Your Government and the Valley Proteins Wastewater Grant: Stealing From the Rich and Giving to … Corporations?

By Christian Baran

Valley Proteins, a chicken rendering plant in Dorchester County, is flooding the Chesapeake Bay with the byproducts of its operations, which feature harmful nutrients like ammonia, nitrates and nitrogen. The company’s water pollution permit expired years ago, but it continues to operate and discharge waste. 

Even under the expired permit’s guidelines, Valley Proteins operates in negligence. According to the EPA’s enforcement and compliance database, the company habitually fails to report wastewater discharge information. When the information does get reported, it often indicates gross disregard of the legal limits. 

The state, the company and various environmental organizations all recognize that this stripe of behavior can’t last.  The good news: change is finally here, in a planned wholesale upgrade of Valley Proteins’ water treatment facilities. The bad news: we’re (read: the taxpayers are) paying for it. 

For most of this year, Valley Proteins was slated to receive over $13 million dollars to bolster its wastewater treatment capacities. The funds come from the Bay Restoration Fund, a state-owned pot of money dedicated to upgrading Maryland’s wastewater treatment plants. Individual and industrial users of wastewater treatment plants contribute to the fund via a yearly tax, which amounts to over $100 million annually. Although publicly owned treatment plants have priority access to the money, Maryland legislators are technically permitted to consider private facilities on a case-by-case basis. Valley Proteins would be the first such case in the fund’s 17-year history.

Waste water exhaust pipe

The proposal to supply Valley Proteins with public assistance to manage its pollution was met with outrage by some lawmakers. For some, the move just didn’t sit right. One Democratic state senator said it didn’t “pass the smell test.” Others objected that private companies shouldn’t be permitted to receive money from the Bay Restoration Fund, although the action is, at the time of writing, admissible under the bill. The Maryland State Senate recently approved a budget plan that reduces the amount of the grant. It’s still too much.  

Lawmakers are right to be concerned. The decision to provide Valley Proteins with taxpayer money lands squarely in the nationwide debate over how we should proceed with a green economy, with implications beyond the fate of this particular company. It’s a local case study in the role of government in the green market, one that diverges from traditional discussion of renewable energy. 

Although limits on nutrient pollution are distinct from energy standards, both fall under the umbrella of pollution emission restrictions. The role of government in each is complicated, but arguably much simpler in the former. 

In both cases, the government is free, indeed, encouraged to, set limits on bad behavior like dumping nitrates into Chesapeake tributaries or burning coal. These pollution ceilings already exist for Valley Proteins. This grant is essentially a government subsidy to help the company meet their limits. In this sense, it’s very similar to federal subsidies for renewable energy. 

Those energy subsidies are meant to encourage environmentally beneficial behaviors that have significant impediments. The solar industry, for example, must overcome vast regulatory frameworks that skew towards existing energy producers like the coal and oil industries. The barriers for entry are enormous. 

Solar panels in field

This Valley Proteins grant will also, at its core, support an environmentally conscious action: mitigating nutrient pollution. However, in this case, the barriers are much smaller. In fact, the only true obstacle is cost. The renewable sector can’t control many of the prohibitive institutions that make it difficult for them to gain a foothold in the economy — cost is only one of many hurdles for them. Valley Proteins can and should control its own waste disposal and the attendant financial burden. If it can’t, it’s simply not a competitive company. 

For these reasons, it’s particularly odd to me that Democrats lawmakers seem to be more vocal in their criticism of the Valley Proteins grant than Republicans. The move does not align with the free market approach inherent in conservative beliefs. The conservative value of smaller government should, theoretically, mean opposition to what amounts to unnecessary intervention by the state. 

Regardless of political affiliation, lawmakers should oppose Maryland supplying Valley Proteins with taxpayer money to revamp its wastewater system. In this case, all the government needs to do is set pollution limits. Let private companies meet them themselves. The state should continue to support pollution reduction, but not by throwing handouts at companies violating regulations. 

A number of environmental organizations are currently planning to sue Valley Proteins for their transgressions. The point could potentially be moot if the company receives aid to upgrade its facilities. This would be a massive failure of our legal and political institutions. If the industry is in the wrong, we must hold it accountable. If you agree, write to your state senator urging them to prevent this grant.     

