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In Maryland, Focus on Poultry Industry Pollution
By IAN URBINA, The New York Times, November 29, 2008
WILLARDS, Md. — Standing before a two-story-tall pile of chicken manure, Lee Richardson pondered how times had changed.
“When I left school and started working the land, this stuff was seen as farmer’s gold,” said Mr. Richardson, 38, a fifth-generation chicken grower, explaining that the waste was an ideal fertilizer for the region’s sandy soil. “Now, it’s too much of a good thing.”
How to handle the 650 million pounds of chicken manure produced in the state each year has sparked a fierce debate between environmentalists and the state’s powerful poultry industry. State officials hope to bring Maryland in line with most other states next month by enacting new rules for where, how and how long chicken farmers can spread the manure on their fields or store it in outdoor piles.
“We don’t let hog or dairy farms spread their waste unregulated, and we wouldn’t let a town of 25,000 people dump human manure untreated on open lands,” said Gerald W. Winegrad, a public policy professor at the University of Maryland who is a former state senator. “So why should we allow a farm with 150,000 chickens do it?”
As the amount of cropland in Maryland has shrunk and the number of chickens raised has grown to 570 million, these mountains of manure have become a liability because the excess is washing into the Chesapeake Bay, one of the nation’s most polluted estuaries, and further worsening the plight of the fishermen who ply its waters.
But the chicken farmers say that they are already doing their part to protect the environment and that the proposed regulations come as the industry is reeling from record-high energy and feed prices.
“This will absolutely kill anyone coming into the poultry industry,” Kenny Bounds, a government affairs officer for Mid-Atlantic Farm Credit, said at one of three public hearings in the last month, where farmers objected to the regulations and said they might push some growers out of the state.
The poultry industry in Maryland, the state’s most lucrative form of agriculture and one of its largest employers, has expanded to feed the nation’s growing hunger for cheap chicken.
The lower prices, however, are possible only from huge economies of scale. And the bigger the farms, the more birds and the more manure there are to handle.
State officials have started to realize that there are consequences to being able to sell skinless, boneless chicken breast for just over $2 per pound when virtually no other protein source with so little fat is that cheap, Mr. Winegrad said.
Environmentalists and state officials have also become frustrated that after more than a decade of spending over $100 million a year in state money on restoration efforts, the Chesapeake, unlike most other mid-Atlantic waterways, has only grown more polluted.
As the phosphorous and nitrogen levels in the bay have grown, so have the algae that deplete oxygen needed by other aquatic life.
In the past two decades, working oystermen on the bay have dropped to less than 500, from 6,000. The crab population has fallen by 70 percent.
“A lot of chicken farmers are already doing the right thing when it comes to pollution,” said Larry Simns, president of the Maryland Watermen’s Association, adding that he thought the poultry regulations would be a step in the right direction. “But there needs to be more done to make sure that everyone does the right thing.”
Under the state’s proposed rules, 75 to 100 of the 800 largest poultry farmers in Maryland would have to apply for permits to handle manure. State officials would also begin inspecting these farms unannounced and levying heavy fines if violations are not eventually corrected. The rules would not affect smaller farms.
Michele Merkel, a lawyer with the Waterkeeper Alliance, an environmental advocacy group, said the permits did not go far enough. Too few farms would be required to have them, Ms. Merkel said, and they allow farmers to pile the waste in their fields open to the rain for 90 days, while most other states permit it to be uncovered for only 14 days.
Maryland is most famous for its blue crabs, oysters and watermen, so it has a lot to lose from polluting these waters, Ms. Merkel said.
“That’s exactly why it’s never made sense to me,” she said, “that the state is so unwilling to really regulate one of the bay’s biggest polluters.”
The economic might of the poultry industry is certainly part of the reason.
Concentrated in Somerset, Wicomico and Worcester Counties along the Eastern Shore, the industry contributes more than $700 million annually to the Maryland economy.
For every job added on a chicken farm, seven related jobs are created in slaughterhouses, construction and trucking, according to industry estimates.
Just inland from the shore, the scope of the farms overwhelms the senses. The 500-foot-long chicken houses stretch from the roadways like airplane hangars.
Inside each house, 20,000 to 35,000 chickens cramp the floors farther than the eye can see. Feed and water are delivered in automated pipes that stretch the length of the houses.
Corn and soy fields separate the houses from the roads, and three quarters of the state’s crop go toward feeding the birds.
Gigantic fans suction ammonia from the birds’ waste, filling the air for miles around.
Under the proposed regulations, chicken growers would be required to maintain a 35-foot-wide filter strip of vegetation along streams and ditches, or not to apply manure within 50 feet of streams or 10 feet of ditches, and they would be required to keep manure piles more than 100 feet from streams. The permits would also assess fines of up to $32,500 per day if farmers did not correct problems after being told to do so.
The liability for the manure would fall to the growers who raise the chickens, rather than the larger companies that own the birds, provide the feed and drop off a new batch of chicks every eight weeks.
Bill Satterfield, director of the local poultry trade association, Delmarva Poultry Industry Inc., said the farmers were an important engine for the state’s economic well-being.
“We’re also already doing our part when it comes to the environment,” Mr. Satterfield said.
Farmers already work to plant trees and environmental buffers around chicken houses and feed the birds an ingredient to cut down on the phosphorous in their manure. They also recycle some of their manure in the world’s largest chicken manure recycling plant, which produces organic fertilizer pellets that can be shipped elsewhere.
Storm runoff from urban areas, lawn fertilizers and pollution from cars and sewage treatment plants also play major roles in polluting the bay. But Environmental Protection Agency officials say that agriculture is the largest single source of pollutants and sediment in the Chesapeake Bay, accounting for over 40 percent of the nitrogen and phosphorous and over 70 percent of the sediment.
