The hearing on resolutions to nullify air quality rules that Lyle mentioned
will be held at 7 PM in the House chambers.
HJR 10 and SJR 5 are identical bills that passed out of committee yesterday.
Call your Senators and Representatives at home this weekend and ask them
oppose this joint resolution!! Continue to make calls Monday morning as
well. We need to flood the legislative switchboards!!!!
House Switchboard: (515) 281-3221
Senate Switchboard: (515) 281-3371
The following editorial appeared in the Des Moines Register today, April 25,
2003.
Editorial: Capitol crunch
If lawmakers nullify air rules, they'll look like lackeys for polluters.
By Register Editorial Board
04/25/2003 One big, smelly hog lot. That will be Iowa's national image if the
Legislature sabotages new rules for pollution from large animal confinements
and other sources. Nullifying them, as lawmakers are threatening to do, would
be self-destructive.
The rules are reasonable. They establish ambient air-quality standards for
ammonia and hydrogen sulfide based on recommendations from experts at Iowa
State University and the University of Iowa. Since when did lawmakers know
more about protecting Iowans' health than the experts in those fields at the
state universities?
That's the goal of the standards - protecting human health. That must happen
if people and pigs are to co-exist peacefully in rural Iowa. Nothing has been
more divisive in the countryside in recent years than the neighbors of
ever-larger livestock facilities feeling physically and psychologically that
their rights are being trampled.
While the issue of odor is not addressed by the standards, air emissions are
- just as the Legislature agreed they should be in the 2002 session.
House Speaker Christopher Rants, a Sioux City Republican, is balking now. He
insists that the 2002 Legislature empowered state environmental regulators to
set standards for livestock, not business and industry. But that's not so.
The Iowa Code has long given the Department of Natural Resources authority to
set standards more broadly.
That makes sense. It would be illogical to safeguard people from ammonia and
hydrogen-sulfide emissions from livestock confinements but not
sewage-treatment plants or rendering plants or fertilizer manufacturers.
Twenty-eight other states have standards for hydrogen sulfide and 11 others
for ammonia, according to the DNR. Iowa's regulations are neither the most
nor the least stringent, said Peter Thorne, director of the Environmental
Health Sciences Research Center at the University of Iowa. Sites in Iowa
could exceed the standards seven times a year, and the standards would not be
enforced until 2007.
If Iowa's standards are scrapped, what are the repercussions? "There will
continue to be rural communities and rural citizens who are being subjected
to excessive health risks from emissions from CAFOs (concentrated animal
feeding operations)," said Thorne, co-chair of the study on which DNR based
the standards.
What's more, the standards approved by the Environmental Protection
Commission Monday have been out for public discussion since last summer.
Public hearings have been held. Rants' expectation that the DNR produce
another set of watered-down standards would make lawmakers look like nothing
but lackeys for polluters."This (the standards) has become the poster child
for this notion that Iowa's regulatory climate is out of balance," said
Rants. "You have to have clean air, but you also have to allow businesses to
operate in the state."
That is nonsense, because if businesses exceed standards, reasonable
mitigating practices can be put into effect. Do lawmakers want a cost-benefit
analysis of the toll on people with lung ailments or on young children
inhaling hydrogen sulfide and ammonia while playing outdoors?
Iowa can continue to be the nation's No. 1 hog producer and protect its
residents" health. The two priorities are not at odds. The Legislature should
allow the Department of Natural Resources to do its job, and let the rules
stand.
Copyright © 2003, The Des Moines Register.
Erin E. Jordahl
Director, Iowa Chapter Sierra Club
3839 Merle Hay Road, Suite 280
Des Moines, IA 50310
515-277-8868
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www.iowa.sierraclub.org
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