The EPA has a pig poop problem

Name That LLC

Can you identify the companies that made these donations to super PACs and other outside groups?

$50k

TO THE PRO-JEB BUSH SUPER PAC RIGHT TO RISE. ITS ONLY IDENTIFYING INFORMATION IS THE ADDRESS OF A SERVICE COMPANY IN DELAWARE THAT SERVES AS ITS REGISTERED AGENT.

$100k

TO RIGHT TO RISE. THIS LLC SHARES A MAILING ADDRESS WITH PIVOTAL GROUP, AN ARIZONA REAL ESTATE INVESTMENT FIRM RUN BY FRANCIS NAJAFI, WHO ALSO GAVE $100,000 IN HIS OWN NAME TO A PRO-RAND PAUL SUPER PAC.

$1m

TO RIGHT TO RISE. IN EARLY AUGUST, A BILLIONAIRE COAL BARON NAMED CHRISTOPHER CLINE CONFIRMED HE’S BEHIND THE LLC, REGISTERED IN CHARLESTON, W.VA.

$500k

TO AN INDEPENDENT ADVOCACY GROUP BACKING OHIO GOVERNOR JOHN KASICH. ITS PARENT COMPANY LISTS MARK KVAMME, A VENTURE CAPITALIST WHO WORKED IN KASICH’S ADMINISTRATION, AS ONE OF ITS TWO OFFICERS.

$150k

TO RIGHT TO RISE. THIS COMPANY WAS FORMED IN DELAWARE LAST APRIL. RIGHT TO RISE SAYS IT DOESN’T HAVE A MAILING ADDRESS FOR IT AND IS SEEKING THAT INFORMATION. groups—known as 501(c)4s, after the section of the tax code that defines them—which don’t have to disclose the source of their funding at all. But, unlike super PACs, these groups aren’t supposed to spend all their money influencing elections.

The biggest LLC donation of the presidential race has been a $1 million check to Right to Rise, a super PAC aligned with Jeb Bush, from Jasper Reserves. A Florida billionaire named Christopher Cline identified himself to Bloomberg as the source of the money. Cline is a coal baron whose 164-foot yacht, Mine Games, has its own two-person submarine.

Then there’s MMWP12, one of the biggest donors to an independent advocacy group supporting John Kasich’s presidential run. In early August, the Center for Public Integrity traced the LLC’s $500,000 donation to Mark Kvamme, a venture capitalist and offroad-truck enthusiast who used to work in the Ohio governor’s administration. Reached by phone, Kvamme is happy to share his opinion of Kasich. “I worked for the guy,” he says. “I saw him do what he did in Ohio. The guy is spectacular.” But Kvamme won’t talk about any connection to MMWP12. “Let them report whatever they want to report,” he says. “I’m not confirming or denying. It is what it is.” —Zachary R. Mider

The bottom line Individuals with LLCs, not just major corporations, are making use of looser rules governing election contributions.

Environment What a Load of (Pig) Crap!

The EPA delays promised rules to control 300 million tons of effluent

“Are the creeks and streams showing the effects … ? Yes” Rene Miller grew up on a seven-acre slip of Duplin County, N.C., where her mother, Daisy, raised corn, chickens, and hogs. Now, what was a neighbor’s tobacco farm across the narrow twolane road is a field where a giant sprinkler sprays waste from an industrial hog-raising operation onto whatever happens to be planted there—corn, hay, soybeans. The force of the liquefied manure is so strong it splatters the street sign Miller installed to mark Daisy Miller Lane. “I can’t go out in my yard to watch the cars go by. I can’t put my clothes out on the line,” she says. “It stinks.”

Duplin County has the nation’s highest concentration of industrial hog farms, with about 2 million pigs and 60,000 people. Environmental groups estimate the state’s 8 million hogs produce about 14 billion gallons of waste a year. Nationally, according to the most recent report by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, feedlots for cattle, dairy cows, hogs, and poultry produce 300 million tons of manure a year.

