Let business be business
Remapping Debate asked Walker these and a host of other questions on proposed regulatory changes through phone messages and in emails, but his spokesman, Cullen Werwie, said that the campaign could not respond. “We have not yet announced the exact details of the permitting plan that was laid out during the campaign,” Werwie wrote in an email.
The complex process of reviewing permit applications
Under the federal Clean Water Act and state law in Wisconsin, large industrial farms must submit detailed information for a state permit that, in essence, allows them to release pollutants within limits.
The applications are complex, including plans for managing the enormous amount of animal waste produced by even the smallest industrial farm. Application components include floor plans and specifications for buildings, waste flow plans, and topographical maps. State officials are supposed to study the maps to see where, say, the farm will spread manure, how that waste will flow or be absorbed, and to insure the fields in question are not already receiving waste from another farm.
They check that the fields are not “tiled,” the term for fields that have tubes running beneath them. Such underground tubes reduce erosion by carrying off excess moisture, but often do so by delivering that collected water to lakes, rivers, and streams. In order to avoid the risk of manure and its toxins entering the water supply, the Department of Natural Resources bans the spreading of manure on tiled fields.
A critical piece of the application roadmap is a 30-day period for public notice and citizen input. Because the state Department of Natural Resources is chronically short-staffed, the citizen review component has become especially important, particularly in identifying information missing from permit applications.
Miriam Ostrov, a staff attorney at Midwest Environmental Advocates, recalled in an interview one permit that showed topographical maps of where a large industrial farm planned to spread animal waste. The application showed two fields, and ruled out the first because it was “tiled.” Once local residents got to study the application, however, they noticed that a second field, where the farm did propose to spread manure, was also tiled. Their input forced the farm to alter its plan to obtain a permit, and averted what could have been a disaster for the surrounding wells, Ostrov said.
The questions surrounding Walker’s pledge are hardly academic. Thomas Baumann, coordinator of the state environmental agency’s agricultural runoff program, said that while many permits were granted within six months, reviewing the applications is not a straightforward process, and frequently takes longer (see sidebar).
Spencer Black, an outgoing state senator who authored Wisconsin’s tough barriers to sulfide mining in 1998, said lawmakers had floated bills in the past that aimed to impose a six-month limit on state review of applications. Usually, he said, such bills specified that the permit obtained that way is “deemed granted,” and not subject to further review, except for gross violations.
Indeed, Walker’s proposal does appear to correspond to a proposal the state’s powerful Dairy Business Association has put forward for “automatic approval” of permits if the state environmental agency does not reach a decision within six months. John O’Brien, a consultant for the DBA who initially responded to calls made to the dairy association, said he was “not sure whether there’s an exact connection between what the DBA has talked about in the past and what the governor is proposing.” He promised to call the Walker team and said the dairy association’s executive director, Laurie Fischer, would respond with the information. She did not.
One issue in terms of automatic approval is the fact that, by definition, such approvals would occur without the detailed restrictions that customarily accompany actual approvals, restrictions that spell out how and where farms will manage wastes.
Another issue is the fact that the state Department of Natural Resources does not audit farms on an ongoing basis, so the absence of an initial examination could be critical: “The Department of Natural Resources only inspects every five or six years, and the rest is supposed to be self-reported,” said Miriam Ostrov, a staff attorney for Midwest Environmental Advocates. “If a person didn’t look at something before it was approved, it could be five or six years before someone goes out there.”
Kimberly Wright, executive director of the Midwest Environmental Advocates, pointed to Rosendale Dairy, Wisconsin’s largest industrial farm and the state’s fourth largest source of sewage, lagging only behind the cities of Milwaukee, Madison and Green Bay. “People would think you’re crazy if the fourth biggest city in the state figured in six months what to do with runoff from all its waste,” she said.
Much would depend, Senator Black said, on whether industry has a hand in writing the related legislation, as it reportedly has in the past.
So where did the regulations come from?
In setting out his agenda for reining in the role of government, Walker singled out the practice of writing administrative regulations that, in his view, go farther than anything enshrined in law. And the top offender, in his eyes, was the Department of Natural Resources, or DNR. “In many other states, something that has the force and effect of law, well that’s something the governor and the Legislature would have to sign off on,” Walker said in a September interview with the Lackland Times.
Additional reporting by Timothy Martinez.
Speeding up and cutting back
While Wisconsin’s next governor wants regulatory agencies to act more quickly, he has also proposed, as a deficit-reducing measure, the elimination of civil service jobs that have gone unfilled for two years.
In the Department of Natural Resources, which is responsible for protecting the environment, some 300 jobs are vacant, from a staff that, at full strength, would run to 2,700, said Laurel Steffes, a spokeswoman.
Wright of Midwest Environmental Advocates, said that, even before the election, employees at the Department of Natural Resources complained of being short-staffed, She asserts that the problem is not over-regulation but rather failure to enforce adequately the regulations that exist, and her organization has sued the state for failing to uphold environmental standards. Wright says that the department has failed to add employees to accommodate its growing responsibilities for approving permits for vast industrial farms.
In 1995, the state reportedly granted just 8 such permits. By February 2010, it had granted 189 permits. Despite the soaring number of farms requiring permits from the agency, and increasingly complex requirements for granting permits, the number of employees handling the permits has remained largely unchanged over the last 15 years, according to an investigative report in the Wisconsin State Journal.
Should the governor — who has singled the Department of Natural Resources out as a particular impediment to private industry — make those vacancies permanent, it could render an already overtaxed system unworkable, rendering the permit process a largely perfunctory exercise, said Wright.