Members of Council,
I have concerns about AB2012-300A (the pending slaughterhouse ordinance).
I don't live in the unincorporated part of the County, so it must seem as though am not likely to be directly affected by this ordinance. Bear in mind that slaughterhouses present a meaningful risk to public health as well as a meaningful risk to local water supplies. These concerns strike me as practical.
Above all else, I am alarmed that the Council appears to be checking in with the Health Department as an afterthought. The Health Department apparently has some unaddressed concerns about this ordinance. A slaughterhouse is a public health matter, so I strongly suggest that Council get the benefit of the Health Department's wise counsel before proceeding any further.
My other concerns about the ordinance are about the haste and lack of attention to detail associated with this ordinance.
I am not going to wait until the Council is deliberating over an ordinance that unambiguously affects me directly before I urge the Council to use good clear language and to pay attention to detail. I'm speaking up now.
I can appreciate the desire to get this business transacted efficiently. I can also appreciate the desire to do right by the ag community. Assuming there is a right way to do this, I urge all due diligence and mindfulness in your deliberations in perfecting the language of a slaughterhouse ordinance.
Councilor Mann has the proper attitude: he wants to get this right. If you want to save time overall, take the time get it right the first time. Regrettably, the Council seems to be on the wrong path.
I have read the March 12, 2013 email from Mr Elenbaas to the County Council Planning and Development Committee regarding his recommendations about AB2012-300A. By any objective standard, Mr Elenbaas' recommendations were hastily written. And the Council Planning and Development Committee was hasty in acting on those recommendations.
The time stamp on Mr Elenbaas' e-mail was 12:21 p.m., and at 1:15 p.m. the meeting of the Planning and Development Committee was coming to order and was proceeding to act on this recommendation. Less than an hour after the Committee received the e-mail, the Committee was acting on it.
Even if Mr Elenbaas had delivered a polished recommendation to the Council, it would still have been prudent and appropriate to have County Staff perform due diligence on those recommendations before incorporating them into an ordinance. (To their credit... Councilors Crawford, Kremen, and Weimer were able to persuade the Committee to allow time for due diligence on Mr Elenbaas' recommendations.)
A lack of patience on the part of advocates for this ordinance must not be mistaken for a legitimate sense of urgency. The development in the ag-zone that will result from AB2012-300A will have impacts for years, even decades, after the ordinance is passed into law. For that reason alone, I urge Council to get this right the first time.
I find the following specific recommendations from Mr Elenbaas to be particularly alarming.
It strikes me as an acutely cynical decision to strike the term "slaughterhouse" and replace it with the term "packinghouse". The recommended definition of "packinghouse" makes it abundantly clear that a "packinghouse" will have an identical effect as a "slaughterhouse" in terms of intensity of use, water consumption, waste generation, odor emission, and impact on area property value. There may be a meaningful difference between a "slaughterhouse" and a "packinghouse" in the context of food production. Nonetheless, in terms of land-use, it is a distinction without a difference.
Mr Elenbaas argues that a packinghouse would actually reduce the risk of large agri-business interests exploiting the ordinance on the grounds that "the big companies would never offer the value added products" associated with packinghouses. This is not an argument so much as it is an assertion. And it is not an assertion so much as it is wishful thinking. Large companies offer value added products as a matter of routine. Jimmy Dean Sausage springs immediately to mind. As does Oscar Meyer. As does Hormel, the maker of Spam. Last I checked, none of these were "Mom 'n Pop" companies.
 |
| How is this the first Monty Python Spam pic I've posted on this blog? |
Mr Elenbaas's argument also entirely ignores the fact that large corporate interests have been known to flaunt the law and act irresponsibly from time to time.
Mr Elenbaas argues that a packinghouse is not an industrial use but is an agricultural use. He compares a packinghouse to a milking parlor or a berry processing facility.
A University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee study from 2012 finds that...
Cattle contain up to 50 pounds of blood per animal, and typically only 35 pounds of blood are recovered in the sticking and bleeding area. The remaining 15 pounds are lost... LINK
Mr Elenbaas recommends that an appropriate size for a small packinghouse would be a facility that could process 110 head of cattle per day.