State officials say that animal manure produces more phosphorus and nearly the same amount of nitrogen pollution as all human wastewater from treatment plants in the state.
Although the dairy and hog industry in states near the bay produce more pounds of manure, poultry waste has more than twice the concentration of pollutants per pound. Reducing pollution from agriculture is also about a tenth as costly as it is to achieve the same reductions from urban development, state and federal environmental officials say.
“The reason to focus on poultry,” said Tom Simpson, executive director of Water Stewardship, an environmental nonprofit agency, “is that sewage treatment plants have already been required to reduce their pollution and storm water runoff from cities and large dairy and hog farms have permits that can be used to limit their water pollution.”
But in the past two decades, the poultry industry has carved a special role for itself in terms of the oversight it receives, and it has twice defeated state efforts to impose permits.
Maryland is one of the only states where the poultry industry is regulated by the State Department of Agriculture, whose primary mission is helping farmers, and not by the State Department of the Environment, which is charged with enforcing pollution laws.
Most other states with large poultry farms already require the permits and regular inspections.
In Maryland, however, chicken farmers have only had to file nutrient management plans with state agriculture officials, describing how they control their chicken waste each year.
These documents are not public. The guidelines for manure storage are optional, and the fine for not filing a plan is $350.
Standing in front of his pickup truck with a bumper sticker that said “It’s not farmland without farmers,” Mr. Richardson shook his head in frustration.
“As far as I can tell, the current system works fine except a few bad apples,” he said. “What they are proposing now is just more cost for us growers and more time doing paperwork.”
Preserving the City: Preservationists See Bulldozers Charging Through a Loophole
By ROBIN POGREBIN, The New York Times, November 29, 2008
Hours before the sun came up on a cool October morning in 2006, people living near the Dakota Stables on the Upper West Side were suddenly awakened by the sound of a jackhammer.
Soon word spread that a demolition crew was hacking away at the brick cornices of the stables, an 1894 Romanesque Revival building, on Amsterdam Avenue at 77th Street, that once housed horses and carriages but had long served as a parking garage.
In just four days the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission was to hold a public hearing on pleas dating back 20 years to designate the low-rise building, with its round-arched windows and serpentine ornamentation, as a historic landmark.
But once the building’s distinctive features had been erased, the battle was lost. The commission went ahead with its hearing, but ultimately decided not to designate the structure because it had been irreparably changed. Today a 16-story luxury condominium designed by Robert A. M. Stern is rising on the site: the Related Companies is asking from $765,000 for a studio to $7 million or more for a five-bedroom unit in the building.
The strategy has become wearyingly familiar to preservationists. A property owner — in this case Sylgar Properties, which was under contract to sell the site to Related — is notified by the landmarks commission that its building or the neighborhood is being considered for landmark status. The owner then rushes to obtain a demolition or stripping permit from the city’s Department of Buildings so that notable qualities can be removed, rendering the structure unworthy of protection.
“In the middle of the night I’m out there at 2 in the morning, and they’re taking the cornices off,” said Gale Brewer, a city councilwoman who represents that part of the Upper West Side. “We’re calling the Buildings Department, we’re calling Landmarks. You get so beaten down by all of this. The developers know they can get away with that.”
The number of pre-emptive demolitions across the city may be relatively small, but preservationists say the phenomenon is only one sign of problems with the city’s mechanism for protecting historic buildings.
“This administration is so excited about the new that it overlooks its obligation to protect the old,” said Anthony C. Wood, author of “Preserving New York: Winning the Right to Protect a City’s Landmarks.”
In an interview Robert B. Tierney, chairman of the Landmarks Preservation Commission, called end-run alterations and demolitions “a terrible situation and a complete misuse of the process.”
He added that the commission was trying to address the issue. Before putting a property on the calendar for landmark consideration, for example, Mr. Tierney or the commission’s staff members meet with owners to explain the potential benefits of landmark designation —a federal tax credit for repairs or improvements, for example — in the hope of enlisting cooperation or even support.
“Owner consent is not required, but I strongly try to obtain it whenever possible,” Mr. Tierney said. “It helps the process going forward. It’s not a continually contentious relationship.”
But some owners pay little heed. In one of the most memorable cases, a wrecking ball destroyed a corner tower of the former Paterson Silks store near Union Square on March 8, 2005. The double-height glass tower was the signature feature of the building, designed by the architect Morris Lapidus, known for his flamboyant Miami Beach hotels.
A few hours later the commission, seemingly oblivious, agreed to schedule a hearing on the building’s future.
Preservationists were outraged, particularly because they had been trying to bring the building to the commission’s attention for at least three years. Yet the owner, Donald J. Olenick, vice president of BLDG Management, then a co-owner of the building, said he did not understand the objections. “This is certainly not the Plaza Hotel,” he said the day the tower toppled. “I’m a little surprised anyone was concerned about it.”
For years, preservationists seeking to save midcentury Modernist architecture in New York have sought landmark status for 711 Third Avenue. That William Lescaze building, near 45th Street, features a wall mosaic in the lobby by the artist Hans Hofmann. Just last month the owner, SL Green Realty, began tearing out the lobby’s distinctive blue mosaic ceiling, as well as the door surrounds by the Abstract Expressionist sculptor José de Rivera. The Hofmann artwork will be preserved; the de Rivera may be relocated within the lobby.
A spokeswoman for the landmarks commission, Elisabeth de Bourbon, said the lobby had been under review as a potential interior landmark. Upon learning of the demolition, she said, the commission entered into “a standstill agreement,” under which the owner was prohibited from altering the Hoffmann mosaic during the reconstruction. A spokesman for the owner said that a formal agreement had not been signed.
As for the rest of the lobby, Ms. de Bourbon said that because of alterations in the 1980s and the current renovation, it was not landmark-worthy.
