Arkansasonline

Environment notebook

Pollution board: End permits how?

The Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality will look into how it can discontinue the farm permitting program that it announced Thursday it would no longer offer, department Director Becky Keogh said Friday.

Administrative Law Judge Charles Moulton of the Arkansas Pollution Control and Ecology Commission asked Keogh at the commission's monthly meeting Friday whether the department would pursue a rule-making effort to remove the permit from its established regulations.

Currently, Moulton said, Regulation 6 provides for the statewide general permit for concentrated animal feeding operations.

Changing regulations requires the initiation of rule-making by the commission, which then sends the change out for public comment and review by the governor's office and the Legislature, and then it must vote on final adoption of the regulation change.

The department announced Thursday that it would no longer offer the statewide general permit under Regulation 6, which refers to the federal pollutant discharge program, after receiving only one application for it since its creation in 2011. That application came from C&H Hog Farms in Mount Judea, which received approval.

Moulton said that in 2011 the commission was told that the permit would be necessary to get the state on par with the federal government's less strict permitting process. The permit was designed to mirror a proposed similar permit by the federal government that would be less stringent and would cut down on paperwork and make the permitting process easier.

But the federal government never implemented that type of permit, Keogh said, which made the state's version unnecessary.

Keogh's and Moulton's exchange was a small part of a more than two-hour meeting Friday that consisted of comments denouncing the department's approval of C&H Hog Farms' permit application in 2012, which many argued at the time was done without adequate public input.

Several who commented urged the department on Friday to look into whether the hog waste ponds at C&H Hog Farms are leaking into the terrain in the Buffalo National River watershed. Newly obtained research has caused them to suspect that the ponds are leaking.