Boss Hog 3

By JOBY WARRICK and PAT STITH, Staff Writers

State Rep. Howard Hunter Jr. expected all kinds of responses when he proposed tougher rules for hog farms two years ago. Laughter wasn't one of them.

But looking back, he should have known his bill was doomed the minute he saw a grinning Rep. Raymond "Pete" Thompson gesturing to him from the House floor one April morning.

"Pete just looked at me and laughed," Hunter recalled of the exchange with the now-deceased legislator. "He said, "You know we're going to kill that damn bill of yours, don't you?'‚"

But what actually happened was even worse, in Hunter's opinion. A few weeks after Hunter's controversial bill was introduced, a substitution was made in the House Agriculture Committee.

The result: Instead of imposing new regulations to control hog waste, the bill funded a two-year, $200,000 study to determine if hog odor was a problem and, if so, if anything could be done about it.

The Swine Odor Task Force was born.

What happened in those few weeks convinced Hunter of the hog industry's enormous clout in Raleigh. Days after he introduced his bill, the N.C. Pork Producers Association sent letters to farmers warning that Hunter's legislation would "eliminate the hog business in North Carolina." The group mounted a intensive lobbying campaign against the bill, which would have required permits for large farms and tripled the minimum separation between hog barns and houses.

In the General Assembly, Hunter's bill was diverted from its intended destination, the House's Environment Committee, to the Agriculture Committee chaired by Rep. Vernon James, a man who considers himself a friend of the pork industry.

James later said he opposed Hunter's bill because he felt it was "a little too severe." He said he had the votes then to kill it, but he thought creating a study commission was the better solution.

He says he spoke individually to the leaders of most of the major hog companies and got them to see it his way.

"Their general impression --all of them --was that we didn't need the bill. It was detrimental to the industry," James said. The hog producers wanted James to kill the legislation, he said, but "I persuaded them that that was not the way to handle the bill."

Once the study commission was announced, Hunter sought to salvage his bill by helping pick the members of the new task force. But instead of the diverse group of scientists, farmers and environmentalists he favored, the panel came to be dominated by agricultural engineers and animal science professors from N.C. State University.

Nine of the 26 task force members had received research grants directly from the N.C. Pork Producers Association or one of the major pork companies, university records show.

"NCSU has been involved in promoting intensive livestock operations for years," said Bill Holman, a lobbyist for the Sierra Club. "It's hard to imagine them being critical."

A notable absence in the initial roster was Duke University psychologist Susan Schiffman, a nationally recognized odor expert. Task Force Chairman Johnny Wynne, associate dean of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at NCSU, said Schiffman was admitted to the group after she approached him and asked to participate.

During the two-year study, Schiffman was invited to only one meeting and was never asked to share the results of her research, she said. Last spring, Schiffman began a major new study for the N.C. Pork Producers Association, which relayed some of her findings to the task force.

Meanwhile, the other members of the panel focused their attention on three tasks: gathering data about previous scientific work; examining county tax records for evidence of declining property values; and studying odor-control methods in other countries.

The information-gathering process led to a trip to northern Europe --and a fresh round of criticism. Environmental groups blasted James, the agriculture chairman, for traveling to Europe with the panel, even though he was set to retire before the task force finished its work. James told reporters he paid his own expenses.

Later, in one of his last acts as chairman, James asked committee members at a Nov. 30 meeting to approve the task force's final report --even though the document hadn't yet been written.

The task force prepared a draft report, drawing on its European visit and a number of U.S. studies, recommending more stringent voluntary standards for hog waste. The report is expected to be delivered to the General Assembly by the end of this month.

James said he was glad he'd succeeded in setting up the task force. If Hunter's bill had been killed outright, James said, anti-hog forces might have simply come back the following year with an even tougher proposal.

"As it was, the study commission ran on for two years, and it gave people in the industry time to start working on their problem without restrictive legislation," James said.