If litter were chocolate
Posted on Saturday, October 4, 2008
If the pastures and fields across
Northwest Arkansas were permeated with
chocolate from eight candy companies, would it matter if the chocolate were harmless to health ? Frivolous ? Maybe. But for me that would seem to be a fundamental issue in Oklahoma Attorney General Drew Edmondson’s lawsuit now that U. S. Circuit Judge Greg Frizzell has denied his request for a preliminary injunction that would have prohibited chicken litter from being spread across pastures in the Illinois River watershed. The purity of the river, which begins in Washington County, has long sparked contention between Oklahoma and Arkansas, eventually prompting Edmondson to sue eight poultry firms in Arkansas in 2005. The lawsuit alleges that the companies’ operations in Washington and Benton counties and parts of eastern Oklahoma are polluting the watershed and endangering human health in the process.
In seeking the injunction, Edmondson called on two scientists whose testimony apparently failed to impress Frizzell.
“The state has not yet met its burden of proving that bacteria in the waters of the [watershed ] are caused by the application of poultry litter rather than by other sources, including cattle manure and human septic systems,” the judge wrote in a ruling made public this week.
Edmondson sought the injunction in November, claiming that litter was considered solid waste under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act of 1976. He alleged that spreading the litter threatened human health because it contains fecal bacteria. Our veteran reporter, Robert J. Smith, reported that Frizzell determined that Edmondson had failed to prove that litter threatens human health.
The problem becomes remarkably complex when waste created by various other animals also pervades the watershed. Nonetheless, Edmondson vowed to look past the fact that Frizzell fizzled his injunction plans. He said it will not affect his environmental case, which is set for trial in November 2009.
A federal report issued last week must have encouraged him. The Government Accountability Office spent 85 pages explaining that broiler chickens across Benton and Washington counties produced a whopping 471, 000 tons of waste in 2002.
“The report mirrors what our own experts and scientists tell us, which led to the litigation and will result in a verdict for us,” Edmondson was quoted as saying.
Perhaps. Yet there is no denying that the game changed when Frizzell later rejected the contentions of Edmondson’s two scientists. No matter how one fries or bakes this poultry problem, the question for me is whether Oklahoma can ever legally prove that poultry litter is the primary culprit in polluting the river—and if so, whether it is any more threatening to humans than tons of chocolate. E-mail update
Houston Nutt is plotting how his team can defeat his once beloved Razorbacks, former University of Arkansas-Fayetteville Chancellor John White has returned to the classroom and Mitch Mustain is at Southern Cal. In short, except for B. Alan Sugg, all of the principal figures in the smarmy e-mail mess that rocked the Fayetteville campus for more than a year have moved on.
Except, that is, for Fort Smith attorney Eddie Christian Jr. and his client, John David Terry of Mount Ida. Those men dared to raise valid issues in a civil case against the university in connection with several e-mails about Mustain that were circulated across Arkansas.
Christian’s arguments subsequently were dismissed by Washington County Judge Mark Lindsay. At one point, the lawyer found himself held in contempt for failing to abide by the judge’s order to quit gathering evidence in the case. He challenged both rulings. On Thursday, the state Supreme Court upheld Lindsay’s dismissal order and affirmed the contempt citation against Christian. Regardless of the outcome, I respect Christian for insisting that the facts of the Mustain case be publicly aired under oath. I believe that most Arkansans would agree that this case raised legitimate issues that deserve the fullest possible airing in the public interest. It’s reassuring to know that a much brighter day has dawned on the Hill in Fayetteville. BB&B redux Anyone else find it surprising that the majority of some 36 arrests and citations issued during the four days of the annual Bikes, Blues & BBQ event that brought more than 300, 000 fun-seekers to Fayetteville were of local residents ? Some of those were for old warrants. At least, this was the word from police after the throaty roars had faded for another fall. More than half of the charges filed involved (drum roll here ) inebriation. There were a few arrests for bar fights. All things considered, I’d say an average of eight arrests a day for relatively minor violations in a community swollen by four times its normal size with rowdy revelers is one impressive statistic. I tried to imagine how much money 300, 000 people would leave in Northwest Arkansas over four days. If each one spent an average of $ 200 for food, lodging, fuel, refreshments and entertainment (which sounds a bit conservative ), my pencil says that would be somewhere around $ 60 million. Oh, my.
—–––––•–––––—Staff columnist Mike Masterson is the former editor of three Arkansas daily newspapers.
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