A privately held oil company with an interest in limiting public input on its requests to change New Mexico’s drilling rules faces opposition from local environmentalists who learned about the company’s latest proposal from notices published in their local papers.
Texas-based Hilcorp Energy Co. is petitioning the New Mexico Oil Conservation Commission (OCC) to allow it to double the number of wells it operates in San Juan and Rio Arriba counties. Local activist Mike Eisenfeld learned about the proposal when he read a public notice in the Farmington Daily Times in late August, according to NMPolitics.net. The notice also ran in the Rio Grande Sun on the Friday before Labor Day, and “opponents were left scrambling to organize and formally object to the move within a seven-day deadline,” San Juan County cattle farmer Don Schreiber told the Sante Fe New Mexican.
Notice Again at Issue in Battle Over Arkansas Hog Farm
In December 2012, residents of Newton County, Arkansas were shocked to learn that the state’s Department of Environmental Quality (ADEQ) had approved a permit to operate a hog farm on the banks of Big Creek, a tributary on the Buffalo National River. To learn about the permit application they would have had to visit ADEQ’s website, where notice about it had been published for 30 days that summer. The notice was not published in a local newspaper.
The agency received no comments about the application. It was approved a week after notice was posted on its website. The process was so secretive that even the Buffalo National River staff and the National Park Service didn’t know about it.
More Proof That Even in Big Cities, Many Still Don’t Have Access to the Internet
Sarah Bowman is one of the young environmental reporters at the Indianapolis Star who wrote the IDEM story discussed in the post below.
About a week before the IDEM article was published, Bowman wrote another story about a state agency proposal to establish a bobcat hunting season in Indiana. She was surprised when she began receiving phone calls from readers who wanted to know where and when the Natural Resources Commission (NRC) would be holding a public hearing on its proposal. After all, her story about the plan had been published that morning and it included a graphic featuring those details.
Michigan Approves Controversial Nestle Proposal Despite Public Opposition
Q: When does a vote of 80,945 to 75 result in a win for the 75?
A: When a state agency gets to cast the deciding ballot.
Although it wasn’t technically a vote, Michigan’s Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ) last month approved Nestle Water’s controversial request to pump more groundwater for its Ice Mountain bottling plant despite that lopsided margin. In fact, NPR reports that the 80,945 public comments MDEQ received opposing the proposal set a record.
Michigan Reporter Wins Public Notice Journalism Award
Garret Ellison, a reporter for MLive and The Grand Rapids Press, today was named winner of PNRC’s 2018 Public Notice Journalism Award. Ellison won for a series of stories about an application submitted to the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ) by Nestle Waters North America to pump more groundwater from a local well. He is the first reporter in the history of the PNRC contest to be awarded for a story revealing the inadequacy of government website notice.
Ellison will receive a $500 award and a trip to Washington, D.C., where he will be honored at a special March 15 dinner at the National Press Club.
PNRC Files Comments Opposing Indiana Agency Proposal
The Public Notice Resource Center filed comments early last month urging the Indiana Department of Environmental Management (IDEM) to reconsider its recent proposal to eliminate the newspaper notice requirement for certain permits issued under the Clean Air Act (CAA). IDEM’s proposal cited last year’s decision by the EPA to discontinue mandatory newspaper notice for such permits at the federal level. That new rule opened the door for EPA state affiliates like IDEM to follow suit.
PNRC argued that Indiana newspapers and their websites are far more effective at providing official notice than IDEM’s website. It also cautioned that highly publicized controversies at state environmental agencies in Michigan and Arkansas demonstrate that few citizens ever see notices posted on government websites.
Researchers Rush to Preserve Data on Government Websites
For over 200 years, public notices have been published in newspapers in part as a consequence of the inviolability of newsprint. Legislators have always understood that when they passed laws requiring notice of official actions to be published in newspapers, a record of the notice would be easy to authenticate and would remain in newspaper archives in perpetuity.
A recent conference of independent researchers provides an excellent reminder that government websites fail miserably at meeting that traditional public-notice standard.
Government Website Notice Inadequate, Admits Environmental Agency
The director of the same Michigan environmental agency under fire for dismissing concerns about the contamination of Flint’s water supply admitted her department failed to provide sufficient notice of another recent water proposal in the state, according to MLive Media Group.
Michigan Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ) director Heidi Grether (pictured on the left) told an air and waste management law conference last week that 42 days on MDEQ’s website “probably” wasn’t sufficient to properly notify the public about a request by Nestle Waters North America to increase the amount of groundwater it pumps in Osceola County. Grether was named director of MDEQ in August after her predecessor was forced to resign in the wake of the Flint crisis.
EPA Eliminates Mandatory Newspaper Notice for Clean Air Act Permits
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently announced it was eliminating the mandatory requirement to provide newspaper notice of permitting and implementation actions under the Clean Air Act (CAA). The rule, which will take effect 30 days after it is published in the Federal Register, requires notification on EPA’s new “National Public Notices Website” and allows other agencies that implement EPA-approved CAA programs to publish notices on their websites as well.
The rule doesn’t prevent permitting authorities from supplementing notice on their own websites with newspaper notice. In addition, it doesn’t override state laws requiring state and local environmental agencies to use newspapers to notify the public about EPA-approved permitting actions under the CAA. In those states, new laws would have to be passed to eliminate the newspaper-notice requirement.
Government Website Leaves Residents with Little Notice about Bee-Killing Zika Spray
Many residents in Dorchester County, South Carolina were upset by the lack of notice from government officials about a recent aerial insecticide spray that killed millions of honeybees, according to USA Today. The county sprayed naled, which is harmful to bees and other insects, in order to kill mosquitos that are known to carry Zika.
A local TV news station reported that many people said they had been notified by phone only 10 hours before the spray. County officials responded by noting that they had also posted a notice on the county website two days earlier.