When Montpelier Steps in to Table Waste 
By Martin Harris

Readers of this column who are also in-migrants to Vermont from New Jersey (those two demographics may not overlap very much) and are of the Silent Generation or older will recall the pig-farms of the New Jersey Meadowlands. That’s the vast wasteland/wetland area which is the formerly-cat-tail-filled drainage basin of the lower Hackensack River, and more recently the filled-in site for everything from a sports stadium (East Rutherford) to a shipping dock system (Newark). At one point in fairly recent history it was the home of uncounted hundreds of  small pig farms, centering around Secaucus, a village industry based on the re-cycling (before that word had become trendy) of porcine-edible table waste from New York City restaurants only a few miles to the east. At its height the pig-industry "employed" 40,000 short-term-career curly-tailed eater-workers, a 1984 Rutgers University study reports. Now it’s down to 24 farms, from 250 in 1963. Presently, Secaucus is more infamous as the demolition-dumping destination of the once glorious New York City Pennsylvania Station, a 1963 permitting decision by a bunch of NYC planners and zoners which I can’t adequately describe in this family publication, than as an odoriferous pig-farming enclave.

The Rutgers writers attribute the opening of the Secaucus pig-farm boom to the opening of the Holland Tunnel in 1927, efficiently connecting lower Manhattan restaurants to nearby available pig-friendly swamp acreage, and its subsequent decline to the opening of the Giants Stadium in 1976, when sports patrons reacted negatively to the then-famous pig-smell in the local air. By 1959, with the opening of the New Jersey Turnpike, it had already become possible for low-value land uses to move further from NYC by commuting their supplies and products in and out, and so the more distant pig-feeders are now part of the general urban dispersal pattern despised by anti-sprawl advocates. Yes, there are still table-waste pig feeders in New Jersey. Indeed, the Rutgers writers don’t even mention the 1982 adoption of Federal regulations requiring pre-feeding heat-treatment of meat-category table wastes, which you can read for yourself (it’s only three paragraphs) in the Code of Federal Regulations, Title 9, page 914, as any part of a supposed pig-feed industry-killer. But soon there won’t be any pig-feeders in Vermont, which is a curly tale all by itself.

You can credit this huge step for mankind to gardeners/activists in the Town of Burke, who have gleefully blown the regulatory whistle on one George Wagner, a local who has been in the table-waste (partially from the town school lunch-room) pig-feeding business for 30 years, but no more. Now, the table waste will go to the gardeners in town for free compost. Their demand is based on a long unenforced Vermont statute prohibiting the feeding of garbage to pigs, according to reporter Amy Nixon of the St. Johnsbury Caledonian-Record. And it’s quite legal: read it for yourself in Vermont Statutes Annotated,  Title 6, Chapter 113, paragraphs 1671-2. Unlike the Federal regulation, which requires that meat wastes be heat-treated prior to pig-feeding, Vermont law goes farther to prohibit such re-cycling entirely. What’s interesting about this tale isn’t so much the skillful use of the law to grab the table waste from one  re-cycler and give it to others (themselves) more entitled, in their own opinion;  it’s the growing list of areas in which Vermont’s Beautiful People and politically-dominant Gentry-Left (the two demographics pretty much overlap) have, on the basis of their own innately superior  wisdom and judgment, made Vermont law more restrictive and demanding than Federal law.

A partial list of such areas includes the American with Disabilities Act, wherein Vermont has included a number of handicap-access requirements not found in Federal law;  more stringent requirements for asbestos management in buildings; more stringent requirements for radiation management at Vermont Yankee; and even activist demands for more stringent air-quality standards at International Paper’s New York State plant because prevailing winds are westerly. One area in which the B-P’s have chosen easier standards: locally-purchased school achievement tests, to supplant the Federal requirements, so that Vermont students appear more capable than they really are.

It makes you wonder why Vermont bothers staying in the Union; but, of course, as you already know, it has its own little Gentry-Left secession movement, headquartered in Charlotte, in progress. 
 

Martin Harris is a former Chairman of Citizens for Property Rights