Under current rules, once a landmark hearing has been scheduled, building owners may not obtain demolition or alteration permits. But if such a permit is secured before a hearing is scheduled, as was the case with Dakota Stables and 711 Third Avenue, the work may proceed without penalty.
Safeguards crumble because the landmarks commission and the buildings department lack an established system of communication, and commissioners often are unaware that permits have been issued. There is also no set procedure by which the buildings department alerts the commission when someone seeks a permit to strip off architectural detail.
Some City Council members are determined to change that. Tony Avella, who represents northeastern Queens, has introduced a bill that would require the buildings department not only to withhold demolition permits but also to suspend existing ones and issue a stop-work order when the commission schedules a hearing to consider landmark status for a structure.
Another bill, proposed by Rosie Mendez, a city councilwoman representing the Lower East Side and the East Village, would require the commission to notify the buildings department as soon as a property comes under consideration, even if a hearing has not been scheduled. The department would then alert the commission if an owner applied for a work permit. Both bills are wending their way through the council.
A school in Ms. Mendez’s East Village neighborhood galvanized her to introduce the bill. In June 2006 the landmarks commission designated former Public School 64, a French Renaissance Revival building on East Ninth Street near Tompkins Square Park, as a landmark over the objections of its owner, Gregg Singer.
After that designation, Mr. Singer used an alteration permit that had been granted in 2003 and stripped the terra-cotta elements and copper cornices from the building’s exterior. This month a State Supreme Court judge in Manhattan upheld the school’s designation as a landmark despite the architectural changes. But the damage remains.
“Because of a loophole, if there is an existing permit you can move forward, irrespective of the designation of the building,” Ms. Mendez said. “It was alarming to me that it was happening.”
Mr. Tierney said he had talked with City Council members about the bills but was also working to address the problem by improving the commission’s database to include information about permits that have been requested or issued.
“We’re not just sitting back waiting for legislation,” he said. “We have ramped up the interaction and communication.”
Under current procedures, when an owner of a building that is under review by the commission applies for a demolition permit, the commission has 40 days to schedule a hearing on the structure.
But “it is difficult to put together a designation in that time frame,” Mr. Tierney said. And when it comes to an entire historic district, he said, the job “is difficult if not impossible.”
At times the commission can move swiftly. When a northern swath of the Crown Heights neighborhood in Brooklyn was placed on the calendar in June 2006 for consideration as a historic district, a developer quickly obtained a demolition permit for the George B. and Susan Elkins House, the only known free-standing mid-19th-century wood-frame house remaining in the area.
“We pulled the building out of sequence and did an individual designation in two to three weeks,” Mr. Tierney said.
Sometimes landmark designation is awarded after major alterations. In 2006, for example, the commission reinstated protection for two tan-brick apartment houses on the Upper East Side known as the City and Suburban Homes, even though the owners had reclad them in reddish-pink stucco, drastically changing their appearance.
“It was a Pyrrhic victory,” said Seri Worden, executive director of Friends of the Upper East Side Historic Districts. “Now we have a red stucco building, but it’s a landmark.”
In the case of Dakota Stables, some preservationists have accused the landmarks commission of deliberately dragging its heels. “The commission had no intention of designating Dakota Stables,” said Kate Wood, the executive director of Landmark West!, a preservation group. “They waited until it had been torn down. It was clearly too late for them to do anything meaningful.”
“It was all so carefully orchestrated,” she added. “It was politics. It was all just theater.”
But Mr. Tierney said he fought genuinely hard to have the case heard. “It was knock-down, drag-out time trying to do everything we could do to have a fair and open hearing on that building,” he said.
He also said he was “extremely unhappy with how the owners proceeded” on Dakota Stables and on Paterson Silks, yet added, “That’s two out of thousands — not to minimize them.”
Mr. Stern, the architect who designed the Harrison, the luxury condominiums replacing Dakota Stables, said the late-night demolition created “a controversial and awkward moment,” adding, “I don’t like to tear anything down if I don’t have to.”
Some commissioners say the landmarks commission and the buildings department should adopt a more reliable alert system to prevent pre-emptive demolitions. “When a property owner goes to the buildings department for a permit to strip, it should be a red flag,” said Roberta Brandes Gratz, who has served on the landmarks commission since 2002.
Christopher Moore, a commission member, also said the situation demanded redress. “There is a standard of honor I wish the developers would follow,” he said.
“The landmarks commission should have greater authority” over the granting of demolition permits, he added. “All of a sudden, the cornice is gone.”
A Land Rush in Wyoming Spurred by Wind Power
By FELICITY BARRINGER, The New York Times, November 28, 2008
WHEATLAND, Wyo. — The man who came to Elsie Bacon’s ranch house door in July asked the 71-year-old widow to grant access to a right of way across the dry hills and short grasses of her land here. Ms. Bacon remembered his insistence on a quick, secret deal.
The man, a representative of the Little Rose Wind Farm of Boulder, Colo., sought an easement for a transmission line to carry his company’s wind-generated electricity to market. His offer: a fraction of the value of similar deals in the area. As Ms. Bacon, 71, recalled it: “He said, ‘You sure I can’t write you out a check?’ He was really pushy.”
A quiet land rush is under way among the buttes of southeastern Wyoming, and it is changing the local rancher culture. The whipping winds cursed by descendants of the original homesteaders now have real value for out-of-state developers who dream of wind farms or of selling the rights to bigger companies.
But as developers descend upon the area, drawing comparisons to the oil patch “land men” in the movie “There Will Be Blood,” the ranchers of Albany, Converse and Platte Counties are rewriting the old script.
Ms. Bacon did not agree to the deal from the Little Rose representative, Ed Ahlstrand Jr. Instead, she joined her neighbors in forming the Bordeaux Wind Energy Association — among the new cooperative associations whose members, in a departure from the local culture of privacy and self-reliance, are pooling their wind-rich land.
