Latest news with #R-Corning
Yahoo
02-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Bill targeting watershed moratoriums passes Arkansas Senate committee
A bill targeting the swine farm moratorium in the Buffalo River watershed made it out of committee Tuesday. (Photo courtesy of National Park Service) A bill that could strip away an environmental permit moratorium intended to protect the water quality of the Buffalo River watershed passed out of a Senate committee Tuesday. Senate Bill 290, sponsored by Sen. Blake Johnson, R-Corning, passed the Senate Agriculture, Forestry and Economic Development Committee on a voice vote, with audible dissent. The bill has gone through multiple revisions since it was introduced and has sparked strong opposition from environmental groups in the state that said removing the permit moratorium could again allow another facility like C&H Hog Farms to open up shop in the watershed, endangering the Buffalo National River. The state of Arkansas spent $6.2 million to buy the farm and shut it down in 2019, after years of efforts led by groups such as the Buffalo River Watershed Alliance. Unlike previous versions of the bill, the latest version would not immediately strike the moratorium that is currently in place, but would instead require the Department of Energy and Environment's Division of Environmental Quality and the Department of Agriculture to go through the rulemaking process again for the rules that contain the moratorium if the bill goes into law. The effective date for the bill, if passed, is Jan. 1, 2026, and agencies would have 90 days from that date to get approval for a moratorium. The rules containing the moratorium would then go back before the Arkansas Legislative Council or the Joint Budget Committee after agencies approve them through their usual rulemaking processes. The council, according to Johnson, would be granted greater leeway to reject the moratorium once it goes before them under his bill. Moratoriums would expire four years after their effective date under the bill, requiring agencies to resubmit them for consideration and requiring legislative council approval every four years. Sam Dubke, a spokesperson for Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, said the governor would not support legislation that did not protect the river. 'Governor Sanders appreciates Senator Johnson's leadership and dedication to Arkansas agriculture, but she is opposed to legislation that does not protect the Buffalo National River,' Dubke wrote in an emailed statement. Dubke did not say whether Sanders would sign the bill in its current form if it makes it through both chambers of the Legislature. Multiple people spoke against the bill before the committee, urging lawmakers to protect 'the jewel' of the state of Arkansas. Little Rock resident Richard Johnson said the moratorium needed to remain in place, citing pollution hazards posed by swine CAFOs, or concentrated animal feed operations. 'They tend to pollute way beyond their footprint,' Johnson said. Mark Lambert, who represented Arkansas Farm Bureau, expressed support for the bill, saying that it was a 'right-to-farm' issue. The bill wouldn't take away any protections for the watershed — an assertion opponents of the bill pushed back against. Committee members questioned why moratoriums would receive a 'different threshold' for making it past the legislative council compared to other rules. Johnson said it was to return oversight to elected officials, and described the Buffalo River watershed moratorium, which has been in place for 10 years, as a slippery slope that could lead to other moratoriums. 'This is oversight of executive branch departments,' Johnson said. 'The moratorium is something that's an outlier also, in my opinion as an agricultural producer, because that's not allowing an agricultural producer to even apply for a permit. … This is telling a producer that he can't even attempt to use his property in the way he wants to, and this can be expanded beyond just CAFOs.' The only other watershed-based moratorium is for Lake Maumelle, a primary source of drinking water for the Central Arkansas region. Johnson said everyone agrees that people don't want CAFOs in the Buffalo River watershed and he didn't think a producer would put one there in the first place. However, there is a long history of swine farms within the watershed beyond C&H Hog Farms — something the DEQ said explicitly in its response to the Farm Bureau's comments on changes to Rule 6 last year that would have made the moratorium permanent. 'The potential impacts of swine farms, including farms large enough to be considered CAFOs, on the Buffalo River have been an ongoing concern in Arkansas, and the Division (or its predecessors) have taken action to mitigate the impacts of existing farms in that watershed,' the division wrote last year. 