That represents about 1,650 pounds of blood lost as waste per day. That's over three quarters of a ton of blood. Per day. That strikes me as an industrial level of waste generation. How many pounds of blood waste does a milking parlor or a berry processing plant produce per day? I'm no farmer, but I'm guessing... approximately... none.
Mr Elenbaas argues against a fixed limit to the size of packinghouse facilities in the ag-zone. He describes such a hard limit as arbitrary. He favors, instead, that the size of a facility should be primarily bound by "the character of the surrounding (area)" for the purpose of allowing the facilities to be scalable.
A fixed limit on the size of a meat packing facility in ag land may seem arbitrary but it appears to be the only way to prevent the development of a facility that could grow so large that it would be absurdly incompatible with the nature of ag-zoned land.
Mr Elenbaas also recommends against a hard limit on the number of packinghouses in the ag-zone, for reasons similar to his opposition to size limitations.
Mr Elenbaas further opposes restricting packinghouses to conditional or administrative uses. He seems to prefer allowing packinghouses as a permitted use.
If you give the greenlight to placing an unlimited number of packinghouses in the ag-zone as a permitted use, then the County will have about 88,000 acres of land zoned for packinghouses. The market will decide where the packinghouses will be located, and roughly how many will be built. In the long run, the precise number and location of these facilities will be found through market forces, by way of the Unseen Hand described in Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations. But in the short run, the market will determine how many slaughterhouses the county can support in a manner similar to how a market determines how many gas stations it can support. A bunch of gas stations open. Some stay open. Others don't. Eventually, you have the correct number of gas stations. You also have a bunch of abandoned gas stations that are relatively difficult to redevelop for other purposes and that also have adverse impacts on neighboring properties. The Unseen Hand is kind of a jerk-ass that way.
The advantage to keeping slaughterhouses (or packinghouses... or whatever you are going to call them) in land zoned for Rural Industrial Manufacturing (RIM)... is that it would remain easy to predict where such facilities might be built. The reason we have zoning laws is because the Unseen Hand of Jerk-Assery has proven over the centuries that it completely sucks at zoning. (Remember, The Wealth of Nations was published in 1776.)
It is my understanding that there is a dearth of RIM zoned land in the County that can accommodate a slaughter facility. It is not clear to me how opening up the entire ag-zone in the County to meat packing facilities is a better solution than finding places in the County for more RIM zoned land that can accommodate meat packing facilities. It, however, is clear to me that there are enough votes on the Council to go forward with an ordinance placing meat packing facilities in the ag-zone. I am not going to predict an apocalyptic future for Whatcom County if the Council decides to take this step. Sometimes you eat the bear, sometimes the bear passes an ill-advised zoning ordinance. Such is life.
I urge the Council to prevent its desire to get this done now from trumping its need to get this done right.
AB2012-300A is not an emergency ordinance. Please don't treating it as such.
It is difficult to overstate the impact of language on governance. These days, I am attending some of the Title 20 "Code Scrub" committee meetings held at the Northwest Annex. At these meetings, the committee members (including Councilors Crawford and Mann) habitually express surprise at how disorganized and poorly drafted the zoning code is proving to be. And they do so without a trace of irony.
Based on what I saw at the March 12th meeting of the Planning and Development Committee, and what I read in Mr Elenbaas' recommendations, I have gained an insight into how the zoning code came to be the 270,000-plus-word hot mess of statutory law that it is today. (Yes, I actually subjected Title 20 to a word count.)
Badly written ordinances don't just happen. They require a lot of work. It seems to me that they are not any quicker or easier to adopt into law than well written ordinances. It takes a lot of effort to get any ordinance passed. It takes even more effort to get a badly written ordinance fixed after the fact.
I shall end this correspondence with one final observation. No farming community is monolithic. Whether in Northeast South Dakota, or Napa Valley in California, or Northwest Washington... farmers have a diversity of opinions and it is impossible to get a sense of the community from the perspective of one member of that community. Mr Elenbaas may be an outspoken member of the ag-community, but he is not the official representative of the entire ag-community. He can only speak authoritatively for himself. I recommend talking to some other farmers before passing an ordinance like this.
I thank the Council
Shane Roth
Bellingham, WA
No comments:
Post a Comment