We’re one year down the pike, and ain’t nuthin’ been done about fixing the mess the three stooges (aka Shannon County Commissioners) made on Big Creek, a tributary of the beautiful Current River. And since no effort has been made to repair the damage, the area looks even worse now. (Pictures of the scene today below the fold.)

Late last February, I wrote:

Both streams are part of the Ozark National Scenic Riverways and thus protected by the National Park Service. Any in-stream activity requires a permit from the federal government and a water quality certification from the Missouri Department of Natural Resources. Apparently, the Commissioners decided to wave a dismissive hand at those interfering city folk, because, without permission of any kind, they channelized (straightened) about a thousand yards of the creek, built “wing-dams”  to make sure the meandering stream flowed faster, and piled gravel twenty feet high on each side of the creek.

Presumably, the reason they did this was to stop the flooding of a nearby road, which they then rebuilt. Unfortunately, they chose to ignore the fact that the road was on private property owned by the L.A.D. Foundation and that the foundation did not want that road rebuilt. Indeed, the foundation’s board had offered the County an easement to build another road on higher ground. It was a sensible offer, especially considering that federal funds are available for building roads in that area, so doing so would not have cost the county anything–would have provided some jobs, in fact.

Furthermore, Ken Midkiff of the Sierra Club tells me that hydrologists and engineers have informed him that the changes to Big Creek not only won’t stop the flooding in the spot, they are likely to increase it.

So. Let’s tally up the stupidity. The Commissioners broke federal law in order to damage a beautiful waterway. After they defiled that, they built a road on private property without permission when they already had an offer to build a flood-free road at no expense to themselves. The road they rebuilt will flood again, probably sooner than it would have if they’d left the lovely creek undamaged.

As for the arrogance of the Commissioners, how’s this? Tony Orchard, the presiding commissioner, told the Post-Dispatch that “Some people are just going to get carried away if you move a piece of grass the wrong way.” It’s beyond him to imagine why anyone would care what they did to Big Creek. It’s also beyond the trio of dunces, or so Commissioner Dale Counts claims, to understand all that bureaucratic red tape for permits to breathe and certification before you can cross the road. He didn’t know about all those hoops the commission was supposed to jump through, all right?

Really? Commissioners who don’t need to be watered twice a day would know that.

But in fact, Ken Midkiff of the Sierra Club asserts they did know that permits were required. He knows that because an attorney at the Department of Natural Resources told him that Jo Ann Emerson was laying down covering fire for the commissioners at the Park Service before any of those blades of grass got moved. She called the Park Service and told them not to bother the commissioners after they were through meddling with Big Creek. When he filed a sunshine request for the Shannon County phone logs in order to verify that information, though, he got naught but silence.  

Once it became obvious that the commissioners intended to smirk at the law–again–Midkiff contacted the Attorney General’s office. That was almost as frustrating as dealing with Shannon County. Every time he called, he was told to leave his name and phone number and someone would get back to him. When some dweeboid gave him the same song and dance on the fifth phone call, Ken said, “Forget it, my next move will be to contact the press.” And he e-mailed me.

That threat did get a little bit of action. It got him a phone call from Jane Gummels (he wasn’t sure of the spelling). She informed him that the Sunshine Division of the AGO has no lawyers. They what? That’s right. NO lawyers.

All the lawyers in that division left with Nixon, so a month and a half after Koster took office, he had filled none of the 75 vacancies. Wasn’t there a Transition Period in which filling positions was supposed to have occurred?

All that frustration was mitigated by the MDNR’s decision to fine the Shannon County commissioners and require them to restore the section of Big Creek that they disfigured. Problem is, the commissioners were just as willing to ignore the MDNR as they were to ignore Midkiff’s sunshine request, and the agency finally turned the matter over to the AG.

As if that would do any good. Midkiff wrote me:

When I last spoke with Jack McManus (lead attorney for the AG), he relayed that they were “working with” the Shannon County Commission – because the AG treats elected officials with kid gloves (my interpretation of his words).   I pointed out that these people had violated federal and state laws and regs, that they were nothing more than criminals, and that I couldn’t understand why the AGO was “working with” criminals.