This allows them to bargain collectively for a better price and ensures that as few as possible succumb to high-pressure tactics or accept low offers. Ranchers share information about the potential value of their wind.
The development of eight Wyoming wind associations (with three more waiting in the wings) and similar groups in Colorado, Montana and New Mexico has not always been a simple matter. While ranchers have always been ready to help their neighbors, they have been less willing to discuss their financial affairs.
That has made it easier for wind developers to make individual deals and insist that the terms be kept secret. The developers’ cause has not been hurt by a 10-year drought’s impact on agricultural families’ finances.
Gregor Goertz heads the Slater Wind Energy Association, one of the oldest although less than two years old, formed by dozens of independent-minded men and women. “Maybe they wouldn’t talk to each other often about other issues,” he said, “but here they could see a common goal.”
Mr. Goertz added that, of the 45 or more landowners who came to his first meeting, just one declined to join. The group’s land holdings, which total about 30,000 acres, are centered on a row of buttes where the wind routinely blows at 25 miles per hour.
Mr. Goertz said that because of the changes a forest of turbines would make in the serrated, far-flung vistas here, “everybody in the community is going to be affected.” The association, he said, would “assure that everybody will have some income whether they have a turbine placed on their property or not.”
The developers hope to supply Wyoming wind power to markets like California, which intends to have one-third of its power from renewable sources by 2020.
“This is the best wind in North America, we think,” said Ronald Lehr, a representative of the American Wind Energy Association, the developers’ trade group.
Of course, the decline in oil prices and the constraints on the capital markets are most likely to slow the development of wind energy. But for ranchers, the calculations remain the same about whether to deal with developers individually or as a group.
Bob Grant, 82, a rancher who sleeps in the bed his Scottish grandfather brought across the ocean and the prairie a century ago, has never liked the wind here. Mr. Grant has seen it hurl gravel off ridges and into a friend’s face like shrapnel.
He said he warmed to the idea of wind associations after long, individual negotiations with enXco, a French-owned developer.
In early 2007, the centerpiece of the price discussed was a per-acre payment of about $2.50, Mr. Grant and an enXco representative said. Discussions broke off, then resumed a year later; the suggested price per acre has nearly doubled.
The doubling of the offer made Mr. Grant and his sons wonder how they could assess, and trust, any offer, they said.
Greg Probst, a representative of enXco, said the first offer had not been an effort to drive a hard bargain. It was, Mr. Probst said, a realistic appraisal, given the difficulties of transporting wind power to market when there was little transmission capacity to spare.
From early 2007 to late 2008, he said, the potential marketability of wind power in southeastern Wyoming was enhanced as plans for construction of the Wyoming-Colorado Intertie, a privately financed transmission line, became firmer and Xcel Energy showed an interest in buying the renewable energy.
“There’s a better chance that there’s a market for the power, and a way to get the power to market, than there was 18 months or two years ago,” Mr. Probst said. “So we’re definitely willing to pay more at this point.”
But the experience made the Grant family look harder at the possibility of joining their lands with those of their neighbors in a new group, the Bordeaux Wind Energy Association, which sent its incorporation papers to the state just before Thanksgiving.
The godfather of such associations is a federal official, Grant Stumbough, whose work for the Resource Conservation and Development office of the Agriculture Department was focused on ways to keep ranchers on the land. Revenue from wind farms, he believed, could mean the difference between success and failure for some ranchers.
Mr. Stumbough felt the ranchers were at a disadvantage when dealing individually with wind developers. The developers, in most cases, know more than landowners about the value of the wind and the transmission lines that will carry it.
For instance, the deal that Mr. Ahlstrand offered Elsie Bacon was valued, yard for yard, at as little as a quarter of the amount that the largest local electrical cooperative had paid for a large transmission right of way. And it included a nondisclosure clause to prevent her from comparing notes with neighbors.
(Mr. Ahlstrand did not respond to repeated telephone calls and e-mail messages seeking his version of these events.)
Mr. Stumbough said: “I thought we could use collective bargaining strategies to maybe have a little more leverage in negotiating with wind developers. If we could all get together and work together cooperatively and do some cost sharing and maybe share some of the profits, I think it’s going to be a benefit to everybody.”
The idea has quickly spread. Aside from the promise of economic dividends, which may make it easier to stay on the land, ranchers are finding other less tangible benefits to the groups.
Larry Cundall, a rancher in Glendo who heads the Glendo Wind Energy Association, said the organizational meeting in April attracted 126 people, some from 60 miles away. It had, Mr. Cundall said, “the feeling of an old country dance.”
“Afterward,” he went on, “everyone stood around and visited like we did before we had TV.”
The initial reaction, Mr. Cundall said, had been “90 percent positive,” although he admitted there was skepticism. “Everyone takes everything with a grain of salt around here,” he said.
The associations send out requests to wind developers who may be interested in constructing a wind farm; Mr. Goertz’s Slater Association, the first one formed, gave tours of their lands to at least a dozen different developers, Mr. Goertz said, and are in the final stages of making a deal.
Asked if the terms of the impending deal were better than those offered to some of the ranchers originally, Mr. Goertz said simply, “Yes.”
The financial arrangements of each association are unique, but in the case of the Slater Wind Energy Association, 55 percent of the total annual royalties is to be distributed among the landowners who have turbines on their properties. The rest is to be distributed among all association members, both those with turbines and those without.
Jim Anderson, the state senator whose district covers the windy acres of this region, welcomes the rise of these associations as vehicles to market their wind and as bargainers with the leverage to get ranchers a good deal. “I think the word is kind of out,” Mr. Anderson said, “that Wyoming is probably ahead of the curve in regard to those people who might be opportunist and want to come in and take advantage” of local ranchers.
“I think that we’ve positioned ourselves well to be prudent and intelligent negotiators.”
