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An Editorial Series
April 2, 2002

   In the summer of Daniel Harrington’s seventh year, he, his pack of friends and his Labrador retriever Buddy did what boys of the South have done for countless generations: They spent their time roaming green fields and thickets, damming up streams, skipping rocks across placid beaver ponds, dodging the odd moccasin, hurling dirt clods and generally experiencing that rare feeling of freedom from school, responsibility and worry — and being with nature.

   Paradise reigned for the first-grader in and around his yellow house atop a hill in the small subdivision of Spring Brook, a spot just shy of Alexandria, off the Gate Five Road. He had his mom Judy, a nurse at Regional Medical Center, and his two older brothers Andrew and Josh. The family had moved a few months earlier to the three-bedroom house from what Judy describes as a tiny place in Ohatchee. She was working long hours to support the boys, but was on top of the bills and building for the future.

  All was well in Spring Brook in 1998.

   Then the hogs came.

   “I didn’t think anything at first,” said Judy sitting at her kitchen table. “A sign went up saying a meat company was coming and I thought, great, a meat shop or butcher shop. That’ll be nice. Then the next thing I know, there are these huge trucks hauling in hundreds of hogs at a time. It’s unbearable. Had I known this was going to happen, I would have never come here.”

   The Harringtons had fallen victim to a hog slaughtering operation owned by Diamond Meat Co., a butcher pen of staggering proportions. Around 250 feet from their house, and no more than 100 feet from their neighbor’s back door, is a brick and tin structure that witnesses the cacophonous slaughter of hundreds of pigs a day, the spilling of gallons of blood and the disposal of thousands upon thousands of pounds of pig excrement. And if that isn’t bad enough, residents here say most days when the render truck stops around, it is packed so full of remains and body fluids that it sloshes onto the pavement when the truck pulls out onto Gate Five Road.

  The squealing, stinking, noisy hogs arrived in a flash, and in a flash, Daniel Harrington’s magical boyhood was over and his mother’s quest to build a better life for her children, a place where they could enjoy a late summer’s afternoon, a cookout with family, a walk through the woods, was through.

   How could this be? How could a full-scale slaughterhouse set up shop literally a stone’s throw from a residential neighborhood?

   For the answer to that question, turn your eyes to Alabama’s 1901 Constitution. Land-use planning and zoning — the power to designate areas as residential, commercial or agricultural — in rural areas is almost nonexistent in Alabama and what little there is resides in the state Legislature down in Montgomery.

   You need not worry about pigs moving in next door if you live inside the city limits. Anniston, Oxford, Jacksonville and the other cities all have zoning authority. But the unincorporated parts of Calhoun County, where around one-third of the people in this county live, is wide open for any business that wants to locate there. The unincorporated parts of just about all of Alabama are vulnerable to the same kinds of threats.

   Frustrating? Of course. And that goes not only for the people at Spring Brook but for people all over the county and the state. The people at Spring Brook have only one recourse; they must file a civil lawsuit against Diamond Meat Co. And that is exactly what most people in the subdivision have done. But that means the people must find a lawyer who will take the case, and they have to pay the expenses. It is not easy and it is not cheap, but it is the only way.

   And amazingly enough, the state Legislature is now considering a law brought forward by the heavyweight of special interest groups, Alfa, called the Family Farm Protection Act that would shield companies such as Diamond Meat from just this kind of litigation. Last year, the House passed the measure by a huge margin. It died in the Senate.

   The Harringtons’ home falls in Commissioner Randy Wood’s district. Many in the subdivision have spoken to him about the farm; all come away appalled that their County Commission and their commissioner, the man who is directly accountable to them, can’t do “a darn thing to get rid of the farm.”

   “I understand how they feel,” said Wood. “It is just not right. But believe me, I am as frustrated by this as they are. That is a residential area, and that subdivision was there first, before the slaughterhouse came in. My gosh, it draws flies, stinks to high heaven and just fouls everything.

