Legislative Watch: What’s That Smell?
Boy, that stinks—legislators want to protect polluter profits at the expense of long-suffering neighbors of factory hog farms.
Neighbors of the factory-style hog farms which dot (and despoil) the landscape of the inner coastal plains in particular have long been handed the short end of the stick, to put the matter politely. Regulation of the air and water pollution impacts on their health and enjoyment of their own property has commonly been so weak or ineffective as to be practically nonexistent. Disproportionately rural, poor, minority communities have especially suffered.
Now there comes a bill, HB 467, “Agriculture and Forestry Nuisance Remedies,” which would effectively shut down the most promising remedy they still have—nuisance claims in private lawsuits against the corporate masters of the hog factory farming system. The bill would eliminate the possibility of compensation for key kinds of damages that people in such situations most often suffer—injuries to their health, pain, and income loss. Their recoverable damages would be limited to the provable reduction in their property value, not to exceed its sale value.
If your health has suffered and you’re out of work, tough luck. If you live in a modest house in a poor community where the property value was never that high, too bad. In a particularly perverse impact of environmental anti-justice, the proposed legal change could further encourage the location of more polluting operations in poor communities, by guaranteeing that depressed land values were the only financial risk polluters faced.
It’s no coincidence that those are exactly the kinds of injured folks, and the kinds of injury, asserted in pending litigation against pork behemoth Murphy-Brown, the hog-producing subsidiary of Smithfield Farms. Twenty-six such lawsuits filed on behalf of 541 people are now pending in federal court.
NCLCV Director of Governmental Relations Dan Crawford said, “Folks who live and work near these lagoons have had to endure rotten air and tainted water for decades. Instead of holding the polluter, Smithfield Foods, responsible, NC lawmakers are all too eager to cozy up to these corporate fat cats and let them off the hook to continue their pro-polluting ways. We cannot allow one more environmental injustice to further marginalize our fellow North Carolinians.”
At least two other legislative environmental developments also deserve a quick reference this week.
First, the latest terrible “regulatory reform” bill, SB 131, so-called “Regulatory Reform Act of 2016-2017,” was considered in the House Finance Committee. This is the bill that (among other bad provisions) would double the length of stream that could be destroyed by a development with no permit or offset (mitigation) required. That change would overturn a 20-year-old critical environmental protection for clean water and resources in our state. Conservationists are continuing to fight hard against this gift to polluters and major loss of clean streams in North Carolina. You can add your voice in opposition here.
Second, the late and unlamented HB 2 claimed at least one more victim last week: Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) Secretary Michael Regan’s scheduled confirmation hearing last Thursday. When the General Assembly instead decided to debate and act on the late-breaking proposal to deal with HB 2, Regan’s scheduled hearing before the Senate Environment and Agriculture Committee got bumped.
Look for a likely rescheduled hearing date this week or next.