By IAN URBINA, The New York Times, November 29, 2008
WILLARDS, Md. — Standing before a two-story-tall pile of chicken manure, Lee Richardson pondered how times had changed.
“When I left school and started working the land, this stuff was seen as farmer’s gold,” said Mr. Richardson, 38, a fifth-generation chicken grower, explaining that the waste was an ideal fertilizer for the region’s sandy soil. “Now, it’s too much of a good thing.”
How to handle the 650 million pounds of chicken manure produced in the state each year has sparked a fierce debate between environmentalists and the state’s powerful poultry industry. State officials hope to bring Maryland in line with most other states next month by enacting new rules for where, how and how long chicken farmers can spread the manure on their fields or store it in outdoor piles.
“We don’t let hog or dairy farms spread their waste unregulated, and we wouldn’t let a town of 25,000 people dump human manure untreated on open lands,” said Gerald W. Winegrad, a public policy professor at the University of Maryland who is a former state senator. “So why should we allow a farm with 150,000 chickens do it?”
As the amount of cropland in Maryland has shrunk and the number of chickens raised has grown to 570 million, these mountains of manure have become a liability because the excess is washing into the Chesapeake Bay, one of the nation’s most polluted estuaries, and further worsening the plight of the fishermen who ply its waters.
But the chicken farmers say that they are already doing their part to protect the environment and that the proposed regulations come as the industry is reeling from record-high energy and feed prices.
“This will absolutely kill anyone coming into the poultry industry,” Kenny Bounds, a government affairs officer for Mid-Atlantic Farm Credit, said at one of three public hearings in the last month, where farmers objected to the regulations and said they might push some growers out of the state.
The poultry industry in Maryland, the state’s most lucrative form of agriculture and one of its largest employers, has expanded to feed the nation’s growing hunger for cheap chicken.
The lower prices, however, are possible only from huge economies of scale. And the bigger the farms, the more birds and the more manure there are to handle.
State officials have started to realize that there are consequences to being able to sell skinless, boneless chicken breast for just over $2 per pound when virtually no other protein source with so little fat is that cheap, Mr. Winegrad said.
Environmentalists and state officials have also become frustrated that after more than a decade of spending over $100 million a year in state money on restoration efforts, the Chesapeake, unlike most other mid-Atlantic waterways, has only grown more polluted.
As the phosphorous and nitrogen levels in the bay have grown, so have the algae that deplete oxygen needed by other aquatic life.
In the past two decades, working oystermen on the bay have dropped to less than 500, from 6,000. The crab population has fallen by 70 percent.
“A lot of chicken farmers are already doing the right thing when it comes to pollution,” said Larry Simns, president of the Maryland Watermen’s Association, adding that he thought the poultry regulations would be a step in the right direction. “But there needs to be more done to make sure that everyone does the right thing.”
Under the state’s proposed rules, 75 to 100 of the 800 largest poultry farmers in Maryland would have to apply for permits to handle manure. State officials would also begin inspecting these farms unannounced and levying heavy fines if violations are not eventually corrected. The rules would not affect smaller farms.
Michele Merkel, a lawyer with the Waterkeeper Alliance, an environmental advocacy group, said the permits did not go far enough. Too few farms would be required to have them, Ms. Merkel said, and they allow farmers to pile the waste in their fields open to the rain for 90 days, while most other states permit it to be uncovered for only 14 days.
Maryland is most famous for its blue crabs, oysters and watermen, so it has a lot to lose from polluting these waters, Ms. Merkel said.
“That’s exactly why it’s never made sense to me,” she said, “that the state is so unwilling to really regulate one of the bay’s biggest polluters.”
The economic might of the poultry industry is certainly part of the reason.
Concentrated in Somerset, Wicomico and Worcester Counties along the Eastern Shore, the industry contributes more than $700 million annually to the Maryland economy.
For every job added on a chicken farm, seven related jobs are created in slaughterhouses, construction and trucking, according to industry estimates.
Just inland from the shore, the scope of the farms overwhelms the senses. The 500-foot-long chicken houses stretch from the roadways like airplane hangars.
Inside each house, 20,000 to 35,000 chickens cramp the floors farther than the eye can see. Feed and water are delivered in automated pipes that stretch the length of the houses.
Corn and soy fields separate the houses from the roads, and three quarters of the state’s crop go toward feeding the birds.
Gigantic fans suction ammonia from the birds’ waste, filling the air for miles around.
Under the proposed regulations, chicken growers would be required to maintain a 35-foot-wide filter strip of vegetation along streams and ditches, or not to apply manure within 50 feet of streams or 10 feet of ditches, and they would be required to keep manure piles more than 100 feet from streams. The permits would also assess fines of up to $32,500 per day if farmers did not correct problems after being told to do so.
The liability for the manure would fall to the growers who raise the chickens, rather than the larger companies that own the birds, provide the feed and drop off a new batch of chicks every eight weeks.
Bill Satterfield, director of the local poultry trade association, Delmarva Poultry Industry Inc., said the farmers were an important engine for the state’s economic well-being.
“We’re also already doing our part when it comes to the environment,” Mr. Satterfield said.
Farmers already work to plant trees and environmental buffers around chicken houses and feed the birds an ingredient to cut down on the phosphorous in their manure. They also recycle some of their manure in the world’s largest chicken manure recycling plant, which produces organic fertilizer pellets that can be shipped elsewhere.
Storm runoff from urban areas, lawn fertilizers and pollution from cars and sewage treatment plants also play major roles in polluting the bay. But Environmental Protection Agency officials say that agriculture is the largest single source of pollutants and sediment in the Chesapeake Bay, accounting for over 40 percent of the nitrogen and phosphorous and over 70 percent of the sediment.
