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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