   But the commission can’t do anything. We don’t have any zoning authority, and the hog farming companies can do pretty much what they want. And that just isn’t right. Those people have not been treated right. They dumped their life savings into those houses, and now they can’t sell them if they had to. Who would buy? It’s just a sad situation.”

   The Harrington’s state legislator, Gerald Willis, a 20-year veteran of Montgomery, feels their pain too.

   “If I were them, I would take that to court. I’d do just exactly what they are doing right now,” said Willis who oddly enough is a co-sponsor of the Family Farm Protection Act which would shield Diamond Meat from the very lawsuit the Spring Brook residents are bringing.

   That’s all fine and good, but in the meantime Daniel Harrington hardly goes outside these days.

   Sitting at the kitchen table with his mom and new baby sister Michelle, baseball and glove in hand, Daniel speaks almost stoically about the recent past.

   “Before the smell got so bad,” he says while popping a ball into his glove, “the first thing I would do when I got home from school was to go skating with my friends. Now we mostly stay inside. The stink is too bad.”

   The ultimate humiliation for Judy, her Waterloo with the hog farm if you will, came on an unseasonably warm Thanksgiving in 1998. As family gatherings go, it was an unmitigated disaster.

   “I really wanted to put on a good show for the family,” said Judy. “We were going to have a big to-do. I was planning on the kids playing football out in the yard, everyone flowing in and out of the house and then we were all going to sit down to this huge spread I had prepared. But the flies were everywhere, big green blowflies. And the smell was horrible that day. The kids tried to go outside for a bit, but when they came back inside, they smelled like it. After that, I tried to get the family to come over again, but my whole family said, ‘no way, we’re not coming to your place to eat; it just kills our appetite.’”

   Of course, thanks to the 1901 Constitution, the Diamond Meat Company’s slaughterhouse isn’t the only intrusion into the lives of the people of rural Calhoun County. Take a drive through the county sometime and count the number of junkyards and places where commercial development hugs a residential area.

   But for the people of Calhoun County, besides the hog farms, perhaps the most visible example of the absence of planning and zoning are the cell phone towers that have started sprouting like Dandelions on a spring day.

   Take a drive east out Choccolocco Road, just outside the Anniston city limits, and you’ll see a monstrous cell phone tower on the right that looks as if it is waiting for traffic to pass so it can dart across the road. Drive anywhere these days and you are liable to see one of these hulks marring the landscape.

   The absence of planning and zoning and the proliferation of cell phone towers in unincorporated areas is perhaps best illustrated by two towers not a mile from each other in Golden Springs.

   Alongside Coleman Road, between Greenbrier-Dear and Golden Springs Road, sits a cell phone tower that is like any other in the countryside: It is ugly as all get out. Because the tower sits in a small chunk of land that, although surrounded by the city, is unincorporated it is technically in the county. Because of that, the contractor that built the tower did not have to bow to strict regulations set down by the city.

   Now go a mile south, to the Forest Lawn Gardens cemetery, which is in the city. Tucked back in the woods behind the graves and the mausoleum, is a flagpole, complete with an Old Glory flying at the top.

   But look closer. The flagpole is a fully functional cell phone tower, as powerful, and as efficient as the one on Coleman. It’s just more pleasing to the eye.

   But the issue of hog farms, cell towers and junkyards isn’t just about making the countryside look pretty, it is about maintaining property values and being comfortable with the knowledge the home you put your hard-earned money and time into will not fall victim to the tragedy that befell the Spring Brook subdivision. It’s even about defining and maintaining a sort of land ethic that balances the age old Alabama motto, “you can’t tell a man what he can and can’t do with his property” with trying to keep a hog farm from moving in next door to your home.

   Alabama doesn’t have that balance today. But if the good people of the state are given the chance, or if the lawmakers have the courage, to rewrite the 1901 Constitution, then we might just be able to give Daniel Harrington his childhood back.

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