Members of Opponents of Cooper County CAFOs spread throughout dining room, kitchen, living room and on the stairs of leader Fred Williams' home Tuesday to discuss how to promote protecting the air, land and water of the rolling hills that surrounded the home, within a mile of the proposed site of a CAFO the group is fighting against.
The OCCC is a group of rural residents who live near the proposed site of Tipton East, an export-only class 1C CAFO, which would be operated by the third-largest U.S. pork producer, Pipestone System. OCCC members object to the proposed CAFO due to water quality and public health concerns with the facility.
About 35 members of OCCC met at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday for the last time before the Department of Natural Resources meeting April 18 the organization worked to help create. They and others submitted more than 100 public comments to DNR requesting the public meeting regarding the proposed concentrated animal feeding operation, Tipton East.
The meeting will close DNR's public comment period, which is held before the department must decide to accept or deny the Tipton East CAFO permit application.
At the April 18 meeting, members of the public will be given three minutes to offer comment to DNR representatives. Williams said it is important for as many people to attend and offer comment as possible.
"Get there early," Williams said. "Think about what you may want to say. I know talking in front of people is not the greatest thing in the world to do, but at some point we need to stand up and say what's in our hearts."
Tipton East would include a gestation building housing 4,704 sows, a farrowing building housing 1,080 sows, and a gilt-development unit for 1,620 females weighing more than 55 pounds, and 324 nursery pigs, according to the application. It would be located in Cooper County, about a mile north of the Moniteau County line, near Clarksburg.
Pipestone System is a quasi-cooperative of 70 sow farms owned by 450 individual independent farmers with the majority of its operations in Iowa and Minnesota, where there is a high volume of corn and other swine operations.
Tipton East's hog manure would be stored in concrete tanks beneath the facilities until injected as fertilizer in adjacent row crop fields. Williams said there is a buried well and other OCCC members mentioned multiple small springs located near or within the proposed site. If manure were to leak into these water sources, the OCCC fears it will poison the water table from which many residential wells draw drinking water.
Williams said he will discuss the well and springs during his public comment. He fears manure runoff from the fields could reach Smiley Creek and impact area ponds, such as the one his cattle drink from, and downstream waterways like Moniteau Creek where the endangered Topeka Shiner minnow resides.
OCCC member Susan Williams said it will be important for people to work together and arrange public comments so all of the group's issues are covered, including health and scavenger concerns with composted hog carcuses, the potential for manure leaks in ditches and waterways if a malfunction in the fertilizer injection process occurs, and the increased risks of cholera (swine fever) around major hog operations.
The OCCC previously lobbied to establish a Cooper County health ordinance, a proposal the commission rejected Feb. 16 at a Cooper County Public Health Center board meeting. Commissioner David Booker said the state and federal regulations on agriculture are sufficient, and a county health ordinance would hinder the county's agri-ready status.
The OCCC filed a four-count lawsuit in Cooper County Circuit Court on April 2 against Cooper County and the three Cooper County Commissioners for violating of the Missouri Open Records Law (Sunshine Law). Each count seeks a $5,000 civil penalty to be paid to the County School Fund and payment of OCCC's legal expenses. The lawsuit alleges the commission intentionally violated the Sunshine Law by not providing public notice of the Feb. 9 tour of the proposed site and refusing to provide access to requested documentation.
According to the lawsuit, the commission failed to give advanced notice of a Feb. 9 meeting with Pipestone System employees, MU Extension experts and other agricultural industry representatives in which the group toured the proposed Tipton East site. The commission's calendar lists the commissioners were attending a three-day training session Feb. 7-9 in Columbia and makes no mention of the Feb. 9 tour of the proposed Tipton East site.
"It's common sense that it's kind of hard to be in two places at the same time," said OCCC attorney Stephen Jeffery, of Jeffery Law Group, LLC. "It's clear that if all three commissioners are conducting county business it should constitute a public meeting and should have been properly posted under the Sunshine Law requirements.
"Essentially, everything is on hold for a period of 30 days until (the commission) files a response, and without knowing what that response is, we can't really say what our next action is going to be," said Jeffery, who is representing clients in six CAFO-related cases throughout Missouri.
Fred Williams made a Sunshine request to the commission and health department seeking a copy of the notice of the Feb. 9 site visit, as well as emails in commissioners' official and personal accounts discussing county business with Pipestone representatives, the University of Missouri, Tyson or Cargill and documents regarding the decision to not impose a health ordinance. Jeffery had previously filed a similar, more extensive request.
Cooper County Clerk Keat Catlett responded, saying he was not required to deliver personal emails. However, according to Jeffrey, personal emails regarding public business should be copied to and saved by the custodian of records. Williams was asked to provide $75 to begin searching for the records, and Jeffery had to provide a $350 deposit before the county would research his records request.
Catlett said the deposits were based on the amount of time staff members would invest in filling the Sunshine requests. He said Jeffrey's request would take much more time to fill than Fred Williams'. If the request took less time to fill than expected, they would receive a partial refund. Catlett said he began asking for deposits before researching requests, because the department has had problems with people not paying the fees after being provided requested information.