Part One of Two
Project Sunny was not on last night’s City Council agenda, however, a number of speakers came to the podium during the non-agenda portion of the meeting to give statements on the project. As the Aiken community learned only two weeks ago, Project Sunny is the code name for House of Raeford — the chicken slaughterhouse and processing center that is looking to locate at the Exit 22 gateway to the City on US Highway 1 North.
The speakers in last night’s meeting raised a number of important concerns:
- concerns about the capacity of the aquifer to support this industry;
- concerns over the ability of infrastructure to handle both the water supply and the waste generated;
- concerns over the City’s decision to site a chicken processing plant, rather than sorely needed retail, grocery stores and basic services, for existing residents on the northside;
- concerns over the City giving priority to the profit of a private enterprise over the needs of existing residents;
- concerns over the people who would be employed at this facility;
- concerns over the wisdom of placing a chicken processing plant at the main gateway to Aiken — an idea one speaker described as “out of touch” with the vision that City Council has been projecting for Aiken’s future.
Local resident Winona Specht, a retired SRS scientist with a background in environmental toxicology, pointed out that House of Raeford has an “abysmal record when it comes to violating environmental regulations and violating worker safety issues” and has been fined over $1.5 million for violations going back many years. She recounted several specifics from the past 4 years, alone, including two serious environmental violations and two serious workplace safety violations, along with price-fixing and anti-competitive practices.
A recurring theme among last night’s speakers was the lack of information provided by the City to citizens on a project that local leadership has been working on for months, if not longer. This same message has been echoing for the past two weeks in local social media threads. What do we know about Project Sunny, House of Raeford, and the chicken processing and slaughterhouse industry that our leaders have been working to bring to Aiken?
Some Basics
Chicken processing plants and slaughterhouses are, by nature, water-intensive, waste-producing, pollution-generating industries. They are also among the most dangerous workplaces in America. For this reason, the industry tends to site these facilities in areas where labor is exploitable, regulations weak, and water cheap. They find fertile ground in the South.
The realities of water depletion go largely unimagined in the southeastern US. We’ve yet to see the repercussions of unfettered water consumption that are being realized in the midwestern and the western US, where water depletion is starkly viewed in the disappearing rivers, lakes, ponds and well-water. A recent New York Times story, “America is Using Up its Groundwater Like There’s No Tomorrow,” reported that, in some areas:
“So much water is being pumped up that it is causing roads to buckle, foundations to crack and fissures to open in the earth. And around the country, rivers that relied on groundwater have become streams or trickles or memories.”
Working from numbers provided by Aiken City Manager Stuart Bedenbaugh, Project Sunny will use about 34 million gallons of water per month, equal to about 15% of our surface water capacity. As if to reward such consumption, the City is incentivizing this company by offering to sell the water at a 50% discount. Similar discounts are being offered for wastewater discharge in a system already under stress to keep up with demand. As was recently pointed out in the Aiken Chronicles, Another Fifty-Percent Off Sale:
“In both cases, the more water used, and the more industrial wastewater produced, the lower the prices. No other City water and sewer customer even comes close to using this much water, or discharging that much wastewater. The Project Sunny facility, or any other major water user, could consume as much water in one year as the capacity of the City’s spring-fed Mason Branch reservoir. It also has the potential to put a further strain on the County’s Horse Creek Wastewater Plant, which the County is working to upgrade to meet a projected future capacity that seems to keep increasing.”
The question is — given a choice — why would leadership in a city and in a state that is still fortunate enough to have adequate drinking water supplies give the keys to our water to such a water-intensive industry, and at BOGO prices? What are they thinking?
Jobs, we’ve been told — 900 of them, with a starting pay of $18 per hour; just what the northside needs, we’ve been told.
There is also the matter of dollars brought to Aiken — a $183 million investment by House of Raeford and the $65k per month water bills to be paid by Project Sunny. The seduction from all these dollars requires we engage denial on the cost. The seduction depends on our ability to ignore the lessons being learned all over the US and the rest of the world: when the water’s gone, there is no amount of money going to refill those creeks, streams, rivers, lakes, wells and aquifers.
About Those Jobs
According to the City Manager Stuart Bedenbaugh, the starting pay is $18 per hour. Elsewhere, we’ve been told that $18 is the average pay, which could mean the starting pay may be only two-thirds of that amount. We don’t know. Accurate information is lacking.
Regarding the type of work in these facilities, according to OSHA and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, these are some of the most dangerous jobs in the country. According to the Executive Summary in an OSHA file dated October 1, 2023, a publication whose stated purpose was to “to reduce injuries, illnesses and fatalities related to workers’ exposures in poultry processing facilities”:
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The Overview on Poultry Processing at the OSHA website further elaborates:
“There are many serious safety and health hazards in the poultry processing industry. These hazards include exposure to high noise levels, dangerous equipment, slippery floors, musculoskeletal disorders, and hazardous chemicals (including ammonia that is used as a refrigerant). Musculoskeletal disorders are of particular concern and continue to be common among workers in the poultry processing industry. Employees can also be exposed to biological hazards associated with handling live birds or exposures to poultry feces and dusts which can increase their risk for many diseases.”
The work for the clean-up crew is no less hazardous, according to the earlier-mentioned October 2023 OSHA publication:
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According to this same OSHA publication, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reports that “the extent of the problem may be far greater than the elevated risk reported by employers and seen in the BLS data due to under-reporting.”
This reality is borne out through the accounts of workers over the past 50 years of poultry processing history and at least 35 years of House of Raeford history. While the rates of worker injuries and illness have fallen somewhat over the years, it is difficult to ascertain how much of this is due to improved processes; how much is due to the ripple effects from the defunding of OSHA and other oversight and regulatory agencies; how much is due to under-reporting by industry; and how much is due to under-reporting by employees, themselves, who understand that the fastest way to getting fired is to get sick or injured. As the headlines and the stories tell, poultry industry workers know better than to take time off for gastrointestinal infections, lost fingernails, amputations and broken bones.
This history and the records of this industry will be explored in some depth in Part Two of this story, as told in 35 years of House of Raeford headlines.
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