Who's Afraid of the Light ? Enviromental Issues and Faith !
How did the settlement between city of Waco and dairies become sealed ?
By J.B. Smith Tribune-Herald staff writer
Saturday, February 11, 2006
The city of Waco's unusual secret settlement with six upstream dairies raises the question of whether the city illegally bargained away the public's right to know.
City officials say they cannot discuss the settlement they reached last month with the dairies they sued under the Clean Water Act, because U.S. District Judge Walter Smith ordered the agreements sealed.
City Attorney Art Pertile acknowledged that state law considers city settlements to be public information, but he said state law doesn't necessarily bind the federal judge who made the decision.
“We didn't want it,” he said. “We didn't request to have it. ... We knew it was going to be a decision where the federal judge's order would supersede state law. I'm not sure whether the state law is going to apply to a federal judge.”
Pertile said he is seeking a state attorney general's opinion on the Public Information Act request the Tribune-Herald made last week for the settlement terms.
The six dairies in the sealed settlement are among 14 dairies the city sued in 2004, alleging that they had polluted the North Bosque River watershed with manure. The other eight dairies previously accepted settlements that were made public. The city reports that it has spent more than $3 million on the 14 lawsuits.
Pertile said he has never known the city to withhold settlement information, and the city did not consent to seal this one.
“No, but we knew the judge was going to seal it, because they (the dairies) wanted it sealed,” he said. He said the city's attorneys made their opposition to a confidential settlement clear, but didn't “kick and scream or march out of there.”
A defense attorney for the dairies, Jim Bradbury of Fort Worth, said the judge's order does not allow him to discuss who asked for the seal or whether the city agreed to it. U.S. Magistrate Jeffrey C. Manske, who mediated the settlement, said he was forbidden to talk about it.
But a spokeswoman for the Texas Association of Dairymen, which was not part of the suit but raised money for the defense, said it appears the city effectively agreed to a sealed deal.
“If the city said they knew the settlement would be sealed before they signed it, then in essence by signing it they agreed to the sealing,” spokeswoman Kirsten Voinis said.
The Texas Public Information Act, Section 552.022, states that “a settlement agreement to which a governmental body is a party” is considered public information, and that “a court in this state” may not order a governmental body to withhold public information.
Whether in federal or state court, the city would have no right to agree to a confidential settlement, said Texas Freedom of Information Foundation director Joel White, a Houston attorney.
“Its settlements are public,” he said. “It can't agree otherwise.”
White said federal judges technically are not bound by the state Public Information Act, but they are expected to follow state law. He said his group has persuaded federal judges to unseal documents on that basis.
Pertile said the state attorney general could rule that the information must be released and direct the city and the dairies to go back to the judge and ask to unseal the settlement.
“The issue comes down to whether a federal court can seal a document,” Pertile said. “We know what the law says. We deal with the law every day. Under the law, that question will be answered.”
The agreement was signed by City Manager Larry Groth, who said he relied on Pertile's legal advice.
Councilwoman Robin McDurham said she hasn't seen the settlements, and she doesn't believe the council was consulted about making them confidential.
“It appears what we need to do is to go back and say, ‘This is not legal,'” she said.
Councilman Randy Riggs said he was surprised when he heard the settlement was sealed, because the city is usually open about sharing information.
“People should have access to the operations of the city,” he said.
Councilman Jim Bush said he doesn't believe the city staff would have agreed to that sealing the settlement as a way to break a stalemate in negotiations.
“It's always important for the public to know what's going on,” he said.
jbsmith@wacotrib.com
757-5752
source: http://www.wacotrib.com/news/content/news/stories/2006/02/11/20060211wacdairysettlement.html
From the Waco tribune Herald Editorial: Peace on Bosque Sunday, January 22, 2006
It hasn't been pretty: the “battle of the Bosque.” Then again, neither were stretches of the North Bosque River.
They were being choked off by pollution – high levels of fecal matter and contagions like fecal coliform. They were heavy also in nutrients like phosphorus.
It is true that many sources have contributed to the nutrient-loading in the river – like fertilized row crops and water treatment plants. But only dairies could contribute the gunk that river users near Iredell and Hico were seeing 10 years ago.
This alarming development ultimately came into play in Waco, where the city's water source, Lake Waco, was having more than the standard “taste and odor event” that used to happen when the lake “turned over.” This chronic new problem was because of high nutrient levels causing algae to grow like mad.
The problem wasn't the lake. It was the river. And the chief contributing factor over that time was an influx of dairies upstream in Erath and Comanche counties.
This week the city of Waco settled six suits filed against several dairies in the watershed, an end to a long skirmish in this battle.
Dairies are on notice that water users will go to court if necessary to have suspect environmental practices vetted. And some of the practices were much worse than “suspect.” City fly-overs a few years ago saw collection ponds of dairy waste bleeding directly into tributaries. Excessive application of liquid from those had saturated some fields to an extent that they probably should have no more of that applied for a generation.
We've come to understand that even with the best practices, a certain percentage of the waste from large dairy operations ends up in the environment. An impaired watershed can withstand only so many cows.
