Dec. 8—JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. — The Missouri Department of Natural Resources is holding a public meeting at 9:30 a.m. Friday, Dec. 13, in Jefferson City, to “continue discussing permitting land application of industrial wastewater and wastewater treatment residuals.”
Attendance can be in person, by conference call and by Webex, a video meeting service.
Companies such as Denali Water Solutions, based in Arkansas, have drawn criticism in recent years from residents who live near the storage lagoons and in areas where the waste is spread, characterizing it as sludge. They worry that the practice threatens their health, property values and water quality, and say that it creates an odor that makes it uninviting for them to live and work outdoors.
Companies that store and spread the waste argue that it is fertilizer, and that they are recycling different organic waste streams that reduce dependence and reliance on landfills, reduce carbon and methane impact on the environment, reduce water consumption, and provide farmers an alternative to more expensive chemical fertilizers.
Heather Peters, chief of the water pollution control branch at the DNR, said the meeting is the latest in a series being held to discuss the creation of rules to enforce a law passed last year, sponsored last year by Missouri state Reps. Dirk Deaton, R-Noel, and Ed Lewis, R-Randolph County, and state Sen. Jill Carter, R-Granby, who represents Jasper and Newton counties.
The bill established standards for regulating and controlling the storage and application on the waste product.
“We will be discussing the draft rule language, the draft industrial nutrient management technical standard, the land application management plans and the regulatory impact report, all of which are associated with House Bill 2134/1956 that was passed last legislative session,” Peters said. “This is our next public meeting to ensure transparency on what we’re proposing, what changes we’ve made in response to comments and what we’re doing next.”
The DNR has held a series of public meetings to get opinions, and recordings of those meetings are available on the DNR website.
Also available on the website are some of the documents being discussed in these meetings.
“The Department of Natural Resources has to do what’s called a Regulatory Impact Report prior to doing a rule-making,” Peters said. “We did our first draft of that. We had some questions, there were concerns about ease of finding information while that draft was on public notice so we wanted to make sure everyone has a chance to weigh in. We wanted to ensure full transparency so we’re going to do a second public notice on the Regulatory Impact Report and then after that is when we get to start rule-making that goes with the new law that passed. So these are all the drafts that are out and will be out for informal public comment and discussion right now and then the formal public period during the Regulatory Impact Report.”
Peters said this meeting is scheduled for three hours because the agency and people involved in the meeting in November couldn’t get through all the information in a two-hour meeting.
“We want it to be as engaging as possible so we want interaction, we want questions, and that’s what we received at the last meeting,” Peters said. “That was fantastic and it was a very valuable use of our time. Unfortunately we ran out of time to cover anything so we wanted to make sure we made the next meeting longer so if interested parties have more questions, we want to have enough time to give them an opportunity to ask us questions or provide thoughts on the documents we have. And we want to go through all of them so everyone understands exactly what’s out there.”
Information about this process and the previous meetings can be found at: https://dnr.mo.gov/water/business-industry-other-entities/technical-assistance-guidance/land-application-wastewater. This site includes the agenda for the Dec. 13 meeting, links to video recordings of the previous meetings and drafts of all the documents being discussed under the tab named “Ongoing Discussions.”