State officials say that animal manure produces more phosphorus and nearly the same amount of nitrogen pollution as all human wastewater from treatment plants in the state.
Although the dairy and hog industry in states near the bay produce more pounds of manure, poultry waste has more than twice the concentration of pollutants per pound. Reducing pollution from agriculture is also about a tenth as costly as it is to achieve the same reductions from urban development, state and federal environmental officials say.
“The reason to focus on poultry,” said Tom Simpson, executive director of Water Stewardship, an environmental nonprofit agency, “is that sewage treatment plants have already been required to reduce their pollution and storm water runoff from cities and large dairy and hog farms have permits that can be used to limit their water pollution.”
But in the past two decades, the poultry industry has carved a special role for itself in terms of the oversight it receives, and it has twice defeated state efforts to impose permits.
Maryland is one of the only states where the poultry industry is regulated by the State Department of Agriculture, whose primary mission is helping farmers, and not by the State Department of the Environment, which is charged with enforcing pollution laws.
Most other states with large poultry farms already require the permits and regular inspections.
In Maryland, however, chicken farmers have only had to file nutrient management plans with state agriculture officials, describing how they control their chicken waste each year.
These documents are not public. The guidelines for manure storage are optional, and the fine for not filing a plan is $350.
Standing in front of his pickup truck with a bumper sticker that said “It’s not farmland without farmers,” Mr. Richardson shook his head in frustration.
“As far as I can tell, the current system works fine except a few bad apples,” he said. “What they are proposing now is just more cost for us growers and more time doing paperwork.”
Preserving the City: Preservationists See Bulldozers Charging Through a Loophole
By ROBIN POGREBIN, The New York Times, November 29, 2008
Hours before the sun came up on a cool October morning in 2006, people living near the Dakota Stables on the Upper West Side were suddenly awakened by the sound of a jackhammer.
Soon word spread that a demolition crew was hacking away at the brick cornices of the stables, an 1894 Romanesque Revival building, on Amsterdam Avenue at 77th Street, that once housed horses and carriages but had long served as a parking garage.
In just four days the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission was to hold a public hearing on pleas dating back 20 years to designate the low-rise building, with its round-arched windows and serpentine ornamentation, as a historic landmark.
But once the building’s distinctive features had been erased, the battle was lost. The commission went ahead with its hearing, but ultimately decided not to designate the structure because it had been irreparably changed. Today a 16-story luxury condominium designed by Robert A. M. Stern is rising on the site: the Related Companies is asking from $765,000 for a studio to $7 million or more for a five-bedroom unit in the building.
The strategy has become wearyingly familiar to preservationists. A property owner — in this case Sylgar Properties, which was under contract to sell the site to Related — is notified by the landmarks commission that its building or the neighborhood is being considered for landmark status. The owner then rushes to obtain a demolition or stripping permit from the city’s Department of Buildings so that notable qualities can be removed, rendering the structure unworthy of protection.
“In the middle of the night I’m out there at 2 in the morning, and they’re taking the cornices off,” said Gale Brewer, a city councilwoman who represents that part of the Upper West Side. “We’re calling the Buildings Department, we’re calling Landmarks. You get so beaten down by all of this. The developers know they can get away with that.”
The number of pre-emptive demolitions across the city may be relatively small, but preservationists say the phenomenon is only one sign of problems with the city’s mechanism for protecting historic buildings.
“This administration is so excited about the new that it overlooks its obligation to protect the old,” said Anthony C. Wood, author of “Preserving New York: Winning the Right to Protect a City’s Landmarks.”
In an interview Robert B. Tierney, chairman of the Landmarks Preservation Commission, called end-run alterations and demolitions “a terrible situation and a complete misuse of the process.”
He added that the commission was trying to address the issue. Before putting a property on the calendar for landmark consideration, for example, Mr. Tierney or the commission’s staff members meet with owners to explain the potential benefits of landmark designation —a federal tax credit for repairs or improvements, for example — in the hope of enlisting cooperation or even support.
“Owner consent is not required, but I strongly try to obtain it whenever possible,” Mr. Tierney said. “It helps the process going forward. It’s not a continually contentious relationship.”
But some owners pay little heed. In one of the most memorable cases, a wrecking ball destroyed a corner tower of the former Paterson Silks store near Union Square on March 8, 2005. The double-height glass tower was the signature feature of the building, designed by the architect Morris Lapidus, known for his flamboyant Miami Beach hotels.
A few hours later the commission, seemingly oblivious, agreed to schedule a hearing on the building’s future.
Preservationists were outraged, particularly because they had been trying to bring the building to the commission’s attention for at least three years. Yet the owner, Donald J. Olenick, vice president of BLDG Management, then a co-owner of the building, said he did not understand the objections. “This is certainly not the Plaza Hotel,” he said the day the tower toppled. “I’m a little surprised anyone was concerned about it.”
For years, preservationists seeking to save midcentury Modernist architecture in New York have sought landmark status for 711 Third Avenue. That William Lescaze building, near 45th Street, features a wall mosaic in the lobby by the artist Hans Hofmann. Just last month the owner, SL Green Realty, began tearing out the lobby’s distinctive blue mosaic ceiling, as well as the door surrounds by the Abstract Expressionist sculptor José de Rivera. The Hofmann artwork will be preserved; the de Rivera may be relocated within the lobby.
A spokeswoman for the landmarks commission, Elisabeth de Bourbon, said the lobby had been under review as a potential interior landmark. Upon learning of the demolition, she said, the commission entered into “a standstill agreement,” under which the owner was prohibited from altering the Hoffmann mosaic during the reconstruction. A spokesman for the owner said that a formal agreement had not been signed.
As for the rest of the lobby, Ms. de Bourbon said that because of alterations in the 1980s and the current renovation, it was not landmark-worthy.