The problem is how to dispose of it. In the swine facilities, hogs in groups of more than 20 are put into stalls with slats in the floor. Their feces and urine go through the openings and out pipes into open-air lagoons that can hold 180 days worth of waste. The industry says the holdings allow bacteria to break down the waste and gobble up pathogens. In its ideal state, the wastewater becomes free fertilizer for adjoining crop fields. “The application of waste is something that’s become more and more popular because it’s recycling,” says Kraig Westerbeek, who oversees environmental compliance at Smithfield Foods, the world’s largest hog producer and pork processor, which has contract farms and packing operations in North Carolina.

Yet nutrient-rich runoff from spray fields like the one across from Miller’s farm also nurtures algae blooms that choke rivers by depleting them of oxygen. North Carolina has seen blooms in the Cape Fear River and fish kills in the Neuse River since hog feedlots moved in 30 years ago. The farms “are inarguably the biggest source of nutrients to the coastal region,” says Larry Cahoon, a University of North Carolina at Wilmington professor who studies water quality in the Cape Fear River. “Are the creeks and streams showing the effects of nutrient loading? Yes.”

In 2010, after being sued by the Waterkeeper Alliance and other environmental groups, the EPA pledged to reconsider a rule issued during the George W. Bush administration exempting feedlots from having to disclose hazardous emissions to the agency and the public. Five years later, the EPA hasn’t done anything about it. On July 13 agency lawyers went back to court

A hog feedlot in Duplin County, N.C.

Pig poop

and said the regulations wouldn’t be changed after all.

The Obama administration had early on signaled a different approach. Lisa Jackson, Obama’s first EPA chief, pledged to crack down on water violations and make public more information about problems. (Jackson now oversees environmental initiatives at Apple.) The president’s first appointee to oversee the agency’s water quality office had been Nancy Stoner, an environmental attorney who’d sued n the EPA to win tighter regulations on animal feedlots. Stoner left the EPA in 2014 to become director of water programs for the Pisces Foundation. She declined to comment.

The EPA says it’s focusing on taking action against livestock producers that break the rules. “We are committed to civil and criminal enforcement for the cases that have the highest impact on protecting public health and the environment,” Liz Purchia, an EPA spokeswoman, said in an e-mail. “At the same time, we’re providing states with guidance and resources to help them.”

Former EPA officials say the agency faces a hostile Congress urging it to go easy on the animal farms. Budget cuts have also constrained its ability to act. The EPA is also preoccupied with implementing carbon emissions rules, a top White House priority before Obama leaves office. Agency data show that its inspections and fines of feedlots, known as concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), dropped to a seven-year low last year, with 26 enforcement actions compared with 71 in 2008. A study of animal air pollution has dragged on for decade. While the study . continues, thousands of CAFOs g continue under a at safe- harbor accord o guaranteeing they e won’t face any n fines from the EPA i- for air pollution. In June, the U.S. Geological Survey published a study on nutrient and

71 in 2008. A study lution deca

There are about There are about 2 million pigs in Duplin County (none as cute as this one)

pollution levels in streams near hog operations, comparing them with those far from feedlots. “Land applications of waste manure at swine CAFOs influenced ion and nutrient chemistry in many of the North Carolina Coastal Plain streams that were studied,” the researchers concluded. In other words: CAFOs polluted the water. The North Carolina Pork Council disputes those findings and commissioned its own analysis of the USGS data, concluding that soil type, not the number of hogs, determined the amount of nutrients reaching streams.

For farmers, keeping up with the constant flood of waste is an issue. The Waterkeeper Alliance has documented hog farmers spraying on fallow and frozen fields and even on cattle as they grazed. Spraying also occurs on rainy days, despite regulations that are supposed to limit spraying during wet periods, when more effluent washes into waterways. “What they can put on the fields depends on average rainfall,” says Rick Dove, a longtime Waterkeeper activist who’s been tussling with hog farmers