U.S. Water News Online
CHINO, Calif. -- The National Resources Defense Council and Defend the Bay sent notices to five dairies in Ontario, Corona and unincorporated Riverside County last month, formally threatening to sue them over alleged violations of the Clean Water Act and other federal laws designed to protect the environment.
Dairy industry representatives respoinded by saying they are forming a legal fund to defend local dairy farmers from the threatened lawsuits by the two environmental groups.
"This is a real serious attack on the Chino Valley dairymen," said Bob Feenstra, executive officer of the Chino-based Milk Producers Council. "We're going to protect our dairy industry." Alleged violations by the dairies include discharges of manure-polluted water from holding ponds, spraying of liquefied manure on surrounding fields, and stockpiling of manure in dairy corrals. The notices include descriptions and photos of alleged violations that were recorded by employees of the two environmental groups.
The notices also include statistics from a water quality study made by a consultant for the Chino Basin Watermaster stating that water south of the concentration of dairies is up to 100 times more polluted than water to the north.
The two environmental groups claim the polluted water continues to flow south into creeks, flood channels and eventually the underground aquifer, all of which feed the Santa Ana River from which Orange County draws 70 percent of its drinking water.
The groups are threatening to sue on behalf of their members who live downstream of the dairies and whose health, they claim, is jeopardized by the pollution.
Robert Caustin is the founding director of Defend the Bay, a Newport Beach-based nonprofit focused on protecting the Newport Bay and the tributaries that flow into it.
The 48-year-old Costa Mesa resident said the allegations in the notices are nothing new.
"This has been an issue for a long time between the dairies and the Orange County Water District," Caustin said. "That runoff and that pollution is used to recharge our drinking water, and is also allowed to flow on down into the ocean. We end up recreating in it at our beaches."
Feenstra agreed that the allegations are nothing new, but stressed that they and a recently disclosed investigation into potentially criminal violations of the Clean Water Act by a federal grand jury ignore recent history in the region.
He pointed to industry efforts to sewer the dairies and to use cow manure to produce energy. Dairy farmers, Feenstra said, have spent millions of dollars trying to improve their dairies to control the storm water that falls on the urbanized northern communities each winter and rushes south through the dairies, taking manure and contaminated water with it.
He said the once confrontational relationship that dairies had with regulators and water agencies has turned to a cooperative effort to clean things up.
"We have put our shoulder to the wheel," Feenstra said. "Now these environmental groups are coming along and saying it seems to them it really doesn't count."
Industry representatives also worry that language in the notices could easily be applied to many more Chino Basin dairies than just the five who have already received them.
"We're going to protect our industry instead of letting them pick off the dairies one by one," Feenstra said.
David Beckman, senior attorney in the NRDC's Los Angeles office, said his group is focused on violations by specific dairies, not the dairy industry. He said the notices and the lawsuits if they are filed, are simply seeking to make those problem dairies comply with the law.
"We're saying to a court, tell this [dairy] operator to clean up their act," he said. "Had we intended to sue every dairy, we probably would have sent letters to every dairy."
Donald VanderPoel received his letter two weeks ago.
"My first thought was, 'Whoa, what do I do now?' " the 34-year-old third-generation dairy farmer said. "My wife didn't sleep for nights. It worried her sick."
VanderPoel said he looked at the photos and the descriptions of the alleged violations in the notice and was even more confused because the pictures showed a drainage channel that diverts rainwater around his corrals where it would contact manure.
"They see water coming off of a dairy and they just assume that its manured water," he said.
VanderPoel said his dairy has never received a citation from local regulators and he believes the environmental groups are just looking for money, a commodity that he doesn't have a whole lot of.
"I can't afford a lawsuit," he said. "I've only been in business a year and a half."
Beckman said the environmental groups are not after money.
"These are not tort suits, there will be no recovery of damages to NRDC or Defend the Bay," he said. "What we get fundamentally out of this is clean water and clean air. We don't get money."
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