Meanwhile, that creek they straightened has flooded worse than ever. It was no longer beautiful last year, but at least it wasn’t ripping up trees by the roots.

Trees, though, are comparatively light and easy to move. You know that creek is mad when it starts moving boulders. Normally, a wing dam juts out from one bank, forcing the water toward the center of the stream. When several wing dams forced too much water to the center, it got so powerful that in flood season, it moved the boulders of the wing dams–one of them right out into the center of the channel. In fact, the water was so angry about being confined in that narrow channel that it created an extra channel for itself behind the wing dam.

And that meant that the newly rebuilt road, which was only a few feet from the stream, got flooded. Notice how the grader has had to come through and push gravel to the side of the flooded road. Of course, the stooges could have had a new road. On higher ground. For free.

And doing it that way would have prevented several extra tons of Missouri roaring downriver toward the Gulf of Mexico every year.

But what the hell. Why do it that way when you can break the law, get your congressminion to order the Park Service to ignore said lawbreaking, and thumb your nose at state agencies who want you to mitigate the screaming, godawful, screwed up mess you made. Who would want to do it the sensible, easy, cheap way?

Only the people who don’t need to be watered twice a day.

All the photos were taken by Sierra Club activists Tom and Angel Kruzen

Jim Hightower’s December newsletter had this buck-up advice:

Too often we progressive types get all hang-dog about what’s going wrong, failing to acknowledge that many things are actually going right, and that we’re making gains on the greedheads and goof balls who for so long have been running roughshod over common sense and the common good.

Presidential Appointees ………  Yes, Obama has hung such albatrosses as Timmy Geithner, Larry Summers, and Ben Bernanke around our economic necks. But he’s also made some sterling appointments, including Sonia Sotomayor to the Supremes, Hilda Solis to head Labor, Lisa Jackson to run EPA, Steven Chu as Energy chief, Jared Bernstein as chief economic advisor to Joe Biden, and Kathleen Merrigan to be the number two at the Ag Department.

Many other solid progressives have taken over as assistant secretaries, program heads, regional directors, and other key positions- these are the hands-on officials at the operational level of government. If you’ve ever seen the cable show “Dirty Jobs,” you’ll have a sense of the challenges these mid-level appointees face. After Bush & Buckshot’s eight-year frat-house party, the soiling of government programs was so bad that cleaning them would take a giant can of Comet and a wire brush, but the Obamacans have this scrub job well underway (though their efforts get little media attention).

One example of the clean-up process is EPA’s recent moves to reverse The Bushites’ horrific policy of encouraging mountaintop removal. This obscene mining practice by Big Coal amounts to free environmental rape of Appalachia (see Lowdown, November 2005) The new crew at EPA is taking regulatory and scientific steps to stop it. First, they’ve placed 79 mountaintop removal permits that the previous EPA honchos tried to shove through on hold, pending environmental review. Second, they’ve launched a major scientific study of whether the explosion of mountaintops and subsequent shoving of the rubble down into the valleys below destroys streams, thus violating the Clean Water Act.

Here in Missouri, Ken Midkiff, director of the Clean Water Campaign for the Sierra Club, can tell you about the new EPA chief, Lisa Jackson. He went straight to the top when he finally understood that EPA District 7 was going to let the old boys on the Peirce Township Board of Supervisors get away with not paying the $14,500 fine for mauling Dixon’s Crossing on the headwaters of the Jacks Fork River.

They changed it from this:

To this:

Which caused this, when it rains:

Environmentalists threw a fit and got the Township saddled with the fine, which the Supervisors had five years to pay. Their time was up in October of 2009; they hadn’t paid; and the EPA was prepared to let it slide. But Midkiff wasn’t.