'In 1992, APC&EC Regulation 5 was adopted to address how liquid waste from swine farms should be handled. Also in 1992, the Arkansas Department of Pollution Control and Ecology (the Division's predecessor) issued an administrative notice regarding its intent not to issue permits in the Buffalo River Watershed. Following … that notice, Arkansas participated in the Buffalo River Swine Waste Demonstration Project, which was initiated in 1995, to improve swine manure management in the Buffalo River watershed.' Beth Ardapple, a Newton County farmer, called out a 'false narrative' that farmers were opposed to a moratorium when she spoke against the bill. She said the Buffalo River has served as an affordable vacation spot for Arkansans for decades and that it needed to be protected. 'I have great respect for my CAFO friends, people who own CAFOs. They love the land as I do. It's simply that the science doesn't support having the CAFO in the Buffalo River watershed,' Ardapple said. Marti Olesen, the vice president of the Buffalo River Watershed Alliance, said her business on the river would not survive if a CAFO returned to the area and polluted the river. 'There is no other Buffalo River in Arkansas; it's a national treasure,' Olesen said. John Ray, a self-described environmentalist, said that one was not against farming if they supported protecting the state's natural resources. Fishing and hunting businesses in the area were supportive of a permanent moratorium, he said, and tourism on the Buffalo River supports hundreds of jobs for concessioners, lodges and others who cater to those who enjoy the river each year. 'These things are not going to change every four years, and there is no slippery slope when it comes to these kinds of large CAFO moratoriums,' Ray said. 'This moratorium in the Buffalo River has been in place for over ten years; there hasn't been an avalanche of moratoriums on hog CAFOs in other areas of the state.'
Yahoo
10-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Using nitrogen gas in executions will further delay Arkansas death penalty
An oxygen mask. Alabama attaches a similar-looking mask to a condemned inmate when conducting executions using nitrogen hypoxia. (Getty Images) When it comes to administering the death penalty, perhaps the most intractable difficulty is that it's just really, really difficult to kill someone in a way that isn't cruel or unusual or messy or doesn't make us unduly squeamish. Taking someone who is alive and making them dead requires some level of violence — injecting a fatal dose of chemicals, zapping them with electricity, shooting them, breaking their neck with a rope — that raises profound moral and constitutional issues. And state legislators, including here in Arkansas, are finding new and creative ways to tinker with the machinery of death, as they try to overcome hurdles slowing the pace of executions. Rep. Jeff Wardlaw, R-Hermitage, and Sen. Blake Johnson, R-Corning, have proposed a bill to allow the Division of Correction to use nitrogen gas as a method of execution, in addition to the current method of lethal injection. The bill has passed the House and will likely clear the Senate, given that 20 of the 35 senators are co-sponsors. When Wardlaw defended his bill in committee, he said the idea sprang from a conversation with family members of victims of last year's mass shooting in Fordyce about possible changes to the state's death penalty laws. Attorney General Tim Griffin's staff floated the idea of nitrogen executions during those discussions, he said. A firing squad would be far less painful and far less horrific than a nitrogen execution. – Rev. Jeff Hood, North Little Rock priest who witnessed an Alabama execution Only one jurisdiction in the United States has ever used nitrogen gas for executions, the state of Alabama, which has killed four men with this method. And here's what nitrogen gas executions there look like: The prisoner is strapped to a gurney, a mask similar to a fireman's mask is placed over his face, and he is then suffocated with nitrogen, a colorless, odorless gas that isn't toxic but kills by replacing oxygen in the lungs as the prisoner breathes it in. Officials in Alabama have insisted that executions with nitrogen gas are painless and result in rapid unconsciousness. Wardlaw called it 'a very quick, humane death.' But the Rev. Jeff Hood, an Old Catholic priest from North Little Rock — who witnessed Alabama's first nitrogen execution last year of Kenny Smith — said what he saw was neither quick nor painless and amounted to torture. 