PIONEER, Ohio — Nearly 300 people attended an Ohio Environmental Protection Agency hearing Monday night at North Central Local High School to weigh in on a discharge permit for what would be one of America’s largest indoor salmon-rearing facilities.
Although AquaBounty Farms Ohio LLC obtained a permit it needs for construction from the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, the project cannot proceed without the state EPA’s discharge permit.
Nobody from the company spoke at the hearing. Pioneer Mayor Ed Kidston, who owns 83.3 acres the company has agreed to buy and is one of the project’s biggest proponents, listened for the first hour before leaving for a village council meeting without making any comments.
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Tom Henry
AquaBounty Farms Ohio is a subsidiary of Massachusetts-based AquaBounty Technologies. The company hopes to build on a site in Williams County near the nexus of Ohio, Michigan, and Indiana.
Several people identified themselves as residents of the other two states, and said they were concerned about impact on private water wells drawing from the tri-state Michindoh Aquifer. Many people also expressed concerns about western Lake Erie.
AquaBounty plans a daily discharge of about 4.4 million gallons of wastewater treated from the plant and wants a permit that allows discharges of as much as 5.3 million gallons a day. It wants to pull water from the aquifer and discharge it into the St. Joseph River, a Maumee River tributary.
Doug Eisel, who farms 600 acres of corn and soybeans near Alvordton, Ohio, said the St. Joseph occasionally backs up and floods his property.
“Now, they want to dump all of this [wastewater] in the river,” he said, adding that more flooding seems inevitable.
Joyce Konieczny, a Millbury, Ohio, resident with a family farm in Hudson, Mich., read a section of a U.S. EPA guideline that states affected community residents must be consulted whenever there is a project under consideration that could degrade an existing waterway.
“No, we don’t want the quality of our water degraded,” she told the agency.
Tom Henry
Ms. Konieczny also questioned how the Ohio EPA will keep high levels of ammonia and nitrates out of the rivers and, eventually, the lake.
“We're talking about a lot of wastewater,” she said, expressing fear it will send more algae-forming nitrogen to western Lake Erie.
Ohio EPA officials said the company will be required to submit regular samples. But under questioning, they conceded those samples will be mostly self-reported.
Heather Lauer, an Ohio EPA public involvement coordinator who moderated the meeting, had to remind people several times that no decision had been made by that agency and written comments will be accepted through Sept. 19.
“There’s been no decision yet,” Ms. Lauer said. “We are applying what they are asking for to Ohio law.”
Ashley Ward, assistant chief of the Ohio EPA’s surface water division, said the U.S. EPA’s Midwest regional office in Chicago will review any wastewater discharge permit the state agency issues. Permits are issued under what’s known as the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System.
“The NPDES permit will require monitoring,” Ms. Ward said. “All NPDES permit holders take samples.”
Erin Sherer, manager of the Ohio EPA’s permit-to-install and anti-degradation programs, said AquaBounty has proposed recycling 1.5 million gallons of wastewater a day.
“Their production is going to fluctuate,” Ms. Sherer said.
Several residents said they would like to see the company recycle a much higher percentage if it gets an NPDES permit.
The state DNR permit allows the company to withdraw up to 3 million gallons of water from an underground aquifer each day, so long as its consumptive use does not exceed 0.065 million gallons a day.
The salmon farm, which under that construction permit is to be built north of Pioneer in Williams County’s Madison Township, is supported by the Ohio Department of Development and the Toledo-Lucas County Port Authority. The latter’s board of directors agreed last October to issue $300 million in bonds to build the salmon farm after being approached by the Williams County Economic Development Corp. and other state and regional officials, including Regional Growth Partnership/Jobs Ohio.
Sylvia Wulf, AquaBounty’s president and chief executive officer, has said in the past that her company takes a “science-based approach” to raise salmon.
“We prioritize the importance of being a good neighbor and our role in providing economic support to Pioneer and Williams County,” she said after the construction permit was issued in March.
AquaBounty spokesmen have said the project is expected to cost $290 million to $320 million, generate 100 to 120 jobs, and yield $15 million over 15 years for schools, primarily those in the North Central Local School District.
Salmon are to be housed in a 479,000-square-foot building to be built on 85 acres inside the recently annexed North Pioneer Industrial Park, eight times as large as AquaBounty’s next-largest facility in Albany, Ind.
As much as 27 million gallons of water is to be kept inside the building at any given time, all of it continually recirculated for the fish.
The plant is expected to produce more than 22 million pounds of fish annually. Only one other salmon farm in the United States, in South Florida, has that kind of capacity.