Small-town government run amok (Part XIII): Is Kerr County partly to blame for the high death toll at Camp Mystic?

I've already written this week about the catastrophic flooding in Kerr County, Texas.  What I am going to highlight in this post is recent reporting from the New York Times on the 2019 decision by Kerr County to let Camp Mystic build additional structures--including cabins for campers--in places that were at risk of  flooding.  (This is on top of the county's decision not to invest in a warning system, which is discussed in my prior post).

Why would the county do that when, as one expert suggested, the proposal to construct more buildings was a good time to re-evaluate the risk level associated with the existing structures?  Perhaps what the journalists are suggesting here is Kerr County officials simply trusted the camp as a long-time landowner and patron of the county.  Perhaps what is being suggested is the turning of a blind eye.  I wonder what sort of property taxes and other types of revenues Mystic and the otter camps provided to the county? 

Here's an excerpt from the NYT story: 

In 2019, Camp Mystic...underwent a substantial expansion. Camp owners received approval from local authorities to build a new group of cabins over the hillside to the south, in an area known as Cypress Lake. But even there, flood maps show, some of the new cabins were in areas at risk of flooding.

* * *  

At the same time, Kerr County officials were considering how to manage floodway areas, including those at Camp Mystic.

The county said that floodways were to be considered “an extremely hazardous area due to the velocity of floodwaters which carry debris, potential projectiles and erosion potential.” It adopted rules in 2020 to limit new construction or substantial alterations in floodways to ensure that structures could better survive flood events, and that these buildings would not result in raising floodwater levels in other parts of the river.

This NYTimes piece gives a sense of the local lore around the Eastlands, who owned and ran Camp Mystic.  This New York Times podcast, The Daily, also gives a sense of the beloved status of the camp and its long-time owners; the title says it all, "A Love Letter to Camp Mystic."   

Postscript:  Here is a July 12, 2025 NYT story that suggests FEMA over-rode Kerr County on the designation of parts of Camp Mystic as a flood zone.  An excerpt from Mike Baker's reporting follows: 

In the years before floodwaters killed more than two dozen people at Camp Mystic in Texas, regulators approved a series of appeals that removed many of the camp’s buildings from official federal flood zones, records show.

Flood maps developed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency in 2011 had placed much of the camp within a 100-year flood zone, an area considered to be at high risk of flooding. Camp Mystic successfully challenged those designations, which would limit renovation projects and require flood insurance, citing elevation calculations of a series of buildings that allowed them to be exempted from the federal restrictions.

Sarah Pralle, an associate professor at Syracuse University who has researched federal flood mapping, said she found the exemptions granted to Camp Mystic, a girls’ camp on the Guadalupe River near Hunt, to be “perplexing.” Some of the buildings were still very close to expected flood elevations, she said.

“I think it’s extremely troubling that it’s a camp for children,” Ms. Pralle said. “You’d think you want to be extra cautious — that you’d go beyond the minimum of what’s required for flood protection.”

Here is the Washington Post reporting similar conclusions on the role of FEMA.  

Here is the WSJ reporting on what happened at Camp Mystic, cabin by cabin.   You'll see here featured some aspects of the impulse to secrecy regarding arguable failures of a revered Texas institution.  

This excellent episode of New York Times "The Daily" on July 15, 2025, asks if the floods had to be as deadly as they were.  It includes some attention to the rural context. 

Humboldt County, California judge under fire for ethics violations as election looms

The headline from The Press Democrat (of Sonoma County, California but covering the north coast up through Humboldt), is "Humboldt County Judge Greg Kreis accused of sexual harassment, drunken bullying, throwing curveball into his reelection bid." Here's an excerpt from the deeply reported story by Andrew Graham and Marisa Endicott: 

The commission that oversees California’s judiciary has served presiding Humboldt County Superior Court Judge Gregory Kreis a 35-page notice charging him with 19 ethical violations including drunken bullying of attorneys, lewd behavior toward women, poor courtroom behavior, cronyism and abuse of power.

The allegations outlined by the commission on Feb. 2 stretch back years and have thrown his reelection campaign into turmoil just weeks before the March 5 election.

In one case, in May 2019, he is accused of using an antisemitic slur against a deputy public defender, insulting his manliness and then pushing him fully clothed off a pontoon boat into Lake Shasta.

A 2015 allegation from before he became a judge states that he took two attorneys with him to buy cocaine, then used the drug in the car as he drove back from the purchase.

Another accusation alleges he sneaked into a sleeping woman’s bedroom, exposed his genitals and tried to wake her.

Here are more posts about Humboldt County, which is metropolitan, but sparsely populated.  I'm just thinking about the presumably helpful role of this state commission in providing oversight of a sensitive matter like this one.  It seems far preferable to local oversight--and, to my mind, is even preferable to letting the voters decide in a couple of weeks. 

Reaching farmworkers with reporting that reveals realities of their lives

Charles Ornstein of the non-profit news organization Pro Publica wrote last week under the headline, "How We Reached Workers While Reporting on Dairy Farm Conditions."  Here's an excerpt:   

Spanish-speaking dairy farm workers in Wisconsin, many of them undocumented immigrants, are not regular readers of our website. Most have never heard of ProPublica, let alone formed a trusting relationship with us. Some have low levels of literacy and poor internet connections because the farms they work on are remote. Connecting with them, both to conduct our reporting and to share our findings, is a challenge.

For months, Melissa Sanchez and Maryam Jameel have been reporting on conditions at these farms. But one of their earliest missions was crucial. They needed to find out how the workers got their news and make sure ProPublica’s reporting reached them and their communities. The reporters’ process underscores one of our central beliefs at ProPublica: Publishing a story about injustice isn’t enough if we don’t reach the people who are directly affected.

Back in February, when we released the tragic story of a child’s death on a Wisconsin dairy farm, we knew we had to do more than translate it into Spanish.