He wrote Lisa Jackson four times, and she responded by ordering the regional office to make the buggers pay up. The money hasn’t actually changed hands yet, but if it doesn’t, Midkiff will raise some more hell. In the big scheme of the EPA, $14,500 is a piddling amount. But Jackson gets the principle of the thing. And she will listen if he has to come kvetching back to her about it.

And that was the point of Hightower’s letter.

Now that we have President Obama and Governor Nixon, the EPA and the Missouri Department of Natural Resources (MDNR) will do the right thing environmentally. More often. But a change at the top doesn’t change a pumpkin into a carriage with six coursers pulling it with a tap of your fairy godmother’s wand.

Even under Bush and Blunt, lots of competent people stuck it out at those two agencies, but they worked with folk, both colleagues and superiors, who were either anti-science or just plain bumbling. And some of those incompetent or deluded people haven’t left.

Ken Midkiff and Tom Kruzen, in pursuing the case against Peirce Township for the way it mauled Dixon’s Crossing on the headwaters of the Jacks Fork, found some bureaucrats who were competent and others who were … less than that. And one of the competent ones admitted, in disgust, that without the pressure Midkiff and Kruzen brought to bear on EPA7, the fourteen thousand dollar judgment against Peirce would have just, sort of, slipped everybody’s mind.

The fine was levied because Peirce Township brought a road grader in and changed this:

to this:

Which caused this, when it rains:

Anyhow, Peirce Township is either going to have to do the mitigation work by September 1st or cough up the cash. So that tale is turning out well.

On the other hand, Midkiff recently met with four state agency pooh bahs and was dismayed to find policies in place that Big Ag loves.

It was a bit disturbing to learn that nobody is counting. MDNR takes the word of CAFO operators about how many hogs or chickens they have. That was a minor problem, though, compared to this:

If, however, a previously-under 2599-hog or 29999-chicken, CAFO expands and has double or triple that number a Construction Permit is not required upon application for a permit.  The CAFO goes directly from nothing to an Operating Permit.

Most troubling of all was that Midkiff learned that three of the officials believe Big Ag p.r. Rob Morrison, the MDNR Water Permits official, insisted that lawsuits against CAFOs are mostly filed by urban move-ins who don’t understand that country air doesn’t always smell like lilacs. That’s the bs that the Farm Bureau spreads, but it’s a fabrication, and Midkiff spoke up. He had just published an op ed piece in the Columbia Tribune and the Joplin Globe refuting that myth by offering many examples of longtime rural residents filing the lawsuits. Midkiff got some support in his argument from Joe Bindbeutel, the Deputy Director of MDNR, but the other two were silent on the topic and Morrison was unconvinced.

Transforming this pumpkin isn’t going to happen with one flick of the wand. Looks like Midkiff, Bindbeutel and other people who are clued in will have to build their carriage the hard way. But it tries Ken’s patience. He wrote:

MDNR issues permits under the pretext that the only opposition comes from all those cute little ranchette owners.  THIS HAS NO BASIS IN REALITY!

It’s enough to make a guy spit tacks.

Ken Midkiff of the Sierra Club is still pursuing the case against Peirce Township for ravaging a prong of the Jacks Fork headwaters. He sent me his latest letter to Howard Bunch, the EPA, District 7, attorney:

Howard,

What is the status of the $14500 mitigation plan?

It is hoped that EPA7 is not intending to grant an extension.  Five years is long enough!  By now, every pebble loosened by the illegal in-stream work has reached the Gulf of Mexico.

Ken Midkiff

What Dixon’s Crossing used to look like:

Until the Peirce Township Board of Supervisors “improved” it:

When Ken Midkiff of the Sierra Club learned that the Shannon County Commissioners’ had scarred Big Creek, he immediately filed formal complaints with the Army Corps of Engineers, the EPA Region 7, the Missouri Department of Natural Resources, and God Almighty. Ken gets peeved when elected officials flout the law, deface Mother Nature, and then get all smug about it.

The Corps of Engineers indicates that it plans to act on Midkiff’s request that Shannon County be fined and required to restore the section of Big Creek that it disfigured. Good.

