ADEL — The Dallas County Board of Supervisors approved a master matrix resolution at its Jan. 3 meeting. The annual resolution entitles the county to review construction permit applications for CAFOs but leaves it powerless to stop them.
Dallas County is currently home to about 30 concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), of which 22 are hog confinements.
The Iowa Department of Natural Resources (DNR) construction evaluation resolution provides a measure of local input to the discussion of a CAFO’s location and management.
Supervisors can even convene a public hearing in order to review a CAFO’s master matrix score.
The DNR’s master matrix is a tool used to score a proposed CAFO based on its estimated impact on air and water and its likely effects on the quality of community life.
A total of 880 points is possible on the master matrix, and a score of 440 is needed for approval of a construction permit.
“County supervisors review the master matrix items selected by the applicant and determine if a passing score for the matrix has been achieved,” according to Gene Tinker, the DNR’s animal feeding operations coordinator. “The county then submits a recommendation to the DNR on the permit application.”
If a CAFO application earns a passing score on the master matrix, a county is effectively powerless to stop it, and the DNR routinely issues permits in the face of local recommendations to deny them.
Withholding approval would exceed the DNR’s statutory authority, according to the Administrative Rules Review Committee of the Iowa legislature, which has called the master matrix “the exclusive mechanism for the evaluation and approval of an application for the construction or expansion” of a CAFO.
About 87 of Iowa’s 99 counties pass the construction evaluation resolution each year by the Jan. 31 deadline.
Counties that participate in the master matrix process may accompany the DNR on site visits to proposed CAFOs, and the supervisors may also appeal the DNR’s preliminary approval of a permit to the Environmental Protection Commission (EPC). County-level appeals to the EPC also routinely fail.
The DNR’s website has historical information on counties that adopted resolutions.
Yet if under 1,000 animal units, approximately 2,000 hogs, master matrix compliance is not required. They can build virtually anywhere. The state of Iowa should establish an industrial meat production zoning. Let counties determine where that zoning will be applied. Right now there is no control over where a CAFO can be located. Communities, school districts, businesses, homeowners can all spend years and thousands of dollars on long-range planning for growth, development or even just retirement only to wake up one morning with a confinement under construction across the road. Iowa does not allow factories to be built anywhere they want. These meat factories should be treated the same.