Sanchez and Jameel are both fluent Spanish speakers; they are both the daughters of immigrants and grew up speaking the language. ... Early on in their reporting, they learned that dairy farm workers regularly use TikTok, sometimes making humorous videos of themselves dancing in dairy milking parlors. So the reporters, too, became active on the platform, chronicling their reporting trips to Wisconsin and documenting what they saw. 

* * * 

The team also identified businesses in these rural communities that serve Spanish-speaking customers — the spots where immigrants wire money to their families, buy groceries or do their laundry. They visited more than 60 businesses across the state and hung up flyers seeking sources. At one business, a small store a few miles from where Jefferson [the boy] died, Sanchez and Jameel connected with community members and learned how the official version of the child’s death did not match the account the community knew to be true.

The story we published after months of reporting showed how the sheriff’s deputy who responded to the scene mistranslated a key phrase and blamed Jefferson’s father for running him over with a piece of farm equipment rather than understanding that another worker had been driving the machine. Their search for the truth prompted local and state officials to call for police to use more effective translation practices when responding to scenes at which people only spoke a language other than English.

The story appeared on our website and on the front pages of nearly a dozen Gannett-owned newspapers in Wisconsin. We translated the story into Spanish and developed relationships with several Spanish-language publishing partners in Wisconsin and Central America, where many of the immigrant workers are from. These outlets included Mi Wisconsin and El Faro. We also commissioned an audio version of the story in Spanish. Jefferson’s father, who has a first-grade education, said he listened to the audio version several times. Hearing our story, he told the reporters, helped him finally understand how his son died, and how law enforcement so completely failed to understand what happened.

* * * 

In Sparta, near the Mississippi River, the team spent about an hour at the Supermercado Guerrero. They watched a young Nicaraguan woman take a booklet and tuck it into her purse. They asked her if she’d heard of the story, and she said she had read it in Mi Wisconsin, one of the websites that republished the article. 

Lawyers scramble to represent California wildfire victims as plaintiffs

Ad from my Twitter feed, Sept. 26, 2021

Lily Jamali reported for KQED, in a story picked up by National Public Radio yesterday.  It's about lawyers, local and from far away, soliciting clients at an event in Plumas County, amidst the Dixie Fire rubble.  The lawyers want to represent those damaged by the Dixie Fire in a lawsuit against PG & E, or anyone else who may be found responsible for the fire's recent destruction.  It's an important story that names names, meaning names of attorneys who've represented plaintiffs in relation to other lawsuits, like those arising from the Camp Fire that destroyed Paradise.  And those lawyers have not always made good on their representations to clients.  At the end of the audio story is an admonition from the Plumas County District attorney to residents to choose their attorney wisely.  

An August, 2021 Wall Street Journal story on the shortcomings of the litigation against PG&E that arose  from the Camp Fire is here.   

Overcoming the cult of individualism

In 1984, David Engel wrote that individualism, as a cultural phenomenon, takes on two distinct forms. One of the forms, which Engel called "rights-oriented," aligns with the legal notion that individuals possess certain rights for which the justice system offers redress upon those rights being violated. Engel explained that the other type, which I am calling "autonomy-oriented," holds the opposite view: 

[A]n individualism emphasizing self-sufficiency and personal responsibility rather than rights is consistent with the expectation that people should ordinarily provide their own protection against injuries and should personally absorb the consequences of harms they fail to ward off.

Engel argued that the residents of rural Sander County, Illinois embodied that type of autonomy-oriented individualism, which contributed to a social climate that inhibited residents from ever bringing suit after experiencing personal injury. 

Thirty years later, Engel's theory appears in the modern context in the documentary, For the Love of Rutland. In the film, the town of Rutland, Vermont clashed over the Mayor's plan to host Syrian refugees. However, the film mainly focuses on the life of Stacie Griffin, a Rutland resident living in poverty and battling addiction. 

Within the first few moments of the film, Griffin invites the camera into her home and puts her life on full display. At one point, someone off-camera protests that they don't want the crew to see their room, but Griffin quickly rebuts them saying it's real. She does not care to hide any part of her life from the camera, because she wholly accepts the consequences of her past decisions. The audience quickly learns that she also feels that the incoming Syrian refugees should have been held to the same standard, too.

Initially, Griffin was opposed to the refugees coming to Rutland. She witnesses the communal effort to accommodate them and she resents them for it, because neither the community nor the state was helping her with her problems. At that time, Griffin was trying to keep her son in school, find her husband a job, keep her family from being evicted, and so forth. The heightened sense of autonomy-oriented individualism that Griffin held, she held to a fault. It became suffocating as she believed her problems were her own, but they had become insurmountable. Like the residents of Sander County, Griffin could not see herself getting help and seemed intent on making sure the refugees did not receive any, either.

Unlike in Engel's paper, however, Griffin's story offered a solution. Griffin's life began to improve as soon as she began to organize in her community. Although, the film is unclear as to why Griffin started reaching out to community groups--presumably, she might have hit rock-bottom or maybe the filmmakers encouraged her to talk to people actively organizing around the refugees--but she quickly found a new purpose in leading an effort to improve her neighborhood. 

Before linking up with the community groups, Griffin was sinking under the crushing weight of her bills and the other problems previously discussed. She had attended a meeting about the opioid crisis, but felt angry and invisible as politicians and police applauded themselves for their impressive statistical data. But once she began organizing in her community, specifically to help with a youth program, she clearly felt heard and included as part of something bigger than herself and her problems. She also learned how to reach out to other organizers to ask for help, instead of holding onto her problems as her burden alone. 

In the documentary, the Alderman who helps Griffin from not being evicted makes two interesting points in that regard. First, she did not understand why Griffin did not ask for help sooner, as her problem was relatively simple. An eviction might be new for a tenant, but it is not a new phenomenon. An experienced organizer has helped others similarly situated to Griffin, and the Alderman said that her organization could have prevented her eviction in a day.

