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[First Pag [44], (1) Lines: 0 t ——— 2.0pt P ——— Normal P PgEnds: T [44], (1) I, for one, want to have clean water as much as anyone else. [On] the other hand, I think we have to be realistic as to what we can and cannot do and what we can afford and what we can't afford to do. – State Senator Roger Wehrbein, Debate Transcript, Legislative Bill 1209, 30 March 1998 The Legislature Weighs In In its sixty-day session the 1998 Nebraska legislature considered and passed bills to reform the death penalty, increase penalties for drunk driving, provide property-tax relief, and create a sex-offender registry. In addition to the hours of public testimony, negotiation, and debate on these weighty issues and dozens of others, senators also spent an unprecedented amount of time in 1998 considering hog waste: its chemical makeup; its gallons of production per day per boar, sow, piglet, and market hog; its aromatic qualities and how they arise in an anaerobic context and in the spray from center-pivot irrigation; its value as fertilizer for corn, wheat, soybeans, and alfalfa; the chances of its polluting the state's water or indirectly enriching rural communities; and whether and how the state should regulate it. A dominant theme during the many hours of testimony and debate over these issues was a call for "sound science." Citizens and lobbyists rounded up experts to support their own points of view. The legislature was ooded with contradictory research and conicting views of the future. Livestock industry lobbyists, bankers, and chambers of commerce promised a lift for sagging rural economies. Others predicted environmental disaster and the death of family farms if big hog connements were to spread any further in Nebraska. 44 [45], (2) Lines: 55 to ——— 0.0pt PgV ——— Normal Pag PgEnds: TEX [45], (2) The 1997 study hearings had provided about a dozen senators on the Natural Resources and Agriculture Committees with stacks of documents reecting multiple points of view on the scientic, economic, social, environmental , and public health issues connected to concentrated swine production . But a report on the study was never written, so only the senators who had attended the 1997 hearings had convenient access to the information . Others were left to nd it on their own or with the help of staff and lobbyists. One obvious source of scientic research on the issues was the Nebraska Department of Environmental Quality. ndeq director Randolph Wood was a licensed professional engineer (the state registry of professional engineers shows his expertise was in aeronautics). A column that Wood wrote for the Omaha World-Herald in the fall of 1997 may have reassured many Nebraskans , no matter what their position on big hog farms. He wrote that the ndeq was doing a good job of protecting water from pollution and that livestock waste lagoons, if properly constructed,"effectively treat biological wastes without causing an adverse effect on the environment."1 He said a "rigorous regulatory program" had helped Nebraska avoid the problems experienced by other states. But in early January 1998 Wood offered a dramatically different assessment in the report the governor had ordered a month earlier. Acknowledging that his conclusions wouldn't be popular with livestock interests, Wood told Governor Nelson that scientic studies from Nebraska, Iowa, and Minnesota concluded that livestock waste lagoons leak.2 Wood said Nebraska's quarter-inch-per-day limit on lagoon seepage translated to "6,800 gallons of leakage per day for a one-acre structure or nearly 2.5 million gallons per year."3 He wrote that the risk of groundwater contamination increased with the size of a lagoon and when lagoons were built on sandy soils or above a high water table. Wood said the ndeq should require monitoring wells around hog waste lagoons if their location and size increased risk to the groundwater. Because the state already required monitoring wells around landlls and municipal waste lagoons, Wood said it was logical to require them for some livestock operations. He would later tell se

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