Why I'm Marching To Ban Fracking In Maryland

Guest post from Elisabeth Hoffman of HoCo Climate Change
When I march Thursday for a fracking ban, I’ll be calling on Maryland to heed the warning of the canary that is Pennsylvania. And West Virginia, Colorado, Oklahoma and the others.
No state has gotten fracking right, because fracking can’t be made safe or even safe enough.
Everywhere this industry goes, residents rise up to defend their homes and farms, their children and pets, and their forests and towns from the noise and lighting, the truck traffic and ruined roads, the polluted air and water, and even earthquakes. No regulations are sufficient to corral the fracking industry.
Other states let industry experiment on their communities. From studies in fracked areas, we know that fracking is linked to increases in asthma attacks; preterm births and high-risk pregnancies; anxiety, fatigue, migraines and sinus ailments; and hospitalizations for heart and neurological problems. New research finds a link between fracking and a form of childhood leukemia. Thanks to documents from a freedom of information request, we are also learning that Pennsylvania officials suppressed thousands of residents’ complaints about water contamination and other problems. We know too that much damage remains hidden in legal settlements: Industry pays up only after residents take a vow of silence about what happened.  
Along with the fracking come the pipelines and compressor stations and export factories that bring yet more destruction to towns, fields and forests; spikes of toxic pollution, and threats from explosions. Communities must fight not only industry but the rubber-stamping Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which has cozy ties to industry and refuses to take into account the cumulative damage from these fracked-gas projects. In Pennsylvania, for example, residents are rebelling against the 350-mile Mariner East pipeline that will take fracked gas from the Marcellus Shale to export for Scotland to make plastics, of all things; the 124-mile Constitution pipeline that slashed through a sugar maple forest, before it was denied key approvals; and the nearly 200-mile-long Atlantic Sunrise pipeline, slated to cut through preserved farmland and communities in Lancaster and four other counties. Lancaster-area opponents have built The Stand, a wooden watchtower in the path of construction that will be the base for peaceful resistance should Williams Corp. show up.
My county, Howard, is one of only four in Maryland with no shale gas underground. Yet even here, fracking is elbowing its way in. Williams plans to expand and modernize a half-century-old compressor station to connect with that contentious Atlantic Sunrise project. And so we are joined quite literally to our friends fighting this pipeline. Maryland, too, must make a stand. We can’t let the fracking industry invade our state.
Of course, along with the fracking and the infrastructure comes the climate-disrupting methane, which is on the rise in fracked Pennsylvania. Fracked gas is no bridge fuel for our climate emergency.
Fracking and building pipelines is like installing more phone landlines – but with the added dangers. We need to be done with these antiquated fossil fuels, not doubling down on them.
What’s clear is that cheap fracked gas (and oil) is an oxymoron from industry’s playbook of alternate facts. Industry won’t pay for the lifetime of medical bills. Or clean up the air, soil and water. Or compensate for carved-up forests or climate chaos. Or monitor the toxic water it leaves underground.  Or cover the losses to the tourism industry and property values. These costs and much more remain off the industry’s books, instead showing up in our community and household balance sheets.
Even the prospect of fracking is discouraging investment in Western Maryland’s tourism businesses. Industry is fighting this ban too hard – with ads and in the state legislature – for us to be persuaded (as some have claimed) that it has little interest in Maryland. Perhaps industry just doesn’t want to be told what to do.
Yet that’s exactly what we must do. Maryland is where we say no to the whole fracking package. Instead, we’ll invest in renewables and efficiency. As a friend in fracked Pennsylvania says: “Good neighbors don’t ask you to put yourself in harm’s way so they can turn a profit. Good neighbors don’t engage in practices that may have long-term consequences for the health and welfare of the community. Good neighbors are neighborly. They don’t knowingly pollute the air, soil and water. They don’t ruin roads and disturb tranquility. Good neighbors are invested in the community, less interested in extracting wealth than building lasting bonds. Good neighbors leave a place better for having been there.”
Join me this Thursday in marching to ban fracking in Maryland.
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