Second, that it was tragic that people like Griffin have to reach the point of desperation before help is provided. Griffin could have never dug herself out of all the problems piling up in her life, but it was clear that she felt they were her problems, nonetheless. That was the true consequence of her holding onto the idea that personal problems were strictly personal, and that it was selfish to involve the community. For Griffin, relief only came when she abandoned that idea of autonomy-oriented individualism, and found help through helping others. 

 

Coronavirus in rural America (Part LXXXV): Rural Idaho school district prepares to welcome students

Kirk Siegler reports today for National Public Radio from the Bruneau-Grandview School District in southern Idaho.  Here's the lede:

At the Bruneau-Grandview School District in rural southern Idaho, a couple dozen teachers are crowded into the small library.

They're doing a refresher training for online teaching. In person-classes are scheduled to begin Monday, but with coronavirus cases continuing to rise in Idaho and other states, it's an open question for how long. 

Superintendent Ryan Cantrell, who's helping lead the Google Classroom training, is advising his staff that last-minute decisions will be the unfortunate normal this upcoming school year. Parents have the option of sending their kids to school this week, or staying fully online or some combination of both. 

A recent survey indicated that about three-quarters of the district's families were comfortable sending their kids back to school this fall. 

When the district abruptly went to online-only last Spring, Cantrell says some students dropped off the map, learning suffered, especially in outlying areas where there's little or no Internet. 

"There's a general consensus of let's get moving," Cantrell says. "Let's get the kids back in here so that we can find out where they're at, how we can help them."

The story features a teacher from Boise who commutes on hour each way to work in this rural school.  She wears a mask because she doesn't want to bring the virus to her students, a community that has had few coronavirus cases compared to Boise.

Siegler also quotes an Idaho State Senator, Steven Thayn, in a plea for local control, even if it means disregarding medical experts:

Listening to experts to set policy is an elitist approach. 

The story continues:   

At a recent legislative hearing, Thayn, vice chair of an education committee, pushed a bill that would take authority away from Idaho's local health districts so they can't enforce school closures or mandatory mask orders. Many Republicans argued that local school boards should have the final say, not public health experts. 

That bill and another that would limit a school's liability when it comes to coronavirus lawsuits is likely to be debated in a special session of the legislature later this month.

"Ornery Artist's Hand-Written Screeds" in rural Missouri now subject of major art exhibition

Greenville, California, March 2013

NPR ran this story last month about Jesse Howard's 20-acre compound of hand-painted signs, which he called Sorehead Hill, in Fulton, Missouri, population 12,790.  Here is the lede of C.J. Janovy's story:

By all accounts, self-taught artist Jesse Howard was cantankerous. In middle of the last century, it wasn't unusual to see hand-painted signs on country roads advertising a traveling fair or a farm sale. But Howard's signs offered Bible verses. They proclaimed his anger at his neighbors and the government, and his disappointments with the world around him. "Every word I'm saying's the truth," the artist said of his work. "Every word." 

Seen in Madison County, AR, May, 2010

Howard's work hangs in the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the American Folk Art Museum in New York and the American Visionary Arts Museum in Baltimore. Now, the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis has opened the first comprehensive survey of his work.

Court Street, Jasper, Arkansas 2011

Leslie Umberger, the Smithsonian folk art curator, explains the significance of Howard's work—and the work of others who built such environments in the 1940s and 1950s, including Sam Rodia in California and Fred Smith in Wisconsin.  Umberger says Sorehead hill was an

"art environment," or a personal space that's "built or constructed by an individual who, for whatever reason, decides to kind of reshape his or her corner of the world."  

According to Umberger, well-known artists like Roger Brown and Jasper Johns ultimately took note of what Howard, Rodia and Smith were doing.  Umberger continues:

And it makes a big difference because people start to really equate this radicalism with having a strong voice, a strong opinion, being truly original, for standing up for what you believe in and fighting for it.

Janovy reports, too, that Howard had to fight neighbors who "tore down his signs and vandalized his property," even seeking in 1952 "to have committed to an asylum," a fate he was able to avoid.

Hwy. 7 South, Jasper, Arkansas, November, 2011

All of this reminded me of some of the hand-painted screeds I have seen in rural places in recent years.  One is from Greenville, California, population, 1,129 (top), and the other near the community of Marble in Madison County, Arkansas, population 15,701.  These are similar to Howard in the sense of protesting against the government—or in the case of the Madison County sign, another individual--in one way or another.   

Hwy. 7 South, Jasper, Arkansas 2011; sign reads "Not Responsible for Accidents

The bottom photos are from Jasper, Arkansas, population 466, county seat of Newton County, Arkansas, population 8,330.  The first of these photos is of old fashioned junk shop and the last two, photographs of a ????? (outdoor junk shop?) taken two years apart.

Whatever it is, the owner is concerned about fending off liability because the latter version, two years after the first, features  sign that says "NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ACCIDENTS." (Very interesting for the torts professor in me).  While perhaps not political, all seem fairly artistic to me.  In particular, the last two photos of the same place two years apart show the proprietor becoming more artistic (and perhaps less entrepreneurial—less interesting in selling stuff than in displaying cultural artifacts in an interesting, even pleasing way) over time … 

Sexual assault of farm workers

NPR ran a two-part series on this phenomenon, yesterday and today.  The first story is "Silenced by Status:  Farm Workers Face Rape, Sexual Abuse," and it features the story of Maricruz Ladino, who was raped by a farm supervisor in 2006.  Against the odds, Ladino courageously filed a civil suit against the grower. That suit ended in a confidential settlement in 2010.  The story quotes Bill Tamayo, an attorney with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission,  the federal agency tasked with protecting workers from gender-based discrimination.  The EEOC has been using radio ads to reach out to farm workers about sexual harassment.  Tamayo emphasizes just h how much power farm supervisors wield.