But then the story took an interesting twist: Midkiff (shown at left fishing Tavern Creek) got word from an attorney at the National Park Service that Representative Jo Ann Emerson had been laying down covering fire at the Park Service before the Shannon County Commissioners’ assault on Big Creek–giving the lie to all that “who knew we needed permits?” nonsense they’d been spouting.

Immediately, Ken filed a Sunshine Act request with the Shannon County Commission. Since he knew Emerson had made phone calls to the National Park Service, his request carefully defined “communication” as ” any and all formats – for example: electronic, telephone logs, letters.”  

Noting in his request that the law requires them to respond within three working days, Midkiff asked for:

1.  Any and all copies of communication* to or from US Representative Joann Emerson during the period January 1, 2004 to present;

2. Any and all copies of communication* to or from the National Park Service, Ozark National Scenic Riverways during the period January 1, 2007 to present;

3. Any and all copies of communication* to or from the Missouri Department of Natural Resources, Division of State Parks during the period January 1, 2007 to present ;

4. Any and all copies of communication* to or from the Missouri Department of Conservation during the period January 1, 2007 to present;

5. Any and all copies of communication* to or from the United States Forest Service during the period January 1, 2007 to present;

6. Any and all copies of communication* to or from the L-A-D Foundation during the period January 1, 2007 to present; and,

7. Any and all copies of communication* to or from the Missouri Department of Natural Resources during the period January 1, 2004 to present.

That was February 4th.

There’s been naught but silence from the Commission.

Once it became obvious that the commissioners intended to smirk at the law–again–Midkiff contacted the Attorney General’s office. That was almost as frustrating as dealing with Shannon County. Every time he called, he was told to leave his name and phone number and someone would get back to him. When some dweeboid gave him the same song and dance on the fifth phone call, Ken said, “Forget it, my next move will be to contact the press.” And he e-mailed me.

That threat did get a little bit of action. It got him a phone call from Jane Gummels (he wasn’t sure of the spelling). She informed him that the Sunshine Division of the AGO has no lawyers. They what? That’s right. NO lawyers.

The subject line of Ken’s e-mail to me about his … dare we call it “communication”?… with the AGO was, “Now they tell me.”

So, why don’t they have any lawyers, he wanted to know. Well, it seems that all the attorneys from that division left with Nixon, and Koster hasn’t replaced any of them. Not one. Not yet. Here’s Ken’s take on it:

This is very frustrating.  Many people depend upon the AGO to make sure that our government is open, accessible, and transparent.  BUT, the very entity mandated with that responsibility is not doing it.   As far as openness is concerned, we may as well be living in a dictatorship.

Jane Whoever also told me (and I already knew this) that they needed to fill 75 vacancies.  Wasn’t there a Transition Period in which filling positions was supposed to have occurred?   This is Feb. 20, Koster took office on Jan. 12 – apparently enforcing the law is a low priority for him.

Am I frustrated?  Damned right.

As of today, Ken has heard from Daryl Hilton, who identifies himself as “Assistant Attorney General.”

[Hilton] stated that he contacted the Shannon County Clerk and she assured him that the records will be provided.  HOWEVER, she didn’t say when nor did she give any explanation of why I have been stonewalled to this date.  Besides which, I sent the letter to the Commission, not to the County Clerk.

Midkiff’s attempts to get some truth are limping along, and his take on it is that there ain’t no sunshine in Shannon County or the AG’s office.

Photo courtesy of sierrasportsmen’s photos on Flickr

Among progressives, some of us are for ethanol use, others are agin it. Ken Midkiff of the Missouri Sierra Club, in an op-ed piece that he wrote for the Joplin Globe, lays out the case against it (and, by the way, the case against drilling in ANWR).

He’s convincing. Read on past the Midkiff excerpt to see what McCaskill and Obama have to say on the ethanol question.

Pogo famously said “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

That is where we find ourselves when it comes to the high price per gallon of gasoline (which seems to go up almost daily).

