Fish Farm Flap Makes a Stink in Grayling

The Au Sable River is a sacred place for people who love to fly fish. A particularly pristine stretch is known as the Holy Waters; anything that threatens this stream is sacrilege.

A Department of Environmental Quality permit that would enable a large-scale aquaculture facility in Grayling spurred a group that reveres the river into action. The Anglers of the Au Sable challenged the permit on environmental grounds, leading to an 18-day hearing in Lansing and thousands of pages of exhibits.

SACRILEGE ON THE AU SABLE

What alarmed Anglers members about the DEQ permit was the volume of fish that would be produced and what they believe the consequences would be. The permit allows the daily discharge of 8.64 million gallons of wastewater into the river and allows the operator to produce 300,000 pounds of fish per year, up from the previous 20,000 pounds.

Opponents fear this would open a drainpipe of phosphorus and fish excrement pouring into the river. What’s perhaps most troubling to critics is that the permit acknowledges the facility will reduce water quality on the Au Sable in exchange for economic benefits.

That spurred the Anglers to launch a legal and political war to protect these fishing grounds. For these partisans, causing harm to the Au Sable is out of the question.

“I disagree that there are any benefits that outweigh the substantial risk to the local economy and culture,” said Joshua Greenberg, owner of the Gates Au Sable Lodge and author of “Rivers of Sand,” a book about fly fishing in northern Michigan. “It makes no sense. This is the one thing that consistently brings money into Grayling. This is the renewable economic resource of the town; the healthier we keep it, the more it produces for the community.”

GOING TO MAKE A STINK

Dan Vogler, owner of Harrietta Hills Trout Farm in Wexford County, said he had no idea what he was getting into when the ink dried on his 20-year lease with Crawford County. He took over the flagging Grayling hatchery in 2012 when the county had faced financial trouble and wanted to rid itself of a burden.

“We were providing a solution to them that they were really looking for, and the public reaction that we saw right away was very positive,” Vogler said. “It wasn’t until the end of the first summer that we started to smell a little smoke and realized that the fishermen guys were going to make a stink.”

And stink they made. Vogler believes the Anglers want to bankrupt him out of Grayling. Vogler said his foes have distorted his plans for the hatchery and exaggerated the potential environmental impacts.

For one, he said, while the permit would allow him to produce up to 300,000 pounds of fish per year, the facility would not be capable of that. The number, he said, exists because the permit needed a cap.

Vogler said the permit limits the amount of phosphorus that can be released from his facility at a level that state regulators are confident will not damage the trout population downstream.

“What the other guys did is they took our 300,000 pound number and they dreamed up a whole litany of worse-case scenarios,” he said.

FARMING TROUT ON THE MANISTEE

Vogler said he already produces “a couple hundred thousand pounds” of rainbow trout at his Harrietta hatchery on Slagle Creek, a tributary of the Manistee River; he’d like to produce a similar amount in Grayling.

Vogler wishes people who attack what’s proposed at Grayling would look at his hatchery on the Manistee. He said he produces fish there without adverse effects.

“What has Michigan’s experience been with trout hatcheries on streams? For the most part, there hasn’t been a problem,” he said om Baird, a Lansing area attorney who is president of Anglers of the Au Sable, disagrees. He said a deadly fish sickness called whirling disease has broken out on the Manistee while Vogler has run his fish farm there.

He also said farm-raised trout have escaped into the river.

Baird said Vogler is getting a good deal from the state and he’s shouldering none of the risk.

“You have to remember he’s using the water for free; he’s getting the hatchery pre-built for a dollar for 20 years, a nickel a year,” Baird said. “He’s got a real sweetheart deal.”

Baird believes the case is about the state’s and county’s unwillingness to understand the consequences of the permit. He said the Anglers are not against the hatchery as it operates today; they oppose the permit.

“It’s what the permit says and what it doesn’t say,” Baird said.

LONG AND WINDING PROCESS

A decision in the Angler’s challenge may not come until early 2017. The hearing ended in April. Briefs from the sides are due in June, reply briefs in August, and the judge will make a recommendation around Thanksgiving. Then the DEQ director will make a final decision.

“We thought the case went pretty well,” Baird said. “We thought our experts were spot on, really knew what they were talking about and had the data to back them up.”

Baird said the permit would allow a dangerous amount of phosphorus to be discharged. He believes it’s enough to grow dangerous amounts of algae, reduce the oxygen in the stream, and kill off fish.

What the permit doesn’t say, Baird said, is anything about other pollutants that could come from a fish farm. He said there is so little oversight that the proposition just poses too much risk. He said he’s unwilling to trust a DEQ permit given that department’s failure to protect water quality in Flint.