"He determines who gets hired, who gets promoted, who gets fired. And if you're a sexual predator, that's the ideal position to be in because you can determine whether her family eats or not," he says. 

* * *

Over the last 15 years, Tamayo estimates his agency has won tens of millions of dollars in back wages and damages for farm worker victims across the country. The companies involved are rarely made public unless a lawsuit is filed. And the agency doesn't have the power to bring a criminal case — that's the job of local prosecutors. In fact, a review of EEOC's federal lawsuits shows none of the perpetrators accused in those cases have been tried in criminal court.

The second story in the series is "Despite Barriers, Farm Worker Breaks Silence about Rape Case," and it too features a Latina farmworker who is also a rape survivor and, like Ladino, had the courage to report her assailant.  The woman featured in this story is Guadalupe Chavez, who eventually pressed criminal charges against the farm supervisor who raped her in 2006.  Yet with no physical evidence--Khokha notes that many of the farmworkers survive rape don't get a medical exam, which is also true among other demographics--the case came down to Chavez's word versus that of her assailant.  A jury acquitted the defendant, believing his assertion that the encounter was consensual.  Khokha writes:

Even so, Chavez says she got some justice because the man she accused of raping her had to face her in court, and she says, now supervisors like him may think twice about how they treat women in the fields.

This story notes the important role played by organizations such as rural legal aid providers and social service agencies such as Westside Family Preservation Services, in Huron, California.

This two-part series was produced in collaboration with the Center for Investigative Reporting and UC Berkeley's Investigative Reporting program.

The Frugal Traveler reflects on "The Center Cut"

The Sunday New York Times travel section featured Frugal Traveler Seth Kugel's final reflections on his six-week trip from Baton Rouge, Louisiana to Fargo, North Dakota.  As Kugel said, he turned the more typical coast-to-coast journey 90 degrees, which took him through "a large swath of the nation that we coast dwellers often dismiss as flyover country."

I earlier wrote this blog post on Agricultural Law, focusing on Kugel's ruminations regarding all he learned about farming.  In this post, I want to focus more specifically on the Frugal Traveler's reflections on rurality.  Here are some quotes, some that use the word "rural," others that do not.

I suspected that spending most of my adult days in New York City ... had left significant gaps in my knowledge of America, not to mention unfair biases about the 10 heartland states I would be visiting ...  

My suspicion turned out to be true. Vague notions of the region were replaced by what I gleaned from museums and historical markers as well as from residents’ stories of their great-grandparents’ struggles as settlers.

I appreciate his expression of appreciation for the hard work the settlers did--hard work that contributes considerably to how we feed ourselves and, indeed, how we have done so for hundreds of years now.  If you need a reminder of that regarding the country's mid-section in particular, go read some Willa Cather.  (Take your cue from this, perhaps).

Speaking of Cather--and of immigration--Kugel is in touch with the role of immigrants then and now.  He writes: 

Of course, like New York City, the rural Midwest was the place many Europeans migrated when they came to the New World. There’s just been much less turnover, so more cultural relics have endured. My first clue came in the form of “Dutch letters,” S-shaped pastries for sale at the Downtown Farmers Market in Des Moines.

Later, Kugel writes of a detour to a new immigrant destination in Iowa--my term, not his.  Not far from the "New Holland" of Iowa, Pella, Kugel sought out an ethnic restaurant (again, my term, not his), which brought him to the 

unsigned La Frontera grocery store and into the back-room restaurant, which was crammed with Mexican concrete workers on their day off. As had become routine on this trip, I was leaving a state sure I had only just scratched the surface. 

Kugel also writes:    

Rural architecture also intrigued me. I stopped more than once to shoot picturesque barns and the grain elevators that tower with alarming incongruity over otherwise flat landscapes. And I couldn’t get over the old cars and rusty machinery that dotted many people’s lawns. “People are very junky in the Ozarks,” said Fred Pfister, a Missourian who had helped me find a real-deal fiddle jam. “They save everything because they think they might be able to cannibalize it someday.”

Those are Kugel's only uses of the word "rural," but he hits on lots of other rural themes/associations (e.g., religion and conservative politics, the latter illustrated by shocking anecdotes)--and a few legal issues, too--like here, where he writes of the huge annual motorcycle rally in Sturgis, South Dakota, in the shadow of Mount Rushmore :

I didn’t expect to learn all about motorcycle lawyers, a specialty I did not know existed (they are needed because after accidents, the justice system tilts against two-wheelers, I was told).

Don't miss readers' comments.  It seems Kugel's journey and his musings on it really got under the skin of some folks--both rural and urban.  

So much rural/ag news, so little time to blog

Here are a few rural (really ag) stories of the week that I didn't get time to attend to in a more timely fashion.  Both are out of California.

The first is an NPR follow up to an earlier piece on so-called "ag-gag laws", which were also the topic of this NYTimes story last week. (I wrote this post about that story, and Susan Schneider commented here on the AgLaw Blog.)  Alastair Bland writes for The Salt, NPR's food blog, about a proposed California law that is varyingly seen as good or not so good from the animal rights perspective.

Consider Assembly Bill 343 in California. Introduced in February, this bill would not prohibit a person from seeking employment at a slaughterhouse under false pretenses, which Iowa and several other states have outlawed. Nor would it forbid anyone from using a hidden camera while on the job, which Utah recently made illegal. All that AB 343 would do, in fact, is require that anyone who videotapes or records animal abuse turn over a copy of the evidence to police within 48 hours. 

It sounds like the type of bill that animal welfare groups would welcome — but it isn't. Rather, these groups have branded AB 343 as simply a new, and subtler, attempt to stifle undercover investigations of animal cruelty. 

"The 48-hour time limit is a new twist to stop people from compiling information," says Amanda Hitt of the Government Accountability Project, a Washington, D.C.-based group that helps investigate reports of animal abuses. 

