City of Levelland hosts town hall over proposed ordinance regulating ag commodities

KCBD
By Brittany Crittenden
Published: Nov. 27, 2023 at 9:43 PM GMT-7

LUBBOCK, Texas (KCBD) - The City of Levelland is one step closer to bringing an ordinance before its council regarding the storage of agricultural commodities. It hosted a town hall Monday night to hear from its residents on the proposal.

City Manager James Fisher updated the nearly full room at City Hall about the items that immediately caused concern during meetings with the Penny Newman granary, ADM, and cotton farmers and ginners. The town hall comes four months after residents brought their concerns to KCBD about red flour beetles infiltrating their homes. After testing with traps, the City determined Penny Newman was the primary source.

“We’re not trying to shut anybody down. We don’t want to see Penny Newman shut down or any of the cotton farmers, peanut farmers. We just want the problem cured. We want our lives back,” resident Stan Lee said.

Lee says the red flour beetles aren’t gone, they’re only dormant, and will be back next year if something doesn’t change. He claims their neighborhood didn’t have issues with these beetles with any of the other commodities in the Industrial Rail Park.

“Most of those commodities are homegrown. The almond hulls are not, they’re imported from California. The homegrown commodities have never been a problem the many years they’ve been here,” Lee said. “It’s two years ago, Penny Newman started importing those almond hulls then it became a problem.”

Fisher says not everyone is going to get what they want, but they’re trying to find the happy medium. He says the city is still trying to determine whether it can regulate what types of commodities come into city limits.

Fisher says it was farmers and ranchers who asked for the almond hulls to be brought in, because the drought has forced them to find an alternative to cottonseed for their livestock feed.

“I think what we’re initially seeing and hearing is we can’t regulate the types of commodities in town,” Fisher said.

Some of the items at risk for removal on the proposed ordinance include regulations on pest management plans at each company. Fisher says businesses have explained they already have certain protocols for each commodity and each pest, so a blanket regulation wouldn’t help.

The Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service also wants its name removed from the ordinance. Fisher says whether commodities can be stored open air is also still up for discussion. One thing that’s looking more solid, is the use of traps to monitor pest populations.

“We know in this ordinance, we’re trying to keep traps in there, so that if we see the counts rising, we can be more proactive in moving and saying we got a problem here and we need to start looking at what can be done to fix it,” Fisher said.

Some citizens even gave suggestions about how to help until all of the beetles die off.

“We may have to have a big cleanup over there, all the trash in the alleys, all the lawns need to be scalped, all the stuff needs to be cleaned up to help that,” one citizen said.

Fisher says they’re also having to monitor how this ordinance will work within the boundaries of the recently passed Right to Farm Act, which protects agribusiness in city limits, if it’s not a threat to public health.

He says some good has come through this process though, including establishing communications with the companies in the rail park.

The city manager says his staff wants to get this right more than just get something done. His goal is to get an ordinance before the council in January. He says when a new draft is available, it will be posted on the City’s social media and website.