There's also the problem that waste removed from one location could be trucked to another in the watershed, with no benefit in sum.
The legal battle waged by the city has been for the right cause. Now we hope that all factors – state monitoring, city diligence and responsible behavior by operators – will merge to make this less of a story.
We must have hand-in-glove cooperation between those who use the water and those who use the land upstream.
This editorial board has disagreed often with John Cowan, president of the Texas Association of Dairymen. But we can agree with and salute these comments from him:
“By working together – instead of facing each other across a courtroom – I believe we can make sure that all Central Texans have clean water to drink.”
source: http://www.wacotrib.com/
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Note how the Texas Observer was at the forefront of covering this story ? All issues are local and have local implications !
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Strange bedfellows - Evangelical Christians, FORTUNE 500 execs and environmentalists band together to curb global warming.
By Marc Gunther, FORTUNE senior writer
February 8, 2006: 2:46 PM EST
NEW YORK (FORTUNE) - An unlikely coalition of evangelical Christians, FORTUNE 500 executives and environmentalists is coming together to press the U.S. government to take action to curb global warming.
The latest example: Evangelical leaders Wednesday announced a "call to action" asking government and business leaders to agree to "cost-effective, market-based" regulations to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, which are mostly caused by burning fossil fuels.
The new initiative, two years in the making, includes modest buys of print, radio and TV ads, with an initial budget of about $200,000. The TV commercial, which will run on Fox News, CNN and local stations, shows images of hybrid cars and windmills and says: "We can stop global warming for our kids, our world and for our Lord." Radio ads will run on stations owned by Salem Communications (Research), a Christian firm.
Among the 86 leaders who signed on to what is being called the Evangelical Climate Initiative include Rick Warren, author of the best-selling book, "The Purpose Driven Life"; the leaders of the Salvation Army and World Vision, two big Christian charities; and about 40 college and seminar presidents including Duane Litfin, the president of Wheaton College, which has been dubbed the evangelical Harvard.
"We will see tens of millions of evangelicals engaged in the work we are talking about today," said the Rev. Dr. Leith Anderson, former president of the National Association of Evangelicals and senior pastor of a Minnesota megachurch.
In its statement on climate change (available at www.christiansandclimate.org) the evangelical group went out of its way to praise big companies such as BP (Research), Shell, General Electric (Research), Cinergy (Research), Duke Energy (Research) and DuPont (Research) which, it said, "have moved ahead of the pace of government action" and "offered timely leadership." In response, Chad Holliday, the president and CEO of DuPont, congratulated the evangelical leaders "for adding their voice to calls for concerted global action on climate change."
The Rev. Jim Ball, who is executive director of the Evangelical Environmental Network, said a conference of business people and evangelicals will be held this fall at the Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences at Duke University. "We're going to be all about building relationships," he said.
There will be plenty to talk about. Business and environmental leaders, for example, have voiced concern about the growing cost of natural disasters.
Swiss Re, the world's second largest global reinsurer, is among the sponsors of a big coalition of institutional investors, called the Carbon Disclosure Project, that seeks to identify the business risks of global warming to investors. This month, the coalition (www.cdproject.net) of more than 200 institutions with assets of $28.9 trillion under management wrote to 1,800 of the largest quoted companies in the world by market capitalization, asking for the disclosure of investment-relevant information concerning their greenhouse gas emissions.
Meanwhile, W. Todd Bassett, the commander of the Salvation Army, said hurricanes in the Southeast, tornadoes in the Midwest and fires in the West have put enormous pressure on his organization, which is America's biggest charity. "Few doubt that there has been a significant increase in natural disasters, not just in the U.S. but around the world," Bassett said.
Much of this is designed to turn up the heat -- no pun intended -- on President Bush, who is both an evangelical Christian and an ally of business. So far, the Bush administration has resisted calls for government regulation of greenhouse gas emissions.
Of course, neither big business nor evangelical Christians are united on the issue. ExxonMobil (Research), the world's biggest oil company, has opposed government rules to control carbon emissions. So have some, but not all, coal-burning utility companies.
About 20 prominent, politically-active evangelical Christian leaders -- including Charles Colson, Dr. James Dobson of Focus on the Family and Dr. Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention -- recently urged the National Association of Evangelicals to stay out of the global warming debate. They wrote: "There should be room for Bible-believing evangelicals to disagree about the cause, severity and solutions to the global warming issue."
But with publications ranging from The Economist to Christianity Today urging action to curb global warming, there's little doubt about which way the winds are blowing, in both the business and evangelical worlds.
source: http://money.cnn.com/2006/02/08/news/pluggedin_fortune/?cnn=yes
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Note from Steve, The above stories make the Brownwood Talk Radio Participants/Hosts very nervous. I guess they must be the Dobson , Land types ! Reasons for the nervousness ? Guess that's what happens when they've invested so much of their time making fun of, castigating, and demonizing those folks who have worked to protect the enviroment. "By working together" seems to be a threatening phrase for those on the Hard-Right side of the aisle !
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