According to Hitt, in order to prove that a serious animal abuse problem is occurring, undercover investigators must gather lengthy documentation. "You can't prove that animal abuse is systemic and recurring through one snapshot or video of an abused cow," she says.

The other recent story I want to highlight is also about California agriculture--or more specifically, aquaculture.  It is this NYTimes piece headlined, "Oyster Farm Caught up in Pipeline Politics."  The alternate headline is more detailed:  "Public Land Battle over Drakes Bay Oyster Draws Unlikely Allies." Norimitsu Onishi writes of the strange bedfellows that have been made as a result of Drakes Bay Oyster Company's pending loss of lease on public land in Point Reyes National Seashore, Marin County, north of San Francisco.  

The Lunny family, who own the Oyster Company, sued to retain their lease after Ken Salazar, as Secretary of the Interior, declined to renew it.  (Note that the the Lunnys bought eight years of a 40-year lease in 2004, knowing it would expire in November, 2012).  A federal court will decide next month whether the Lunny suit can move forward.  

Environmentalists seem generally to oppose the lease, but others support the Lunnys. Those "others" include posh Bay Area restauranteurs like Alice Waters of Chez Panisse.  Patricia Unterman, an owner of the Hayes Street Grill, which specializes in local seafood, endorsed the Lunny's suit, calling their Oyster operation "'such a rare and beautiful use of land and water' in an area with a long history of agriculture."  She called environmental groups' opposition to the oyster farm "very doctrinaire and unnuanced."  

But here's the really bizarre part:  They Lunny's Drakes Bay Oyster Company has become allied --sorta--with those seeking approval of the Keystone XL pipeline:   

Under the ... Energy Production and Project Delivery Act of 2013, permits for the nearly 2,000-mile Keystone XL pipeline would be expedited, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska would be opened for gas and oil development, more offshore drilling would be allowed – and the oyster farm’s operating permit would be extended for at least 10 years.

Kevin Lunny, one of the owners of the oyster farm, commented:  

Now people are saying we’re connected to right-wing groups, that we’ll have offshore drilling and it’ll be Drakes Bay Oyster’s fault that the Keystone pipeline gets built.  And we’re saying: ‘Where does this come from? Oh, my gosh.’ Other groups that we may or may not agree with have taken up the cause.

* * *

We realize that's not really in our best interest. 

You'll have to read more of the story to get a better sense of how the interests of a small-ish oyster farm and big energy converged, but I'll give you a hint that anti-government, Tea Party-type forces are implicated.

By the way, Onishi refers to the Drakes Bay Oyster Company as a "modest, family-run business," but many readers who commented on the story dispute that characterization, noting that the Lunnys have significant ranching interests in the Point Reyes area.  

New laws label investigative ag reporters "terrorists," expand defamation laws in favor of Big Ag

The New York Times reported today under the headline, "Taping of Farm Cruelty is Becoming a Crime" on new state laws that effectively insulate ag producers from undercover surveillance and exposure of cruelty to animals by imposing penalties on those who who engage in such surveillance and disclosure.  Here's an excerpt from the story by Richard Oppel, Jr.:

[Pr]oposed or enacted bills ... would make it illegal to covertly videotape livestock farms, or apply for a job at one without disclosing ties to animal rights groups. They have also drafted measures to require such videos to be given to the authorities almost immediately, which activists say would thwart any meaningful undercover investigation of large factory farms. 

In the past year, Iowa, Utah and Missouri passed laws of this sort, referred to by critics as "Ag Gag" bills. Indiana and Tennessee are expected to vote soon on similar measures, while states from California to Pennsylvania continue to debate them.  Bills of this sort have died recently in New Mexico and New Hampshire, and legislation in Wyoming stalled after animal rights activists, including Bob Barker, mounted vocal opposition.  Read more here.

The director of Congressional relations for the American Farm Bureau Federation, which lobbies for agricultural industries, noted that the videos "may seem troubling to someone unfamiliar with farming,"but "caution[ed] that some [of these] methods represent best practices endorsed by animal-care experts."

Prof. Jedediah Purdy responds to that point, in a sense, in this op-ed response to Oppel's Story.  Purdy's piece is headlined "Open the Slaughterhouses."  He writes:

[T]ransparency ... is why we should require confined-feeding operations and slaughterhouses to install webcams at key stages of their operations. List the URL’s to the video on the packaging. There would be no need for human intrusion into dangerous sites. No tricky angles or scary edits by activists. Just the visual facts. If the operators felt their work misrepresented, they could add cameras to give an even fuller picture.

Lawyer and wife win $13.8 million defamation award in non metro Texas

Last month, a jury awarded a Texas lawyer and his wife $13.78 million in damages arising from defamatory statements that defendants made about the plaintiffs, Mark and Rhonda Lesher, on the Topix forum.  Read more here.  At the time the defamatory posts were made, the plaintiffs were living and working in Clarksville, Texas, population 3,883, the county seat of Red River County, population 12,860.  Rhonda Lesher ran a spa there.  The plaintiffs alleged that, following the scurrilous allegations made about the plaintiffs, accusing them of sexual deviance and drug dealing, the plaintiffs businesses and professional reputations suffered so much that they eventually moved to neighboring Bowie County, Texas.

This all makes me wonder about the extent to which the small town milieu in Clarksville contributed to the damage done; there's little doubt that most people in Clarksville knew the Leshers before the offending statements were made and even less that they were unknown to any other residents following the statements.  On the other hand, moving to a contiguous county probably does little to launder their reputations--but maybe the $13.78 million jury vindication does that.

Read an earlier post about Topix in the context of small towns here.

