Oversight of required county-level soil amendments in Georgia

Wilkes County Commission Chairman Sam Moore has been fielding calls about land amendments for years. One Thursday night in late June, he got a call that took him to Little River, a tributary of the Savannah River north of Augusta. There, he saw the aftermath of a soil amendment spill that left 1,700 dead fish and sparked a dust-up over the issue of soil amendment throughout East Georgia.

This year, Moore said he believes county commissioners are more organized and coordinated to address the problem than ever before. Working under the Association of County Commissioners of Georgia (ACCG), he has brought together commissioners from across East Georgia with the common goal of getting more local authorities to deal with a situation they see as out of control.

Some Georgia farmers turned to soil amendments as a cheap alternative to fertilizers, designed to introduce nutrients into the soil to promote plant growth. Although soil amendments may contain some beneficial nutrients, such as nitrogen, amendments are designed to improve soil texture, aeration, and water-absorbing capacity.

While complaints about land amendments are nothing new, Moore and other commissioners agreed that complaints and demands for action have increased over the past year. But despite the complaints they’re getting, Moore and his fellow county chairmen argue their hands are tied.

“It’s kind of a circle, that when citizens call us they can never really get anywhere,” Moore said. “I think people in our county are starting to realize that this is a state issue and there’s not much the county can do.”

Oglethorpe County Commission Chairman Jay Paul knows this struggle all too well. He has only served about two years in his current position. Prior to that, he spent more than a decade working for the Georgia Division of Environmental Protection as an environmental specialist. In that role, he said his agency received complaints about odor and nuisance from soil amendments.

But then, as now, his hands were largely tied.

Right now, the Georgia Department of Agriculture regulates and enforces soil amendment rules. If it intersects with an environmental pollution problem, such as a fish kill, the EPD will intervene. But for county commissioners, they have no say in what soil amendment goes into or is used in the county. And they can’t make landlords stop applying when flies or stench harms the neighbors’ quality of life.

Paul’s first encounter with land amendments was in 2009, when he said the EPD received a complaint from Elbert County. He said EPD received calls regularly during his time with the agency, but the only time employees could write citations was when there was an obvious solid waste violation, such as littering in a field. Of course, he said, they couldn’t penalize anyone for breaking Georgia Department of Agriculture rules.

County commissioners have a couple of ways they want to try to regain local control over the issue. Todd Higdon, chairman of the Madison County Commission, compared the powers local leaders have over other types of potential pollution sources, such as motor oil.

“My county code enforcement officer can come out tomorrow if you dump a 55 (gallon) drum of oil in your backyard and pour it into the creek. He comes with a fine; at the county level, no at the state level,” Higdon said. “Why are these (soil amendment distributors) different?”

GDA has argued that this type of delegation is not possible, that it would require a change to the state constitution to legally share these powers so that local leaders can enforce laws instead of GDA or EPD employees. But attorneys at the Southern Environmental Law Center say that’s wrong.

April Lipscomb, SELC senior attorney and leader of the Georgia Water Coalition, a statewide water advocacy group, said it would require legislative action on Capitol Hill, but there is legal precedent for what the commissioners For example, he said, the Georgia Erosion and Sediment Control Act (E&S Act) allows EPD to certify counties or cities as local issuing authorities to administer and enforce the E&S Act.

Once certified, these local entities can issue land disturbance permits and enforce violations of those permits. Lipscomb said something similar could be done for land amendments, giving counties the power to inspect land amendment enforcement sites and enforce violations of land amendment laws.

The Georgia Association of County Commissioners, a nonprofit organization for Georgia county governments, is working on legislation that would give county government authorities the ability to inspect sites where amendments to the ground. Additionally, the organization said counties would like to know the chemical makeup of soil amendments and where it is being applied in their respective counties.

ACCG said it will use personal testimony from citizens and elected county officials to “tell the story of how your rural quality of life is threatened without improved oversight and enforcement of land amendment enforcement.”

A bipartisan bill, introduced by Rep. Rob Leverett (R- Elberton), did not make it out of committee in time to become law this session, but will be considered again next year.

“It’s been a big issue in my district and some other districts around me,” Leverett told the network before introducing the legislation, HB 477. “I think it’s an important program and I think it’s a good program. I want watching the show remains and I worry that some of the abuse from some bad actors will hurt the overall health of the show.”

Leverett worked with ACCG on the bill, which would establish an online portal where soil amendment distributors would be required to register location and composition 48 hours before spreading, if accepted by the county. It would also allow county officials to issue stop-work orders. in cases of serious breaches of the Land Amendment Act and notify GDA for further enforcement.

Now that the bill is on hold until the next session, the ACCG hopes the state legislature will provide additional resources for GDA to inspect and enforce the implementation of the land amendments.

Very soon after the failure of the bill, this wish begins to come true. On March 9, Georgia Agriculture Commissioner Tyler Harper released a statement in which the state House allocated $550,000 in its budget as additional funding for the Soil Amendment Program.

Beyond asserting powers at the local level, county commissioners said state regulation could also address the problem by requiring industrial facilities to process their waste on-site.

One of the main reasons facilities are assumed to prefer to dispose of their waste as a soil amendment is because it is cheap and avoids a major problem: soil amendment wastes are too far from the water for sewage treatment plants, but it is too liquid for landfills. By requiring companies to fix the problem at their facilities, which is expensive but can be done, Higdon said he wouldn’t put the burden on communities to deal with waste when companies with little oversight dump it sporadically .

The example the commissioners gave was processing chicken through stainless steel pipes. Regular steel cannot be used because it collects unsafe bacteria, which is why state law required processing facilities to use stainless steel piping for sanitary safety. Similarly, they said, requiring companies to process waste on-site would protect Georgians.

“They probably would,” said commission chairman Lee Vaughn of Elbert County. “They wouldn’t like it, but they probably would.” It would be expensive, but like stainless steel pipes, it would be a cost of doing business that would have to be done.

Although recent community anger over land reclamation has been greater than in the past, the complaints are not new.

A 2008 lawsuit alleges that more than 100 complaints were filed with EPD against a single soil amendment company between 2007 and 2008 alone. In addition, county commissioners, the online complaint tracker of EPD and community members themselves say a steady stream of complaints has been consistently issued over the past two decades.

Commissioners previously tried and failed to get state-level legislation to fix their problems. But this is the first year they’ve worked so collaboratively on the issue, and they agree that communities have rallied around the issue more than ever this year.

published
8:35 am UTC on April 18, 2023
Updated
8:35 am UTC on April 18, 2023