While it is only human to want to blame someone, such as “liberals and environmentalists,” the fact is that we are all to blame. We have used oil and oil products, such as gasoline, as if there was no tomorrow.

Environmental groups and liberals in the U.S. Congress have decried the government largesse flowing to ethanol, which is extolled as a “green solution” by those who view “green” only as the color of money.

As has been pointed out many times, ethanol could not make it in a true free market economy. A corn grower pointed out that right now, ethanol production is subsidized at about 85 cents per gallon. Remove that 85 cents and ethanol plants would be money-losers and would go belly-up.

There are other problems with ethanol:

* Some scientists claim that it takes more energy than it produces. The corn grower I was speaking with told me that, due to more efficiencies in production, the ratio is currently 1:1. In short, it takes a gallon of energy to produce a gallon of energy. That’s hardly worth it.

* If every kernel of corn raised in this country were converted to ethanol, that fuel would meet about 7 percent of our energy demands.

* One unintended consequence of converting so much corn to ethanol is that food prices have skyrocketed to the point that people in developing nations can’t afford groceries and are quite literally starving.

Bottom line: Don’t blame environmentalists or liberals for our tax monies going to support ethanol production.

Those who would blame environmentalists and liberals for our current high gasoline prices are probably thinking of opposition to drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve or opposition to drilling on public lands. That’s all true; we are opposed to such. But, the amount of oil in ANWR would meet about 6 months’ worth of demands, and to achieve this modest amount, we would have decimated a relatively pristine area. Maybe ANWR isn’t very inviting to humans; but caribou love it. Caribou and drilling equipment, pipelines and other accouterments of the gas and oil industry don’t get along very well.

Claire’s website:

Claire strongly supports reducing our demand for oil and developing alternative fuels, both to improve our national security and to support Missouri’s farmers. Investing in ethanol is an important first step towards developing renewable fuels. We also need to develop even cleaner, more efficient cellulosic ethanol, which can be produced from biomass. Claire believes in developing local production of feedstocks and fuels and local and farmer ownership of processing plants. Claire will fight to make sure that ethanol production does not end up being controlled by a few big out-of-state corporations and will promote incentives that favor smaller-scale, farmer-owned processing facilities.

Associated Press report about Obama:

Democrat Barack Obama said Sunday the federal government might need to rethink its support for corn ethanol because of rising food prices, a stance similar to Republican John McCain’s but at odds with farm states considered important to the November election.

“What I’ve said is my top priority is making sure people are able to get enough to eat. If it turns out we need to make changes in our ethanol policy to help people get something to eat, that has got to be the step we take,” said Obama, D-Ill., on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Perhaps Claire actually sees Obama’s point by now and just needs to revise her website. Or not. Since the two of them hail from corn producing states, their original support for ethanol subsidies was predictable. Anyway, I’m glad to see Obama shift his stance.

I didn’t know that if the Mexican government tries to impose any environmental or safety standards on the maquiladoras that sprung up across the border after NAFTA, it is subject to be sued–by the American corporations who profit from them, I assume–in international courts.

That’s just one item I learned from reading Ken Midkiff’s account of his visit to hell:

A few years ago, I went to hell.   The hell I went to was brought about, so said my City of Matamoras aldermen guides, by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

Lately, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, contenders for the Democratic nomination for President, have engaged in spirited debates about NAFTA.  Both have stated that the issue should be re-visited and that environmental and labor agreements should be part of the core, rather than unenforceable side matters.  These statements have caused considerable discussions in the print and broadcast media.

But what the debate always focuses on is the harm NAFTA has done to U.S. workers. Midkiff writes about the other side of the border and says that Matamoros, Mexico, directly across the Rio Grande from Brownsville, is hell, “a terrible vision of the apocalypse.”

One of the attributes applauded by those who signed NAFTA was that tariffs were lifted – hence the “free trade” aspect of NAFTA.  Where once products coming from Mexico were subject to heavy tariffs, NAFTA ended that. Things made in Mexico are treated the same as products made in the USA.

