Let business be business
In the interview, Walker spoke of the need to “clamp down on the administrative code process so that mid- and lower-level bureaucrats don’t run amok in the DNR.” He added, “There are many barriers that our state agencies — not the least of which is the DNR but other agencies, too — put up to economic progress.”
But the environmental laws and regulations that Walker appears set to weaken in the name of job creation did not emerge out of thin air. At least some emerged from fetid water — or, more precisely, from the experiences of people who saw solid waste from farm runoff flowing through their kitchen faucets (see bottom box). The problem yielded new protective regulations in 2007.
Other environmental regulations in the state, older than the rules banning animal waste on frozen fields, also arose from the clash between business and public interests. Wisconsin’s ban on new nuclear power plants, which Governor Walker opposes, dates back to 1983, and the outcry following the March 1979 accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant. The state’s effective moratorium on sulfide mining, passed by four-term Republican Governor Tommy Thompson, dates to 1998, and the battle over Exxon’s plans to mine copper from sulfide ore at the headwaters of the Wolf River, and to dump the waste into the Wisconsin River. (The law does not fully ban mining, but demands mining companies show a record of mining sulfide ores elsewhere for 10 years without acid drainage or heavy metals polluting ground or surface waters.)
“The big catchphrase is regulatory streamlining,” said James N. Saul, a former staff attorney for Midwest Environmental Advocates, who now runs a public interest environmental law practice in Madison. “We see that as code for weakening environmental standards, and making it easier to get a permit.”
Why will it be different now?
So if these regulations — whether aimed at mining, or nuclear reactors, or scrutinizing farm operations — were once necessary, what has changed? Will businesses voluntarily act as good corporate citizens?
Here, too, the Walker team did not respond to repeated requests for comment. Nor did the state Republican Party chairman Reince Priebus.
Mark Bugher is director of the University Research Park, an arm of the state university system that incubates start up companies based on technology developed by faculty. He is also a former secretary of administration in the Thompson administration.
In rankings of state friendliness to business, Bugher said, executives typically rank Wisconsin near the bottom. The new governor does not aim to roll back regulations, Bugher contends, but to make them easier to navigate.
“I think industry can be trusted,” he said. “As a state you have to work with industry and agriculture.”
But what about all those farms that did dump waste, contaminating hundreds of wells with parasites and bacteria that left their neighbors sick with diarrhea and vomiting?
“No farmer wants to contaminate and make people sick. No farmer I know would be comfortable with that. And yet they’re asked to feed the world. How do we balance their pressures to produce with the concerns people have?” Bugher asked rhetorically. While large-scale industrial farms may be more efficient, they also produce more waste in smaller spaces.
Bugher said the new governor doesn’t see the question as one of sacrificing air and water quality in exchange for more growth. Rather, he said, there were ways to ease the regulatory burden on farmers that would not damage the environment. He pointed to “alternative disposal methods, alternative ways to take waste and filter it,” adding, “New technologies have to be deployed in order to protect the public.”
Bugher also said that Wisconsin’s companies had learned from the debacle of the Gulf oil spill, which dealt a body blow to the reputation of British Petroleum — a company that had spent millions projecting itself as a friend of the environment. From this, somehow, he drew reassurance. “I don’t think any company wants to see its name plastered across the newspaper,” he said.
But the BP spill did happen, at least in part, because of a string of failures by the federal Interior Department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management to exercise tough oversight.
“I’m not suggesting that we leave industry without any regulation,” said Bugher. “The question is, how far does regulation go? Does it go so far as to stifle innovation and development?
“If it does, it’s too far.”
Additional reporting by Timothy Martinez.
A matter of under-regulation?
In 2004, the Judy and Scott Treml family, who lived on a small farm in Northeastern Wisconsin that Scott Treml’s great grandfather had once homesteaded, watched in shock as their neighbor across the road, a 900-cow dairy operation known as Stahl Farms, spread 10,000 gallons of liquid manure over a snowy field. They saw the manure run off into a ditch, over another neighbor’s property line, and into nearby School Creek, they later said. When Scott Treml approached his neighbor to stop spreading the manure, “he was met with an expletive,” Judy Treml said in later testimony before the state Water Resources Committee. The neighbor claimed that he was well within in his rights. The state Department of Natural Resources had granted him a permit to discharge his animal waste on the field.
Though the Treml’s videotaped the incident, neither they nor their neighbors at first realized that water from School Creek — into which the Stahl Farms’ manure flowed — filled the wells whose water came out of their taps.
Agency officials initially advised the family that the water was likely safe. Only days later did the Treml’s and their neighbors see brown water flowing from their taps, with solid waste floating in the water. By then, it was already too late. The entire family, including the Treml’s six-month old daughter, had been poisoned by e. coli bacteria. Samantha, the six-month-old, was vomiting and dehydrated. Ultimately, she and the family recovered.
Over the course of days, then weeks and months, the Tremls and their neighbors tried to reason, argue and shame the Department of Natural Resources into acknowledging that the farm’s disposal of manure had tainted its neighbors’ water supply, to no avail. In the summer of 2004, Midwest Environmental Advocates filed a complaint on behalf of the Treml’s in federal district court, and also sued their neighbors, Stahl Farms. Despite the state’s initial defense of Stahl Farms, the state Justice Department also filed a complaint against Stahl for releasing manure into School Creek, ultimately recovering $50,000 in fines from Stahl Farms. The insurance company for Stahl Farms also paid the Treml’s $80,000, and, as part of the settlement, Glen Stahl, the owner, agreed not to spread any waste from December to April, when the ground is coldest and least able to break down toxins.
Beyond the suit, however, the ordeal galvanized the community and the state. In the years that followed, as the number of industrial farms multiplied, more communities complained of similar contamination of their water supplies. The problem was not the manure, which in smaller quantities and in warmer weather acted as fertilizer on the fields. The problem was that in cold weather, there were no plants to soak up the nutrients, and so the waste and its bacteria seeped directly into the water supply. Other problems emerged, with excessive levels of phosphorous seeping into water systems, and with the disposal of animal carcasses. In 2007, the Department of Natural Resources wrote new regulations covering phosphorous levels, and the handling of carcasses. The rules also required large industrial farms to build containers to store manure during the winter, and to spread the waste in warmer weather, and in fields away from drinking wells, sinkholes and fractured bedrock.