Under current rules, once a landmark hearing has been scheduled, building owners may not obtain demolition or alteration permits. But if such a permit is secured before a hearing is scheduled, as was the case with Dakota Stables and 711 Third Avenue, the work may proceed without penalty.
Safeguards crumble because the landmarks commission and the buildings department lack an established system of communication, and commissioners often are unaware that permits have been issued. There is also no set procedure by which the buildings department alerts the commission when someone seeks a permit to strip off architectural detail.
Some City Council members are determined to change that. Tony Avella, who represents northeastern Queens, has introduced a bill that would require the buildings department not only to withhold demolition permits but also to suspend existing ones and issue a stop-work order when the commission schedules a hearing to consider landmark status for a structure.
Another bill, proposed by Rosie Mendez, a city councilwoman representing the Lower East Side and the East Village, would require the commission to notify the buildings department as soon as a property comes under consideration, even if a hearing has not been scheduled. The department would then alert the commission if an owner applied for a work permit. Both bills are wending their way through the council.
A school in Ms. Mendez’s East Village neighborhood galvanized her to introduce the bill. In June 2006 the landmarks commission designated former Public School 64, a French Renaissance Revival building on East Ninth Street near Tompkins Square Park, as a landmark over the objections of its owner, Gregg Singer.
After that designation, Mr. Singer used an alteration permit that had been granted in 2003 and stripped the terra-cotta elements and copper cornices from the building’s exterior. This month a State Supreme Court judge in Manhattan upheld the school’s designation as a landmark despite the architectural changes. But the damage remains.
“Because of a loophole, if there is an existing permit you can move forward, irrespective of the designation of the building,” Ms. Mendez said. “It was alarming to me that it was happening.”
Mr. Tierney said he had talked with City Council members about the bills but was also working to address the problem by improving the commission’s database to include information about permits that have been requested or issued.
“We’re not just sitting back waiting for legislation,” he said. “We have ramped up the interaction and communication.”
Under current procedures, when an owner of a building that is under review by the commission applies for a demolition permit, the commission has 40 days to schedule a hearing on the structure.
But “it is difficult to put together a designation in that time frame,” Mr. Tierney said. And when it comes to an entire historic district, he said, the job “is difficult if not impossible.”
At times the commission can move swiftly. When a northern swath of the Crown Heights neighborhood in Brooklyn was placed on the calendar in June 2006 for consideration as a historic district, a developer quickly obtained a demolition permit for the George B. and Susan Elkins House, the only known free-standing mid-19th-century wood-frame house remaining in the area.
“We pulled the building out of sequence and did an individual designation in two to three weeks,” Mr. Tierney said.
Sometimes landmark designation is awarded after major alterations. In 2006, for example, the commission reinstated protection for two tan-brick apartment houses on the Upper East Side known as the City and Suburban Homes, even though the owners had reclad them in reddish-pink stucco, drastically changing their appearance.
“It was a Pyrrhic victory,” said Seri Worden, executive director of Friends of the Upper East Side Historic Districts. “Now we have a red stucco building, but it’s a landmark.”
In the case of Dakota Stables, some preservationists have accused the landmarks commission of deliberately dragging its heels. “The commission had no intention of designating Dakota Stables,” said Kate Wood, the executive director of Landmark West!, a preservation group. “They waited until it had been torn down. It was clearly too late for them to do anything meaningful.”
“It was all so carefully orchestrated,” she added. “It was politics. It was all just theater.”
But Mr. Tierney said he fought genuinely hard to have the case heard. “It was knock-down, drag-out time trying to do everything we could do to have a fair and open hearing on that building,” he said.
He also said he was “extremely unhappy with how the owners proceeded” on Dakota Stables and on Paterson Silks, yet added, “That’s two out of thousands — not to minimize them.”
Mr. Stern, the architect who designed the Harrison, the luxury condominiums replacing Dakota Stables, said the late-night demolition created “a controversial and awkward moment,” adding, “I don’t like to tear anything down if I don’t have to.”
Some commissioners say the landmarks commission and the buildings department should adopt a more reliable alert system to prevent pre-emptive demolitions. “When a property owner goes to the buildings department for a permit to strip, it should be a red flag,” said Roberta Brandes Gratz, who has served on the landmarks commission since 2002.
Christopher Moore, a commission member, also said the situation demanded redress. “There is a standard of honor I wish the developers would follow,” he said.
“The landmarks commission should have greater authority” over the granting of demolition permits, he added. “All of a sudden, the cornice is gone.”
A Land Rush in Wyoming Spurred by Wind Power
By FELICITY BARRINGER, The New York Times, November 28, 2008
WHEATLAND, Wyo. — The man who came to Elsie Bacon’s ranch house door in July asked the 71-year-old widow to grant access to a right of way across the dry hills and short grasses of her land here. Ms. Bacon remembered his insistence on a quick, secret deal.
The man, a representative of the Little Rose Wind Farm of Boulder, Colo., sought an easement for a transmission line to carry his company’s wind-generated electricity to market. His offer: a fraction of the value of similar deals in the area. As Ms. Bacon, 71, recalled it: “He said, ‘You sure I can’t write you out a check?’ He was really pushy.”
A quiet land rush is under way among the buttes of southeastern Wyoming, and it is changing the local rancher culture. The whipping winds cursed by descendants of the original homesteaders now have real value for out-of-state developers who dream of wind farms or of selling the rights to bigger companies.
But as developers descend upon the area, drawing comparisons to the oil patch “land men” in the movie “There Will Be Blood,” the ranchers of Albany, Converse and Platte Counties are rewriting the old script.
Ms. Bacon did not agree to the deal from the Little Rose representative, Ed Ahlstrand Jr. Instead, she joined her neighbors in forming the Bordeaux Wind Energy Association — among the new cooperative associations whose members, in a departure from the local culture of privacy and self-reliance, are pooling their wind-rich land.