What happened was that it became economically beneficial for US companies to open factories – maquiladoras – in Mexico.  Labor was cheap and no funds needed to be expended on tariffs.  An unanticipated consequence was that the employees of these maquiladoras completely and totally overwhelmed the already-limited ability of Matamoras to provide the basic essentials of civilization.

And, to complicate matters further, many of those employees have constructed crude housing encampments, or colonias, on the outskirts of the city, with no availability of even minimal municipal services.

Keep in mind that these settlements are literally within sight of the United States, that the gleaming maquiladoras are in many cases owned by U.S. companies or provide “outsourcing” for production of U.S. consumer goods. Major U.S. companies are directly involved: GE, Alcoa, Delphi Automotive Systems. Keep in mind that what I am about to relate stems directly and specifically from the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

With assistance and translators provided by community activists and a Matamoras city council member, I visited the maquiladoras, the colonias and, to my horror, the new and old city dumps. What I saw was a vision of hell, but a hell populated by living, breathing human beings.

While Mexico is a poor country with tremendous problems, the colonias of Matamoras are at the bottom of the pit. No electricity. No running water. No sewage system. No trash service. Cooking is conducted over wood fires in rock enclosures. Dirt or mud lanes wind between squalid hovels constructed of cinder blocks, scrap plywood, cast-off metal roofing and cardboard.

Scrawny chickens and mangy, starving dogs inhabit the streets and bare dirt yards. Bony horses and donkeys transport trash on wooden carts. The trash and wastes are dumped into an open sewer/creek that, after picking up leachate from the dumps, runs into the Gulf of Mexico, polluting the estuarial breeding grounds of shrimp and fish along the way.

…….

The maquiladoras of Matamoras employ hundreds of thousands of people – estimates ranged from 500,000 to a million. Most of these have been recruited from rural villages of central and southern Mexico. A high wage is $10 per day; the average is $5. Tellingly, many of the maquiladoras are heavily polluting industries that emit air and water contaminants with little or no regulation.

Also, tellingly, the injury rate of employees is very high. The Matamoras City Councilmen relayed that, thanks to stipulations in NAFTA, the Mexican government is prohibited from imposing environmental or worker protections, and if it attempts to do so is subject to being sued in international courts.

What got to me were the children. Images stuck in my head: A baby, barely old enough to walk, standing in the mud in front of a shack; four children 5 to 8 years old playing marbles next to a 12-foot-high stack of cow bones with decaying meat still attached; a 10-year-old boy with no shoes scavenging in an impromptu dump; and the children peering from the dark interiors of shacks constructed of rubble.

Some of these children were the age of my grandchildren, and while I worry about their future in this country, there is little doubt about what lies ahead for the children of the border. Their future surrounds them, and it is one of despair, hopelessness and destitute horror.

So Midkiff pleads for environmental and worker protection to become part and parcel of NAFTA.

One commenter on the  Joplin Globe website, If I were president, suggested huge tariffs on American companies that moved their factories to Mexico–not on all Mexican goods, mind you, just on those from American owned companies. Hmmm.

But another commenter, Republican voice, defended, nay sympathized with, corporate behavior in third world hellholes.

Reality is that these people choose to live like this and if their life before NAFTA was so horrible that they would choose to live like this to make 5 dollars a day one can only imagine what it must have been like before. NAFTA has proven to be good for American companies and what is good for American companies is good for America. We in this country give sweatshops such a bad name, but when someone or someplace has nothing they are usually excited to have an oppertunity to work in a sweatshop. These factories have not only helped the people of Mexico, but they have also helped our companies stay profitable and stay in business. In modern times between the anti-American unions and the anti-American environmental wacko’s it is getting harder and harder for a business to stay in business and operate at a profit. It makes good sense for these companies to set up down there where they are not regulated, or collective barganed out of business. The majority of the money these factories brings in come back to the U.S. to help pay for the salaries of the ones running the business. You libs need to quit whinning and get out there and start a business and try to make a difference in the world.

