Its balance at the end of March was $17.9 million. C&L is authorized to use up to $500,000 each month.

Department Director Becky Keogh said last fall that the electronics recycling program had $9 million in reserves. Electronics recycling funds for solid waste districts across the state may continue with the leftover money, Keogh said this week.

Without the extra $1 charge at landfills, the landfill tipping fee is $2.50 per ton for any company or municipality that dumps trash into the landfill.

Some 3.4 million tons of trash were deposited in Arkansas landfills in fiscal 2015, according to a Department of Environmental Quality report released last fall.

A 1991 law allocated $1 toward the landfill post-closure fund and $1.50 toward solid-waste management and recycling. The post-closure fund helps maintain landfills after they close.

According to the 1991 law, once the post-closure fund reached $25 million, collection of the $1 fee would cease. It would begin again once the fund dropped to $15 million. But in 2007, the Arkansas Legislature banned electronic waste in landfills, prompting legislation to address recycling of such material.

Act 512 was passed to provide funds for electronic-waste recycling by keeping the $1 post-closure fund fee in place, even when the post-closure fund exceeded $25 million. When the fund hit the $25 million mark in January 2009, that $1 fee continued to be collected and went toward an electronics-recycling grant program for which districts applied.

However, the language of the 2007 bill also keeps the $1 fee in place for electronics recycling when the post-closure fund drops back to $15 million. That would raise the landfill fee to $3.50.

Funds help farms with water quality

Farmers in eight states, including Arkansas, can apply for up to $2 million in funds from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to install stations to measure water quality at the edges of their fields, the department announced this week.

The funding is also available for farmers in "key watersheds" in Alabama, Iowa, Michigan, Missouri, New York, Vermont and Washington.

The funds were announced at a meeting of the Mississippi River/Gulf of Mexico Hypoxia Task Force in St. Louis, which is working to reduce pollution in the Mississippi River that's causing a "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico between Louisiana and Mississippi.

"Hypoxia" or "dead zone" refers to low oxygen levels that can kill fish and other marine life. States are studying their contributions to the dead zone.

Metro on 05/01/2016

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