In the news article below this one (read it if you haven’t to get up to speed), big dairy and one of it’s acolytes cry bitter tears over the CAFO OPERATIONS ORDINANCEs the Six Town Partnership has drafted to protect the health, air and water of regional folks.
Andrew Marshall, Director of Legal Affairs at KnowCAFOs, Inc. responds:
I feel confident in the Trade Lake ordinance. As a threshold matter, I’m not aware of any statute or regulatory authority that would allow a lobbying organization to request that the State expend the resources necessary to review an operational ordinance, much less an ordinance that is still being worked on. (Trade Lake is actually still working under a moratorium to finish drafting the applications that go along with its CAFO operations ordinance—so the DBA’s request is, at the very least, premature.) Trade Lake has done a ton of work researching and drafting not only its CAFO Operations Ordinance but also the CAFO Study Committee Report–which is about 130 pages long and includes over 200 citations to scientific and industry research articles. The report is incorporated into the ordinance by reference and provides scientifically based findings that support the ordinance.
The correspondence from the DBA patently misstates how local communities are addressing the CAFO issue. For example, in his letter, Mr. Zuleger claims that local towns are “excluding farm interests altogether.” Nothing could be farther from the truth. The fact is that the towns referred to in Mr. Zuleger’s letter overwhelmingly support the ordinances being drafted. One of the five members of the Trade Lake CAFO Study Committee is a farmer. It’s also interesting that, to my knowledge, the operations ordinance, as currently drafted, does not apply to any farming facilities located within Trade Lake. So it is interests outside of Trade Lake, who want to take advantage of our resources and risk damage to our health, air, and water, who now seem desperate to challenge the work being done by Trade Lake and other local communities.
The KnowCAFOs Team
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