'This is like strapping people to the top of a rocket and saying, 'We don't know where you're going, but we're going to light the fuse,' said Hood, whose ministry includes working as a spiritual adviser to Smith and other death row inmates. Hood said he watched Smith struggle from the moment nitrogen was introduced into the mask, as his body began reacting to the loss of oxygen. Smith convulsed, strained so hard against the straps keeping him on the gurney that it shook, and pushed his face against the mask, which filled up with fluid as he struggled for air. It took 22 minutes before prison officials closed the curtains to indicate that Smith was dead. Before the execution, prison officials placed oxygen monitors in and around the death chamber and required Hood to sign a liability waiver in case he was harmed by a nitrogen leak, which he said amounted to 'the state admitting that there's a danger to the people in the chamber.' Having witnessed eight other executions using lethal injection, Hood said Smith's execution with nitrogen 'was by far the worst that I've ever seen' — so much so that he says he'd counsel inmates facing execution to select any other method if they are given an option. 'A firing squad would be far less painful and far less horrific than a nitrogen execution,' Hood said. Hood is an anti-death penalty activist, and, as such, his views were treated with some indifference when he testified against Wardlaw's bill at the Capitol. However, media reports of Alabama's executions also describe prisoners struggling as they were being suffocated. And, of course, the problem with judging whether a new method of death is truly quick and painless is that the only people who can accurately describe the experience are dead. The introduction of nitrogen gas as a method of execution comes as the death penalty has become something of a dead letter in Arkansas, primarily because the state is having trouble acquiring the drugs used in its lethal injection protocol as drug companies balk at getting involved. Death sentences are becoming rarer (the 25 men on Arkansas' death row have all been there since at least 2018), and the state has executed just four men since 2005. All of those executions took place in an eight-day period in April 2017 as Gov. Asa Hutchinson and corrections officials raced to complete eight scheduled executions before the state's supply of one of the lethal injection drugs expired — a gruesome spectacle that drew international condemnation. Presumably, Arkansas would only proceed with a nitrogen gas execution as an alternative method if lethal injection continues to be unavailable. However, Wardlaw and Johnson's bill leaves the choice of execution method entirely to the discretion of the director of the Division of Correction. The bill doesn't address the quality or concentration of the nitrogen or whether it should be administered with a mask or in a gas chamber, letting corrections officials develop a protocol for carrying out nitrogen gas executions with no guidance for how that should be done or the parameters of the protocol. Critics of the bill believe those provisions run afoul of a 2012 Arkansas Supreme Court decision, Hobbs vs. Jones, that struck down the state's death penalty statute because it gave the Department of Corrections too much discretion in what drugs would be used in lethal injections, without sufficient legislative guidance. A statute that provides 'absolute, unregulated and undefined discretion in an administrative agency bestows arbitrary powers and is an unlawful delegation of legislative powers,' the court majority said. The irony here is that should the state ever try to execute an inmate with nitrogen, it will trigger a lengthy legal battle up and down both federal and state courts, which will indefinitely delay executions that the nitrogen option was supposed to jump start. In addition, the three largest U.S. manufacturers of nitrogen gas have responded to states adopting nitrogen as an execution method by prohibiting their products from being used. And that is the conundrum at the heart of the public policy debate over capital punishment — Arkansas and other death penalty states are tangling themselves in more and more legal, ethical and practical knots as they try to rescue a policy that remains politically popular but has become increasingly unworkable. Given the legal challenges and the unavailability of drugs, there's a decent chance that none of the 25 men on death row in Arkansas — some of whom have been there since the 1990s — will ever face execution, by either lethal injection or nitrogen gas. The rational choice would be to accept that fact, move on, and stop pouring resources into defending an untenable policy. The irrational choice would be adopting a new, experimental method of execution, triggering a whole new batch of legal challenges, and pretending that we've figured out a way to kill people that's less violent than the methods already in use.
