Atrazine settlement two-sided
Jasper – Jasper was included as a plaintiff in a class action lawsuit against atrazine manufacturer Syngenta and announced receiving $110,466.33 as a result of the $105 million settlement on Wednesday.
The group currently embroiled in a lawsuit with the city, Healthy Dubois County Inc., has indicated the city is opening one hand to receive the funds while paying for a study that recommends the use of the same chemical on its biomass crop.
Bingham Greenebaum Doll LLP attorney Bill Kaiser, represented Jasper Municipal Utilities in the atrazine suit and is also part of the team representing the Jasper Utility Service Board and the Jasper Common Council in the lawsuit brought by Healthy Dubois County, Inc. Dr. Norma Kreilein, a member of Healthy Dubois County, Inc. and plaintiff in the lawsuit against the Jasper Utility Service Board and Jasper Common Council, asked in an e-mail, “Why has Bill Kaiser [attorney] been paid by our city to argue that the atrazine is dangerous and must be removed and then been paid by our city to negotiate a contract proposing its use on eight to 10,000 more acres?”
The city paid Dr Christopher Shaddix to study the lease between the city and Twisted Oak. In the published report titled “Review of Twisted Oak Proposal and Associated Literature“, Shaddix writes, “Competition from weeds can be a major problem during the 1 to 3 year establishment period of the Miscanthus, but recent success with the well-known and low-cost herbicide atrazine is promising.
According to City Utilities Manager Bud Hauersperger, atrazine is a common chemical used for weed control on corn and soy bean crops but others are available for use by farmers. “Additionally, miscanthus is a crop that only requires weed control for the first two years of its growth,” Hauersperger said, “after two years the miscanthus is well established and you don’t need to apply herbicides.”
According to Hauersperger, neither the city nor Jasper Clean Energy (Twisted Oak) will dictate what types of herbicides farmers will use on the crop.
Twisted Oaks proposal includes finding farmers within approximately 50 miles of the Jasper Clean Energy Power Plant to grow the bio-fuel crop. “To my knowledge no farmers have been found to grow the crop yet,” Hauersperger stated.
Healthy Dubois County and Dr. Kreilein contend that any exposure to atrazine is unsafe. When the group asked the local Purdue Agricultural representative about harmful chemicals on the miscanthus crop, they were assured the chemicals would wash off the plants. This chemical runoff from the farmland along the Patoka River downstream from the Patoka Lake Reservoir dam is what creates a problem for the Jasper Water Treatment Plant.
In the atrazine lawsuit settlement Ferdinand received $20,423.43, Huntingburg receive $12,110.34, and the Patoka lake Regional Water and Sewer District received $20,025.94 compared to Jasper’s $110,466.33. The settlements were based on various criteria, but the major factor for the differences in this comparison is the amount of atrazine present in the water supplying the water filtration plants. Huntingburg and Patoka Lake Regional both draw water from lakes with undeveloped land barriers between the water and any farmland. The Patoka River has no such barriers in place thus requiring Jasper to treat for a greater amount of chemical runoff including atrazine.
Kristin Shrader-Frechette, Ph.D., O’Neill Family Endowed Professor, Department of Philosophy and Department of Biological Sciences, and director for the Center for Environmental Justice and Children’s Health at the University of Notre Dame, states in the abstracts of a pro bono study she conducted on the Jasper Biomass proposal, “Instead of safer available herbicides, TOC (Twisted Oak Corporation) proposes to use lethal atrazine, completely banned in 27 major nations. Even below US-allowed levels, atrazine increases ADHD, autism, and other eurodevelopmental harms, especially in children—and also causes endocrine disruption of human sexual development, feminization of males, and sterility.”
Abstracts from the unpublished study are available here:
wow.
It appears Mr. Kaiser has been charged with the job of getting/saving the city money. Nothing more nothing less. That is his business, and I understand that. Obviously, he’s willing to do that even if it means holding both hands out to conflicting interests. Your elected representatives, on the other hand, are charged with working in the best interest of citizens, both their financial interests and their safety. I’m not a citizen of Jasper, but I feel like your elected representatives only see the POSSIBLE financial benefits and never did their due diligence on the safety issue.