Oglala Sioux file suit against beer distributors

A student called to my attention last month a law suit the Oglala Sioux have filed in federal court against Anheuser-Busch and some other large breweries, along with four stores that sell beer in tiny Whiteclay, Nebraska, population 14. Turns out, more than 13,000 cans of beer and malt liquor are sold in Whiteclay every day, and the reason lies across the South Dakota state line: the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. The New York Times reports on the lawsuit today, and the headline for Timothy Williams's story sums up the situation well, "At Tribe's Door, A Hub of Beer and Heartache."

The Pine Ridge Reservation has been "dry" (an alcohol prohibition area) since the 1970s, but a devastating alcohol problem persists there. The Oglala Sioux blame the beer distributors, accusing them of "encouraging the illegal purchase, possession, transport and consumption of alcohol on the reservation" where "[f]etal alcohol syndrome, fatal drunken driving accidents and beer-fueled murders have cast a pall over Pine Ridge for decades." The Sioux are seeking $500 million for costs that the tribe has borne for health care, law enforcement and social services linked to chronic alcohol consumption. The suit also seeks to limit the amount of beer that stores in Whiteclay can sell. The complaint alleges that the defendants "know that they are selling alcohol to people who have no permissible place to consume it, and who are smuggling it onto the reservation for illegal use and resale."

Williams describes the devastation that is Whiteclay:

After the lawsuit was filed, Whiteclay's two-lane road, Highway 87, bustled with traffic driving to and from the beer stores. Dozens of people in various states of inebriation wandered along the road. Other men and women were passed out in front of abandoned buildings. A Hank Williams, Jr. 45, "I'd Rather Be Gone," was among the detritus along the road, as well as empty liquor bottles, a copy of "Tabernacle Hymns No. 3," soiled clothing and a dead puppy.

Williams also explains some of the law enforcement limitations related to the easily available alcohol. First, the Sheridan County sheriff's department employs only five deputies, and the department is based 19 miles away in the county seat, Rushville. Those five deputies serve a county with just 5,469 residents spread over 2,446 square miles. That's a population density of just 2.2 persons/square mile. The Sheridan County sheriff says his deputies patrol Whiteclay two or three times a day, but with budget cuts, they cannot expect to do more.

Meanwhile, across the state line, the Pine Ridge Reservation is roughly the size of Connecticut, but it, too, is sparsely populated, with just 45,000 residents. The tribal police department has just 38 officers, a drop from 101 just six years ago. Ninety percent of the criminal cases in the tribe's court system are linked to alcohol, as are a similar percentage of illnesses among tribal members. Tribal police made 20,000 alcohol-related arrests last year. On the Pine Ridge Reservation, any sign of alcohol use, e.g., slurred speech, walking funny, can get a person arrested.

Williams shares an anecdote that highlights the inefficacy of the various law enforcement agencies in this place that he characterizes as "lawless." Williams describes a gathering of Sioux drinking in Whiteclay; one shouts obscenities as a Nebraska State Patrol officer passes. "The trooper slammed on the brakes and shouted obscenities back, threatening to call in the sheriff to 'clear this town.' An hour later, there was no sheriff, and the crowds had grown thicker."

Williams touches on another rural angle in this story--the role of the beer stores in Whiteclay's survival. In addition to the beer stores, the town has two grocery stores and an auto body repair shop. Williams quotes Victor Clarke, the owner of one of the grocery stores, which does not sell alcohol:

People don't want Whiteclay to go away ... The state of Nebraska doesn't want Whiteclay to go away because it allows problems to be isolated in this one little place. You hear people in the towns around here, saying, 'We don't want these guys in our town.'

Clarke makes the point that if the Sioux weren't getting their beer in Whiteclay, they could get it in any number of other places an hour away. By permitting the sale of unlimited beer in Whiteclay, the problem is cabined and concentrated.

This seems to me a truly pitiful effort on the part of all of the governments involved to address a complex and entrenched problem.

Child labor and US farms

That’s right, in the United States, children as young as twelve can legally work in the fields. They can pick your berries and even drive a tractor. But recently, a slew of articles have been published about new child labor regulations in the U.S.; you can find them here, here, here and here. Even The Daily Yonder featured the story in one of their Tuesday Roundups.

The media interest in this issue has been triggered by new rules from the U.S. Department of Labor, rules aimed at improving safety for children in the fields. The new rules include a ban on farm workers under the age of 16 handling most “power-driven equipment” (such as tractors) and from contributing to the “cultivation, harvesting and curing of tobacco.” Further, it would prohibit children under the age of 18 from working “in the storing, marketing and transporting of farm product raw materials.” According to a report called "Occupational injuries among young workers," most youth work fatalities occurred in agriculture and about two thirds of these fatalities were attributed to transportation accidents, particularly accidents, which occurred either by truck or by tractor.

In fact between 1993 and 2002, tractor accident counted for a quarter of all youth worker fatalities. The proponents of the legislation say these changes are in response to these shocking statistics and insist that they are “not talking about the children of growers, but children employed as farm workers.” Secretory of Labor Hilda Solis insisted this would not apply to children who work on farms operated or owned by parents but rather is to protect “Children employed in agriculture [who] are some of the most vulnerable workers in America. Ensuring their welfare is a priority of the department, and this proposal is another element of our comprehensive approach.” Many farmer groups and rural-state politicians disagree. They are up in arms about these proposed changes as they feel it will stop many farming families from employing their underage children.

Rachel Leven’s piece in The Hill takes a refreshing rural-urban perspective on the situation. A group of more than 70 House representatives sent a letter to DOL indicating the rule “challenges the conventional wisdom of what defines a family farm in the United States.” In response to the law, Representative Denny Rehberg states

You’ve got a president of the United States … from Chicago, you’ve got a director for secretary of Labor who’s pushing this from Los Angeles, and you have to think to yourself, do you have any idea what it’s like not just to run an agricultural business in a rural state … but to raise a family in one?