Got anything you’d like to point out to Republican Voice?

An old Peggy Lee hit goes “Manana … manana … manana is good enough for me.” Remember that old song about procrastination? It’s the theme song for the Water Pollution Protection Program administrators at the Missouri Department of Natural Resources.

For 25 years now, they’ve been stonewalling environmental groups that want the federal Clean Water Act enforced. Supposedly all water bodies in our state were going to be clean by 1983. Count ’em up: that’s t-w-e-n-t-y–f-i-v-e years that we’ve been in noncompliance. Manana.

And it’s almost cute how the DNR gets around the law that says all our streams should be clean: some streams, like the Current River and the Big Piney, are “classified” and others, like the River Des Peres in St. Louis, are “unclassified”. The classified streams have to meet the standards of the Clean Water Act, but an unclassified stream can be toxic enough to dispatch a T Rex with a single sip. What’s in those streams is irrelevant because we choose not to pay attention to them, says the DNR. Nifty solution, huh?

After a mere 25 years, some of the state environmental experts on water quality have exhausted their patience. Three of them (Ken Midkiff of the Sierra Club and Kim Knowles and Dan Sherburne of the Coalition for the Environment) are on the Small Streams Working Group, an MDNR committee that pretends to care about water quality. Those three made some waves last September. At a meeting of the working group, Knowles pointed that all streams are required to support aquatic life and Midkiff took it further by pointing out that all streams are required to be clean enough for in and on the water recreation.

The working group hasn’t met since.

Don’t get the wrong idea, though. Don’t imagine these three are being stonewalled again. No, no. There are “good” reasons why the Small Streams Working Group hasn’t met again, such as …

Nah, on second thought, I’ll spare you all of the DNR’s convoluted, involuted excuses about why the working group can’t meet. Suffice it to say that the environmentalists are going to sue.

Certainly they will give the DNR fair warning  before they file suit. On Monday, Midkiff plans to mail a letter of intent giving the DNR sixty days to take action. And by “action”, he doesn’t mean getting the River Des Peres cleaned up before the end of June–nothing so unreasonable. He’ll merely warn them that they have sixty days to declare that river and all other “unclassified” streams as classified, so that they will have to start working to clean them up.

That sort of action doesn’t require sixty days. Five minutes oughta do it.

Ken Midkiff, of the Sierra Club, has an article at columbiatribune.com titled “DNR proving itself to be worst ever.” The Department of Natural Resources is in the pocket of big business and polluters. It’s a monkey dancing to whatever tune the governor and his campaign contributors call.

Here are four of the eight examples Midkiff cited:

• Construction and/or operating permits were granted to concentrated animal feeding operations adjacent to or near to state parks and historic sites – Roaring River, Arrow Rock and the Battle of Athens – in spite of the many concerns expressed by those who fear that the spring at Roaring River might be subjected to pollution and the very real fear that stink will make Arrow Rock and the Battle of Athens site undesirable places to visit. DNR now finds itself threatening the existence of state parks instead of obeying its mandate to protect them. …
• The Doe Run Resource Co., with lead mining and smelting operations in southeast Missouri, is infamous for being Missouri’s largest polluter and poisoning children in the town of Herculaneum. Last year, the company failed to file required reports. DNR proposes to forgive the entire matter if $5,000 is “donated” to a school district. … Ira Rennert – Doe Run’s multibillionaire owner – probably has $5,000 in pocket change.

• After being ordered by a court to comply with the 1972 Federal Clean Water Act, DNR recommended that all waters of the state be capable of supporting “whole-body contact” or, as the act phrases it, “recreation in and on the water.” After complying with the court order, DNR then immediately proceeded to get as many streams as possible removed from that designation. Fortunately, cooler heads at the Environmental Protection Agency ruled that more than 100 of the streams proposed to be removed should remain there. Undeterred, DNR is now engaged in funding what is called “use-attainability analysis” to remove even more streams from the designation of whole-body contact so that sewage treatment plants may continue discharging without doing anything differently. If DNR prevails, folks will be splashing around in bacteria-laden waters.
• After a working group appointed by DNR voted that DNR should comply with federal law and designate all waters of the state – not just classified ones – as supportive of aquatic life and recreation in and on the water, that working group has never met again.

