Jefferson County Takes a Risk: 90 Day Permit Moratorium on CAFO’s
Madison Jefferson County Commissioners voted to impose a 90 day moratorium on the issuance of building permits for new CAFO construction in the county this Saturday, despite a warning from the county attorney that there was no basis for such a moratorium in Indiana law:
The resolution approved unanimously by the three county commissioners uses wording from the county zoning ordinance as the basis for why the county is taking the unusual step of imposing a moratorium. The resolution cites a zoning ordinance provision that “each proposed land use shall not create an adverse effect upon the surrounding land uses, health, safety, or general welfare of the county by overburdening the land, existing utilities or the road network.”
The resolution says that the location of confined animal feeding operations “may create the potential for adverse effect upon surrounding land uses, health, safety or general welfare of the county” by such overburdening.
Link (Madison Courier)
The article also notes that IDEM rejected noted as deficient an application from Wandering Waters, LLC (got to be the worst name for a CAFO to date) for a hog CAFO, demanding particular changes in the application before approval. There is to be a public meeting with IDEM on this CAFO in Jefferson County on December 13th.
[Correction: Jefferson County, Madison is the county seat. Thanks]
November 9th, 2006 13:13
A couple of corrections:
1. This action was in Jefferson County (Madison is the county seat).
2. IDEM has NOT rejected the application - they issued a “deficiency letter” which is only a comment letter and gives the applicant 60 days to respond. This is typical procedure for IDEM (at least in other branches of IDEM with which I have more familiarity), and merely indicates that IDEM has some questions which they wish to have addressed prior to issuing an approval - or with other words, they will not issue approval until the indicated items are satisfacotrily addressed.
3. Rumor has it that an IDEM representative did refer to the deficiency letter as “lengthy” (it is 5 pages).