Leven summarizes this quote as mean that Rehberg feels these “proposals are coming from officials who do not understand rural life.” While there are exemptions for family run farms, these exemptions would not apply if parents did not full ownership (which is a common situation today). Further, many feel the necessary precautions are already in place. For example, current regulations allow children to operate heavy equipment if they have taken a safety. A letter written opposing this regulation and signed by more than 30 Nebraska state senators further insisted that "[d]oing away with this exemption will not only reduce the number of youth getting proper training on operating power equipment, but will deny them the experience and responsibility associated with learning to operate the equipment safely and effectively." Representative Lucille Roybal-Allard however insists these farm regulations are not a rural-versus-urban issue. Rather, she feels the “focus needs to be that there are an estimated 400,000 children working on farms that are not owned by family members and those children are not being protected by our current labor laws.”

I am personally conflicted. On the one hand, I support farmers, their sustainability, and their unique understanding of how best to live and thrive. However, I cannot get over the BPL analysis (weighing the burden of taking a precaution against the probability times the gravity of loss if the precaution is not taken) that I learned in my first year law school torts class. The statistics make me believe that the risk is simply too high, and the farming communities need to find alternative ways to teach the next generation of farmers that does not put our nation's youth at fatal risk.

Upper Big Branch settlement unsettling for miners' families

News of the U.S. government's settlement with the owners of the Upper Big Branch Mine, site of an April 2010 mining disaster, was met with mixed reviews this week. The U.S. Attorney for the southern district of West Virginia announced on Wednesday that Alpha Energy, parent company of Massey Energy, which owns and operates the Upper Big Branch Mine, would pay a grand total of $209 million in restitution and civil and criminal penalties.

But those injured in the explosion and the families of the 29 miners who died in it are not pleased, in spite of the fact that $46.5 million of the settlement money is earmarked for them, $1.5 million per family. The families are unhappy because the terms of the settlement protect Alpha from criminal prosecution, though individual Massey executives are not similarly protected. According to a story in the New York Times,

Many were hoping for criminal charges against the people who ran Massey, the company that, according to the federal government's own review, knowingly put their relatives in harm's way.

"Families believe that senior executives should be prosecuted, but they don't have any great faith that they will be, and that's what they're afraid of," said Mark Moreland, a lawyer who represents the families of two victims.

* * *

But industry observers warned that because of weak mining safety laws, prosecutors face a steep uphill battle pursuing the biggest prize--criminal convictions of the powerful people who ran Massey.

So far, only the mine's security chief, who is relatively low in Massey's hierarchy, is facing criminal charges.

Many agree that the Mine Safety and Health Administration--roundly criticized in the wake of the Upper Big Branch disaster (read my post on SALTLaw Blog here)--has stepped up enforcement of the relevant laws. But Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis notes the need for tougher criminal penalties for those who violate the law.

Wednesday's agreement does not stop individual families from pursuing claims against Massey, and eight of those suits have already settled. The $1.5 million per family functions as an offset to any additional jury award or settlement each surviving family is able to achieve or negotiate.

The remainder of the $209 million settlement includes:

• $80 million to improve safety and infrastructure in all of Alpha and Massey's mines
• $48 million to establish a mine health and safety foundation and
• $35 million in fines and fees that Massey owed to the Mine Health and Safety Administration

Earlier posts about the Upper Big Branch disaster--the worst mining accident in 40 years--are here, here, here and here.

Have you been accessing your land?

Everyone who reads this article is a land owner. What? You didn't think you were? Well technically you are right, you don't hold any title, but you are entitled to access and use millions of acres of Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and National Forest Service land. That's not a misprint, there are millions of acres open to the public and are collectively called "public land." Take a look at this map and chart that shows the acreage of public land in the western United States alone.

I'm sure that most people think of public land in terms of the National Park System. Places where tourists visit to car camp and enjoy some very beautiful sights while not completely "roughing it." Meanwhile the BLM and Forest Service lands are relatively underused by the greater general public in part because there are no "big attractions" or few modern utilities.

While the whole population of the United States may be under-utilizing public land, there are a lot of rural people who use public land. Many ranchers supplement their limited property ownership by grazing their cattle and sheep on public land. The government occasionally contracts with timber companies to harvest trees for some supplemental income for the Agriculture and Interior departments and create rural jobs. Many ordinary rural residents can go onto public land to cut firewood or hunt for food. But even with these and many other uses, a lot of the public land maintained by BLM and the Forest Service go unused.

Part of the problem is access to the land. Usually the only way to access a public land parcel is to drive there on a county or Forest Service road. Some of these roads are paved and can be accessed by everyday cars, but many are dirt roads that can only be traversed by four wheel drive vehicles. If you don't have a 4X4, well you're just out of luck.

Another problem is parcels that are completely surrounded by private property owned by people who do not allow the public to cross to access the public land. Take a look at this map of the area near where I personally hunt. All the green areas to the north and east on the map is National Forest land managed by the Forest Service, and in theory open to everyone. But some of the smaller green squares (like those near Dinsmores and Janes Place) have no roads leading into them. These parcels are cut off from the general public by private owners.

This is illustrated by a series of articles published by Bugle magazine entitled "This Land is Your Land" (Volume 28, Issue 6, Nov/Dec 2011). One story, "Opening the Gate to Devil's Canyon," outlines how a private land owner put up a gate on the only access road preventing the public from accessing the 20,000 acre Little Mountain Wilderness in Wyoming. Public access advocates lost their battle for access in a federal court because the road was private with no easement. The only way the gate was opened was the eventual purchase of the private land by the BLM. In another story, a hunter was tired of being thwarted by a private landowner. So he and his buddies hired out a helicopter to access public land to go elk hunting. That's not an option for most public land users.

Access can become a major legal issue. The land where I hunt has five access easements attached to the property. My cousin owns the property, and if he were to cut any easement off... hello lawsuit. This legal complexity applies to public lands as well. Because it can be such a hassle to access some public land, there are many areas that will receive few users. If we don't use these lands, what is the point of keeping them public?