Baird said that what amounts to a “concentrated feed lot” on the banks of the Au Sable poses a great risk to Crawford County’s economy, even if its residents and officials didn’t realize it.

“If you pump this much phosphorus into the river, it will result in a measurable reduction in fish, which will cause a reduction in the number of fishing days,” Baird said. “You just do the arithmetic.”

HOME TOWN SUPPORT

Elected officials of Crawford County disagree.

“We own it. It’s ours to do with what we wish to do with it, and when Dan Vogler approached us, he was the only viable option,” Crawford County Commissioner Rick Anderson said. “Nobody wanted to come forward. We offered it to anybody in Crawford County — anybody, the Anglers, anybody that would have it, and they all refused.”

Anderson, a fly fisherman, said he values the health and viability of the Au Sable and he’s confident that Vogler can safely run the hatchery, an important tourist attraction in Grayling.

“I’ve done a lot of research on the river, the ecosystem,” Anderson said. “As a county commissioner, we don’t take things lightly.”

In fact, he said the county commission has voted several times throughout the process 7-0 in support of Vogler. He said a group of dozens of commissioners from the counties in the upper Au Sable River watershed got together last year and cast their support for Vogler.

Anderson said the seed of the dispute between Vogler and the Anglers dates back to the creation of the non-profit club. He believes the Anglers are an organization that wants to keep the river for itself.

“It’s the same thing that basically motivated the Anglers when they closed the fishery to fishermen, and fisherwomen of the Au Sable River, when they created the catchand-release program,” Anderson said. “They basically told every fisherman in Crawford County and the state that they would win. Their power and their money won that case.”

Anglers was established in the 1980s by six fishermen who wanted to ensure the state enforced a catch-and-release requirement on the Au Sable in order to protect the fish population. The group soon grew to hundreds of members.

The club, largely comprised of people who don’t live in the area year round, had a rocky relationship with Grayling residents over the years. Their first annual member ship meeting in 1987 was held in Gaylord because of hostile feelings between the club and the town.

BRING ON THE DONATIONS

Vogler believes the arguments against the Grayling hatchery have been distorted to inflame feelings about the Au Sable. He said the opponents have compared fish waste to human waste and they’ve stirred up visions of raw sewage running through a pristine trout stream.

“It’s really frustrating to hear people compare fish farm affluent to raw human sewage.

It is really frustrating and they do it all the time,” Vogler said. “It gets people excited and it brings in the donations. What can I say? They’ve found a way to get people all wound up and get them to write checks.”

Vogler said, more than inflaming passions against his business, his opponents have been good at steering the conversation away from what’s really at stake for the Au Sable.

“If you want to argue over whether or not a slight increase in the amount of phosphorus or nutrient is good for the river, okay, that’s talking science,” he said.

Even on that, however, Vogler is unwilling to cede much ground.

He said elevated phosphorus levels in the river in the middle of the 20th century made for a healthier fish population. He believes the river could stand a little boost in its phosphorus levels today.

Baird disagrees. He said that evidence of phosphorus expanding fish populations is misleading because, once phosphorus levels reach a tipping point, algae blooms make the water inhospitable to fish.

“Our state and federal government spent millions cleaning up the Au Sable after decades of abuse,” Baird said in an email after an interview. “This included new water treatment and storm water facilities in Grayling.

Groups like Anglers of the Au Sable have spent their members’ dues and contributions (and lots of sweat equity) on improving habitat in the river.”

12,000 PAGES OF EVIDENCE

Vogler believes the Anglers’ legal strategy is to make defending the permit financially ruinous. For example, during the hearing over the challenge, attorneys for the Anglers presented 12,000 pages of exhibits they said they would use to make their case.

Vogler said lawyers must typically review the opposing side’s exhibits. He estimated the legal fees required to review those pages would have been a half-million dollars. He reviewed some of the documents himself and guessed at which ones they would use.

“They just want to bleed us dry,” he said.

“They want to be the only people that use and enjoy the river and they don’t want to see other people in that space.”

Baird said the Anglers merely want to protect the river and they don’t want to keep anyone away. He said the catch-and-release regulations championed 30 years ago were motivated by the same thing that motivates them to oppose the hatchery permit: the health of the river.

“This idea that we’re trying to keep the river for ourselves is crazy,” Baird said. “If it weren’t for those [catch-and-release] regulations, the trout population in the river would be decimated.”

Baird denied the Anglers are trying to bankrupt Vogler.

“We’re a fishing club which is having to raise thousands and thousands of dollars to fight this fight,” he said. “We didn’t chose this fight; he chose to put a fish farm in the middle of the Au Sable River, just upstream of the Holy Waters. He chose this place and he brought this litigation upon himself.”

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