This allows them to bargain collectively for a better price and ensures that as few as possible succumb to high-pressure tactics or accept low offers. Ranchers share information about the potential value of their wind.
The development of eight Wyoming wind associations (with three more waiting in the wings) and similar groups in Colorado, Montana and New Mexico has not always been a simple matter. While ranchers have always been ready to help their neighbors, they have been less willing to discuss their financial affairs.
That has made it easier for wind developers to make individual deals and insist that the terms be kept secret. The developers’ cause has not been hurt by a 10-year drought’s impact on agricultural families’ finances.
Gregor Goertz heads the Slater Wind Energy Association, one of the oldest although less than two years old, formed by dozens of independent-minded men and women. “Maybe they wouldn’t talk to each other often about other issues,” he said, “but here they could see a common goal.”
Mr. Goertz added that, of the 45 or more landowners who came to his first meeting, just one declined to join. The group’s land holdings, which total about 30,000 acres, are centered on a row of buttes where the wind routinely blows at 25 miles per hour.
Mr. Goertz said that because of the changes a forest of turbines would make in the serrated, far-flung vistas here, “everybody in the community is going to be affected.” The association, he said, would “assure that everybody will have some income whether they have a turbine placed on their property or not.”
The developers hope to supply Wyoming wind power to markets like California, which intends to have one-third of its power from renewable sources by 2020.
“This is the best wind in North America, we think,” said Ronald Lehr, a representative of the American Wind Energy Association, the developers’ trade group.
Of course, the decline in oil prices and the constraints on the capital markets are most likely to slow the development of wind energy. But for ranchers, the calculations remain the same about whether to deal with developers individually or as a group.
Bob Grant, 82, a rancher who sleeps in the bed his Scottish grandfather brought across the ocean and the prairie a century ago, has never liked the wind here. Mr. Grant has seen it hurl gravel off ridges and into a friend’s face like shrapnel.
He said he warmed to the idea of wind associations after long, individual negotiations with enXco, a French-owned developer.
In early 2007, the centerpiece of the price discussed was a per-acre payment of about $2.50, Mr. Grant and an enXco representative said. Discussions broke off, then resumed a year later; the suggested price per acre has nearly doubled.
The doubling of the offer made Mr. Grant and his sons wonder how they could assess, and trust, any offer, they said.
Greg Probst, a representative of enXco, said the first offer had not been an effort to drive a hard bargain. It was, Mr. Probst said, a realistic appraisal, given the difficulties of transporting wind power to market when there was little transmission capacity to spare.
From early 2007 to late 2008, he said, the potential marketability of wind power in southeastern Wyoming was enhanced as plans for construction of the Wyoming-Colorado Intertie, a privately financed transmission line, became firmer and Xcel Energy showed an interest in buying the renewable energy.
“There’s a better chance that there’s a market for the power, and a way to get the power to market, than there was 18 months or two years ago,” Mr. Probst said. “So we’re definitely willing to pay more at this point.”
But the experience made the Grant family look harder at the possibility of joining their lands with those of their neighbors in a new group, the Bordeaux Wind Energy Association, which sent its incorporation papers to the state just before Thanksgiving.
The godfather of such associations is a federal official, Grant Stumbough, whose work for the Resource Conservation and Development office of the Agriculture Department was focused on ways to keep ranchers on the land. Revenue from wind farms, he believed, could mean the difference between success and failure for some ranchers.
Mr. Stumbough felt the ranchers were at a disadvantage when dealing individually with wind developers. The developers, in most cases, know more than landowners about the value of the wind and the transmission lines that will carry it.
For instance, the deal that Mr. Ahlstrand offered Elsie Bacon was valued, yard for yard, at as little as a quarter of the amount that the largest local electrical cooperative had paid for a large transmission right of way. And it included a nondisclosure clause to prevent her from comparing notes with neighbors.
(Mr. Ahlstrand did not respond to repeated telephone calls and e-mail messages seeking his version of these events.)
Mr. Stumbough said: “I thought we could use collective bargaining strategies to maybe have a little more leverage in negotiating with wind developers. If we could all get together and work together cooperatively and do some cost sharing and maybe share some of the profits, I think it’s going to be a benefit to everybody.”
The idea has quickly spread. Aside from the promise of economic dividends, which may make it easier to stay on the land, ranchers are finding other less tangible benefits to the groups.
Larry Cundall, a rancher in Glendo who heads the Glendo Wind Energy Association, said the organizational meeting in April attracted 126 people, some from 60 miles away. It had, Mr. Cundall said, “the feeling of an old country dance.”
“Afterward,” he went on, “everyone stood around and visited like we did before we had TV.”
The initial reaction, Mr. Cundall said, had been “90 percent positive,” although he admitted there was skepticism. “Everyone takes everything with a grain of salt around here,” he said.
The associations send out requests to wind developers who may be interested in constructing a wind farm; Mr. Goertz’s Slater Association, the first one formed, gave tours of their lands to at least a dozen different developers, Mr. Goertz said, and are in the final stages of making a deal.
Asked if the terms of the impending deal were better than those offered to some of the ranchers originally, Mr. Goertz said simply, “Yes.”
The financial arrangements of each association are unique, but in the case of the Slater Wind Energy Association, 55 percent of the total annual royalties is to be distributed among the landowners who have turbines on their properties. The rest is to be distributed among all association members, both those with turbines and those without.
Jim Anderson, the state senator whose district covers the windy acres of this region, welcomes the rise of these associations as vehicles to market their wind and as bargainers with the leverage to get ranchers a good deal. “I think the word is kind of out,” Mr. Anderson said, “that Wyoming is probably ahead of the curve in regard to those people who might be opportunist and want to come in and take advantage” of local ranchers.
“I think that we’ve positioned ourselves well to be prudent and intelligent negotiators.”
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