An attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center, Kay Slaughter has had a long involvement with politics and the environment. This former mayor of Charlottesville also served as a founding member and president of the Virginia Conservation Network.

 

“In the early to mid-’90s, I started working on Virginia water issues,” Slaughter says. “There were a number of issues that I dealt with, but one specific multi-year issue was the issue of citizen standing. That is the right of citizens to be able to appeal permit decisions by the water, waste or air board in court. Virginia law had been determined as limiting appeals only to the permittee. … We really felt like that was an issue of equity and justice and helped to make for a more even playing field. So I became very active in legislative efforts to change that law. Eventually, the law was changed in 1997.

“I was also involved in the wetlands regulations, helping to pass the wetlands law, and I was involved in the Poultry Management Waste Act in 1999, working on regulations in relation to poultry waste.

 

“I’ve also been involved a lot with [confined animal feeding] issues—in large-scale industrial farming—when you have 2,800 or more animals confined in a small space. CFOs are covered by the Clean Water Act, and thus by Virginia’s law. When we got involved in it in the ’90s, it was because there was such an increase in CFO farming in North Carolina and they were pushing into Virginia. There are still many places in the Commonwealth—in Southside—where there were real harms happening to neighbors and other farmers because of odors. I mean tremendous odors.

 

Slaughter praises DEQ’s efforts to give Virginians a stronger voice in environmental decision making. “One of the good things that DEQ did was when Director Bob Burnley initiated a Community Involvement Task Force. I think there were some significant changes made in trying to get more input from citizens and trying to have DEQ regional meetings and open houses. I was a member of the task force, and we tried to do things to make the citizen boards more accessible so that people could come and express their concerns about issues. And there were a number of changes that Bob really took on with Kathy Frahm [the late DEQ policy director] —she was such a great community involvement person. That was a really significant achievement.”