Every one of Midkiff’s examples illustrates how the DNR bows and scrapes to big business. He concludes by showing the agency’s contempt for ordinary citizens:

From a woman in West Plains whose well was contaminated by a large dairy across the road as reported in the West Plains Daily Quill: “I tried for nearly a month to get the DNR to come to my house, with no response,” she said. She made many phone calls and at one time spoke to DNR Director Doyle Childers personally but felt she was ignored until she got Attorney General Jay Nixon on the line and explained her situation, she said. “Within an hour, DNR called,” and an investigator came the next day, she said.

If Nixon wins next November, Doyle Childers is so out of there. Good riddance to bad rubbish.

The nerve of some citizens. I mean, really. Thinking they can attend a public meeting (that we want kept private), assuming they can question us for barring them from such meetings, presuming they have … like… rights. And this Sierra Club jerk, Midkiff, did more than question us. He told us how it was going to be. But I guess we showed him.

What a poor sport, though. When Tony Messenger of the Springfield News-Leader asked Midkiff to write an Op-Ed piece about what’s been going on, he agreed to do it. Well screw him, and lotsa luck getting anybody to pay attention. We’re the pooh-bahs and that’s how it’s going to stay.

Here’s a pirated copy of what Midkiff plans to publish:

Public monies, public meetings

Ken Midkiff

At the last meeting of the Missouri Air Conservation Committee (MACC), under “Meeting Schedule” on the agenda was a notation that a tour was scheduled at Premium Standard Farms, Inc. on March 26.

The MACC is the body – created by statute – that oversees the Air Pollution Control Program (APCP) of the Missouri Department of Natural Resources.  APCP personnel serve as staff for the MACC.  MACC also establishes policies, positions, and adopts regulations about air quality.  Members are nominated by the Governor and approved by the state senate.   Members serve without compensation, but expenses (meals, lodging, travel) are paid for with public monies.

All of this makes the MACC a public body, subject to the Open Meetings and Records Act.  The act is a state law – Chapter 610 of the Revised Statutes of Missouri – and is known commonly as the Sunshine Act in that the intent is to shine the sun on actions of public bodies and elected officials.

But, in a rather blatant attempt to avoid complying with this law, a reporter from the Post-Dispatch was told that this was NOT a meeting that the public could attend, but was a tour of a private operation.   I sent an email to Jim Kavanaugh, Director of the APCP, informing him that I, reporters, attorneys, and other citizens intended to attend.  He forwarded my email to David Gilmore, Public Relations guy for the MACC.  Mr. Gilmore referred to my “request” and stated that I needed to submit this to Robert Brundage, attorney with the law firm of Newman, Conley, and Ruth and legal counsel for the Missouri Agriculture Industry organization.

Mr. Gilmore was then informed that my email in no way was a request, but rather was a simple notice of intent to attend a public meeting, so that arrangements could be made.  I further noted that it was not at all understood why it was necessary to seek approval from an attorney with a private law firm in order to attend a public meeting and asked for an explanation of this.

Mr. Kavanaugh then sent an email stating that Mr. Gilmore was not at work due to an illness, and that the “tour” might not take place due to scheduling conflicts.

That’s where it now stands.    

It should be noted that the MACC is currently considering regulations to impose odor controls on most factory hog operations.  It should also be noted that a representative of Premium Standard Farms is on record as adamantly opposing such controls.   The concern is that employees of the hog operations would have members of MACC all to themselves during this private “tour” and would lobby the members to adopt the positions of Premium Standard Farms.

Whatever.  This is apparently yet another attempt by a public entity, operating with public funds, to avoid complying with state law – and provides yet another example why we need a Sunshine Act.  

Ken Midkiff is pictured above.