(Spirit Lake)– It was standing-room-only at Tuesday’s Dickinson county board of supervisors meeting as discussion centered around a construction permit that’s been approved by the DNR for a four thousand-head hog operation in western Dickinson county.
Neighbors of the proposed operation expressed concern over odor and possible impacts on groundwater. One person who lives in the area says the operation will be very close to a county tile line. However, Ken Hessenius of the DNR’s regional environmental office in Spencer told the crowd there are no regulations dictating a minimum distance between feedlots and tile lines. He says it would take an act of the legislature to include that.
A public hearing on the permit application by Duane Drost was held back in January. But several neighbors say they didn’t find out about the operation until just recently. One resident suggested the county notify residents within a five mile radius of a proposed confinement once a construction permit is received. Assistant County Attorney Lonnie Saunders and David Kolhaase, the county’s Planning and Zoning Administrator, say that would be costly. Kolhaase says abstract companies would have to be hired to do that work, as there would be a possibility of somebody being missed if the county did it in-house. He says the county’s Planning and Zoning Commission currently does that for zoning changes…and Kolhaase says it isn’t cheap.
Several proponents of large confinement operations were also on hand Tuesday. One man says some towns smell worse than hog confinements, using the sewage treatment ponds in Lake Park as an example.
A public hearing on the Drost confinement construction permit was held January 17th. The DNR went on to approve the permit. The county then had 14 days to respond to that approval. It did so with a letter expressing concern over the proposal as well as the state’s so-called “Master Matrix System” which is used to help determine the location of such operations.
Other than requesting to be put on the Environmental Protection Commission’s meeting agenda, Hessenius said he doesn’t think there’s any way the public can appeal the DNR’s approval of the permit.
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