The hog factory

Try again, please

By Mike Masterson

Posted: October 20, 2015 at 4:05 a.m.

A federal judge is giving the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Small Business Administration three additional months to finally comply with two federal environmental laws in properly completing their required environmental reassessment for C&H Hog Farms at Mount Judea.

The agencies sought the extension in late September after being flooded with "an unexpectedly large volume" of public comments (1,858, in fact) on the new draft environmental assessment.

The assessment is an integral part of loan guarantees the agencies made for this factory our state's Department of Environmental Quality (cough) wrongheadedly okayed to operate in Arkansas' Buffalo National River watershed.

The public comments about the second insufficient assessment raised substantive issues including relevant studies and assessments that require review, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. I can attest that those comments contain many relevant issues.

Four environmental and conservation groups sued the federal agencies in 2013, alleging their environmental assessment, needed to guarantee loans to the factory, was woefully incomplete. I always saw that assessment as virtually nonexistent. Federal Judge D. Price Marshall Jr. agreed in 2014 and ordered the agencies to complete a second assessment in compliance with two federal environmental laws. Now Marshall has given them until March 1 to try to get the third attempt completed.

What a needless hog-wild mess our state created, even facilitated, here.