But there are still large swaths of territory that is public and accessible. These lands are very vital to many rural communities and are beautiful in their own right. So if I may suggest, maybe hold off on making another trip to Yosemite this summer and visit some public lands like King's Range or the Marble Mountains. After all, you own them.

Internet anonymity undoes rural lack of anonymity, taking gossip to new "heights"

A front-page story in today's New York Times features a range of interesting assertions about rural society, rural culture, and rural difference. The story is "In Small Towns, Gossip moves to the Web, and Turns Vicious." The dateline is Mountain Grove, Missouri, population 4,544, in the Missouri Ozarks, but journalist A.G. Sulzberger quotes academics generalizing about rural places, particularly rural areas of the the South and Appalachia. Here's an excerpt about the "complications" arising from the growing use of social media in rural America, where the population is "older, poorer and more remote" and has typically "lagged the rest of the country in embracing the Internet":

The same Web sites created as places for candid talk about local news and politics are also hubs of unsubstantiated gossip, stirring widespread resentment in communities where ties run deep, memories run long and anonymity is something of a novel concept.

By way of explanation, Sulzberger quotes Professor Christian Sandvig of the University of Illinois, who has studied rural use of social media:

Something about rural culture seems to make people want to have conversations in public.

Using Internet sites such as those hosted by Topix, rural residents can have those conversations anonymously, thus defying the everyone-knows-everyone constraints long associated with small towns. Sulzberger colorfully observes that while "online negativity seems to dissipate naturally in a large city, it often grates like steel wool in a small town where insults are not easily forgotten." He again focuses on the rural-urban distinction with this comment:

Topix, a site lightly trafficked in cities, enjoys a dedicated and growing following across the Ozarks, Appalachia and much of the rural South, establishing an unexpected niche in communities of a few hundred or few thousand people — particularly in what Chris Tolles, Topix’s chief executive, calls “the feud states.”

Sulzberger goes on to use as an example of such a place Pikeville, Kentucky, population 6,361, once the stomping grounds of the Hatfields and McCoys. (The "feud" reference reminds me of Jim Webb's book on the Scots-Irish, Born Fighting, and Joe Bageant's characterization of white working-class rural folks as "warmongering.") Another Kentucky community, Hyden, has a population of under 500, but had 107 simultaneous users on the Hyden Topix forum one day this month.

Topix does not require commentators to identify themselves, and it even permits the same user to claim a different alias for each post. Topix does, however, make some effort to remove comments that are "obvious[ly]" defamatory, and it automatically screens out comments that feature racial slurs and such. Topix had previously required payment for expedited review of allegedly libelous content, but it ceased that practice after the attorneys general from 30 states challenged it. As a forum, Topix is immune from liability for defamation, but individual commentators in the forum could be liable, if identified. The company reported that it receives about one subpoena a day for the computer addresses of anonymous commentators. Not surprisingly, however, many who feel aggrieved by gossip on the service don't have the wherewithal to sue. They may thus find themselves stuck with whatever new reputation fellow townspeople have endowed them.

Litigious Humboldt

For an out-of-the-way county like Humboldt, has seen a lot of big legal action recently. These lawsuits will have significant impacts on the future of the area.

Some of the biggest litigation involved the Pacific Lumber Company, also known as PL or PALCO. PL was originally a well-respected lumber company, with ample land and what seemed to be inexhaustible timber resources. That is until 1985, when PL was the victim of a hostile takeover.

After the Maxxam Corporation acquired PL, it began over harvesting the timber, causing a great deal of anger and divisiveness in Humboldt. There were allegations that Maxxam falsified documents dealing with timber harvests and sales of land, prompting District Attorney Paul Gallegos to file a complaint for fraud and personally try the case.

The case was eventually thrown out by the courts in 2008, but not before the case divided the county in an “us vs. them” battle culminating in an unsuccessful recall election against Mr. Gallegos in March 2004. PL’s legal woes continued when creditors squabbled over the remaining carcass of a once proud company that Maxxam ran into the ground. The restructured company, now known as Humboldt Redwood Company, is struggling to survive with a skeleton mill.

While PL seemed to be falling apart at the seams, another company seemed very stable: Humboldt Creamery, the local dairy co-op. With a number of high-profile contracts including making ice cream for Costco and providing the military with most of its powdered milk needs, the future of the co-op seemed bright. Until 2009 when the CEO, Rich Ghilarducci, admitted to cooking the books. He did so rather than admitting to co-op members that the Creamery was having financial problems.

The resulting chaos ended with the sale of the Creamery to a corporation and a 30-month sentence for the disgraced former CEO. Many dairy families thought that Mr. Ghilarducci was let off easy by an urban federal court not familiar with farm country values. The once proud co-op run by the dairy farmers themselves has now gone corporate, and the farmers aren’t too happy with the court's role in the downfall.

Now Humboldt finds itself embroiled in more litigation. CalTrans and the Federal Department of Transportation are looking to widen Highway 101 through Richardson Grove State Park. Large redwood trees flank the narrow road so tightly no long tractor-trailers can pass. The plan was to remove a few of the trees and widen the road to a point that more commercial vehicles could reach Humboldt and possibly spur an economic upturn in a county losing more and more blue collar jobs.

But environmentalists want to protect the trees, and some locals feel that better connections with the rest of California will damage the unique feel Humboldt County has as a mostly isolated area. They have begun filing injunctions to block the planned widening creating more tension between different factions in Humboldt. Some locals feel that a bunch of hippies with no roots in the area are abusing the legal system to stop progress.

Humboldt appears to be turning to the legal system to resolve more of its conflicts. Yet as a rural county, is this an expected behavior? For a county with more trees and cows than people, and which prides itself on being mellow and accepting, Humboldt certainly seems to have a lot of attorneys running around these days.