After 18 years of citizen complaints, appeals and lawsuits, a rural Wood County couple has finally won their fight to prove Ohio’s system of permitting factory “farms” is unlawful.
Larry and Vickie Askins, members of Lake Erie Advocates, celebrated their hard-won victory after getting the news November 15 in a letter sent by the U.S. EPA Region 5 Administrator to the Director of the Ohio Department of Agriculture (ODA). They recommend Governor DeWine terminate the illegal permits and declare a moratorium on any new ones.
The letter stated, there “is no reasonable expectation” that the state’s transfer of authority over CAFO permits from the Ohio EPA to the ODA, ongoing for the last two decades, will come into compliance with federal regulations.
Given the political clout of the Farm Bureau and Big Ag, it’s unlikely Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) will disappear, however, despite the damage they do to Lake Erie. But the news does expose how a two-decade scam was conducted and what it took to expose it.
In 2000, the Ohio legislature approved Sub. SB 141, telling then-Governor Taft to ask the U.S. EPA to transfer CAFO permits and inspections from the Ohio EPA to the ODA.
U.S. EPA approval was required, but ODA went ahead without it, issuing over 200 permits to build, operate and expand CAFOs. An estimated 600 more are in the watershed, avoiding oversight by simply staying one animal under the number required for a permit.
Vickie explained, “The scheme was to avoid the EPA and have ODA issue permits to CAFO owners who claimed they would not discharge waste, whereas U.S. EPA’s National Pollution Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permits regulate CAFOs like all other ‘point sources’ of pollution such as factories and don’t allow such claims.”
How important was that legislation to Big Ag? An Ohio Farm Bureau lobbyist told the Dayton Daily News at the time (pg. 4), “We spent a tremendous amount of time trying to massage the bill and have it drafted the way it should be…”
In 2004, the ODA issued a draft permit for a factory farm with 1,765 cows and a 24-million-gallon manure pit less than one mile from the Askins’ home.
“After we started investigating the ODA permits,” Larry said, “we smelled something rotten. The ODA’s job was to promote agribusiness, whereas the Ohio EPA’s job was supposedly to protect the environment.”
Meanwhile, the Askins fought a series of ODA permits, appealing to Ohio’s Environmental Review Appeals Commission, submitting a 200-page petition to Region 5 seeking to withdraw Ohio’s permitting authority, and filing a federal court lawsuit against the U.S. EPA, OEPA and ODA in August 2014, concurrent with a toxic algal bloom forcing the City of Toledo to shut off water to 400,000 people.
In a 2015 “Statement of Legal Authority,” former A.G. (now Governor) DeWine stated “…the rules adopted…by the ODA provide adequate legal authority…to…enforce a partial permit program for a major category of discharges in Ohio now covered under…the Ohio EPA.”
Stymied by U.S. EPA inactivity, Vickie filed a complaint in 2018, alerting the agency’s Inspector General. The following year, the IG ordered Region 5 to either approve or deny Ohio’s transfer request because “the region’s longstanding delay on these issues has impacted federal and state oversight and has created regulatory uncertainty with respect to CAFOs in the state of Ohio.”
Despite DeWine’s 2015 certification that the ODA program met all requirements, the U.S. EPA told Ohio in 2019 and 2020 it would have to make at least 81 revisions. ODA did not respond to either notice. On November 15, 2022, Region 5 finally rejected Ohio’s transfer request.
After 18 years battling governors, legislators and courts, the Askins urge people to “call Governor DeWine at 614-995-0534 and demand the termination of all illegal permits and a moratorium on new ones, to rectify what they consider Ohio’s purposeful violation of the law that damaged public health and cost the public hundreds of millions of dollars to upgrade water treatment systems.
