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Thursday, April 19, 2007
Environment - CAFO hearing; Pines transfer station
CAFO Hearing. "Dairy farm faces hearing on creek spill" is the title of a story today by Rebecca S. Green in the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette. Some quotes:
After hearing arguments on a temporary restraining order against an Andrews-area dairy accused of fouling a waterway with manure, a Huntington County judge ordered written arguments for Wednesday and set another hearing early next month.Pines Transfer Station. Vicki Urbanik of the Chesterson Tribune reports:Sitting in for Superior Court Judge Jeff Heffelfinger, Huntington Circuit Court Judge Thomas Hakes heard more than two hours of arguments Tuesday by Denise Walker with the Indiana attorney general’s office and attorneys representing Johannes DeGroot, owner of the 1,400-cow DeGroot Dairy at 8379 County Road 200 South.
The hastily called hearing, prompted by a late-morning motion filed Tuesday by Walker, focused on whether the manure found last week in a tributary of Salamonie Reservoir could be linked to the cattle at the dairy that have been the source of contamination in the past.
The Porter County Commissioners have said it before, and on Tuesday, they said it again: They will not grant a waste transfer station proposed on the Porter-LaPorte County Line Road the required driveway permit.Here is a list of earlier ILB entries on the Pines transfer station issue.The commissioners unanimously upheld their original May, 2005 decision by rejecting a recently submitted driveway permit application submitted on behalf of the Great Lakes Transfer Station and Sean Bleiden and property owner Darren Kaletha.
The Indiana Department of Environmental Management has granted the transfer station the required permit, but the station still needs a Porter County-issued driveway permit.
The commissioners approved a letter, to be sent today to the attorneys representing the waste transfer station, by County Engineer Dave Schelling, who returned the $40 application fee because the driveway permit was denied.
“There really isn’t a significant difference between this permit application and the previous applications for this location,” Schelling wrote.
Schelling told the commissioners Tuesday that the most recent permit application is faulty, since it lacks a detailed drawing and even leaves out the adjacent railroad tracks. Further, he noted that he spoke at the September, 2005 IDEM public hearing on the waste station permit, but that none of his concerns raised then have been addressed.
The county commissioners have primarily been concerned with the condition of County Line Road. Although the waste station is to be on the LaPorte County side of the road, Porter County is responsible for the road maintenance. County officials have said the road is in poor shape as it is and cannot handle heavy truck traffic to and from a waste station. They have also raised safety concerns about heavy truck traffic.
“The road is posted 10 tons due to the very poor load carrying capacity of the soil under the road,” Schelling’s letter reads. “The road can carry an occasional over weight load, but will be destroyed with repeated heavy loads.”
Schelling’s letter also noted that any vehicles more than 10 tons using County Line Road would have to obtain an overweight permit from the county highway department. But, he wrote, no such permit was requested or obtained for the concrete or the crane that was used to build a cell tower at the waste transfer station site.
“The track record is not good at this location,” the letter says.
Posted by Marcia Oddi on April 19, 2007 10:51 AM
Posted to Environment