Yahoo
27-02-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Arkansas governor unveils anti-China legislation package
(From left) Republican Reps. DeAnn Vaught, Stetson Painter and Mindy McAlindon listen to Sen. Howard Beaty discuss his legislation that would regulate financial activities and affiliations with Chinese entities within Arkansas during a press conference on Feb. 26, 2025. (Antoinette Grajeda/Arkansas Advocate) Arkansas lawmakers joined the governor Wednesday in announcing legislation that will ban certain interactions between state entities and China. The Communist China Defense legislative package will contain six bills, some of which have not yet been filed, Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters during a press conference at the Capitol. The bills' lead sponsors are Sen. Blake Johnson, R-Corning, and Republican Reps. Howard Beaty Jr. of Crossett, Mindy McAlindon of Centerton, Brit McKenzie of Rogers, Stetson Painter of Mountain Home and DeAnn Vaught of Horatio. State officials in 2023 took steps to force a Chinese government-owned agricultural company to divest itself of 160 acres in Craighead County, in accordance with Act 636 of 2023, which prohibits certain foreign-controlled businesses from owning Arkansas land. Sanders said she was proud to be the first governor 'to kick China off of our farmland and out of our state.' The proposed legislation will expand on that law by prohibiting the owning or leasing of property near 'critical infrastructure' like military bases and electric substations, and shorten the time a banned company has to divest, according to a press release. The bills will also ban lobbying 'on behalf of communist China, Russia and other adversaries.' State-supported entities, including colleges and state retirement systems, will also be required to divest from China, Sanders said. 'We want to continue to put people on notice. We want China to know we're taking this seriously and that they're not going to be able to set up shop to do Arkansans harm,' she said. 'That's part of the point of today is to make sure they know that we're taking their activity and their role and their proposed interference and influence very seriously and we're not going to tolerate it in the state of Arkansas.' Beaty said a bill he filed last month will 'enforce strict regulations' on financial activities and affiliations with Chinese entities within Arkansas. House Bill 1352 would allow the state to withhold funding for state-supported colleges and universities that have a Confucius Institute or similar institute related to the People's Republic of China, including a Chinese cultural center. A federal government report in October 2023 noted there are fewer than five Confucius Institutes left in the U.S. since Congress restricted federal funding to schools with institutes. Under HB 1352, state-supported institutions of higher education would also be prohibited from investing in Chinese funds, and municipalities would be banned from having sister cities in China. Beaty said he is working on amendments, but plans to run to legislation and get it on the floor 'expeditiously.' 'It's time that we focus on Arkansas and make sure that outside interests that are here for no good other than attacking our state and our nation, they know where we stand, and we point them out and identify them,' he said. Two bills sponsored by McAlindon would prohibit state agencies from using public funds to purchase promotional items made in China, and prohibit procurement of electric vehicles that are linked to forced labor, she said. 'By putting transparency, accountability and economic safety first, we are standing firm against foreign influence,' McAlindon said. SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX
Yahoo
25-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
New bill introduced in Arkansas legislature to end Buffalo River, watershed protections
Video: Future of Buffalo National River discussed in Marshall LITTLE ROCK, Ark. – A bill introduced in the Arkansas legislature on Tuesday would end a practice used to protect Buffalo River and other watershed protection. was introduced by Sen. Black Johnson (R-Corning) to prohibit moratoriums on issuing permits in watersheds by state agencies if it becomes law. The bill makes a slight change from an earlier bill Johnson filed with the same intent, Senate Bill 84, introduced in January. Bill introduced in Arkansas legislature to end Buffalo River, watershed protections SB290 would allow moratoriums if the Senate and House Agriculture, Forestry and Economic Development committees approve them for a year at a time. The previous bill did not have this provision but instead required Legislative Council approval. SB84 remains stalled in committee. Arkansas reaches deal to shutter hog farm near Buffalo River The state currently maintains a temporary moratorium on issuing new permits for medium and large confined animal feeding operations along the Buffalo River. The Department of Environmental Quality initiated the moratorium in 2014 after environmental concerns about the waste generated by a large-scale hog farm near the river. The farm closed in late 2019 when the state purchased its assets. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
