United States-Meat company sued for half a billion dollars.

UNITED STATES-TYSON FOODS IN us$600 MILLION POLLUTION SUIT.

A household survey helped Oklahoma Attorney General Drew Edmondson calculate natural resource damages from pollution and algae growth in the Illinois River watershed at $610 million.

Springdale-based Tyson Foods Inc. and the other companies that Edmondson sued in U.S. District Court in Tulsa, claiming they polluted the watershed with poultry manure, now question the validity of the research and want to know who took part in the survey.

Edmondson, who supports the research, and two national public opinion research associations want Magistrate Judge Paul Cleary to keep survey participants’ identities secret. Edmondson will allow the companies’ attorneys to question workers who designed the survey and conducted the research.

A hearing was held on the matter last week, and Cleary’s ruling is expected soon.

At issue is whether the poultry companies’ right to interview survey participants supersedes the desire of pollsters to keep secret the names of people who were promised confidentiality.

"Courts have made different decisions about whether they turn over the names," said Tom W. Smith, director of the General Social Survey at the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. "Courts have generally found it to not be helpful from a legal point of view, but there are cases where courts rule the names had to be revealed."

ARRIVING AT $610 MILLION

Stratus Consulting, the Boulder, Colo., survey company hired by private attorneys working for Edmondson’s office, used "contingent valuation" to measure harm in the watershed.

In contingent valuation, interviewers present a problem to survey participants. They then describe a solution and ask participants what they would be willing to pay for the solution.

The U.S. Department of Interior accepts contingent valuation as a way to assess harm to natural resources.

"The method we followed is a regulatory methodology commonly used to assess damages to natural resources under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act," Edmondson spokesman Emily Lang said in a statement.

Tyson spokesman Gary Mickelson said measuring damages is "an example of the attorney general trying to count his chickens before they’re hatched." The case, filed in 2005, isn’t expected to go to trial until fall.

"It’s another misguided attempt by the attorney general to extract imaginary damages in a lawsuit that should never have been brought," Mickelson said in a statement.

For instance, Smith used contingent valuation and asked a hypothetical question about coal plant pollution over the Grand Canyon.

"There’s no way to do that without showing pictures of what the sky would look like," Smith said. "There’s a lot of controversy about the technique. It has its advocates and its critics."

Still, contingent valuation has its place, Smith said.

"When you have a cost of a polluted river, there’s no market price for that," Smith said. "You have to try to put a value on it."

Lawyers for the poultry companies dislike the hypothetical question used by Stratus Consulting in the Illinois River watershed. The in-home interviews were conducted by employees of Westat Inc., a Rockville, Md., firm.

Interviewers asked 1,793 participants how much they’d pay in a one-time hypothetical tax to treat Lake Tenkiller with alum, a nontoxic substance used to make drinking water clear and that reduces phosphorous in water.

Alum treatments over five years would allow the lake to reach its 1960 condition in about 20 years, participants were told.

Stratus Consulting then averaged the amount that survey participants said they’d pay - $184.55 - and multiplied it by 1.35 million households in 63 of Oklahoma’s 77 counties to arrive at $249 million in natural resources damages over the next 50 years to Lake Tenkiller and the Illinois River.

Some western Oklahoma counties were left out of the survey to reduce the survey’s cost, estimated by the poultry companies in court documents at nearly $4.5 million.

Status Consulting also put a dollar figure on damages between 1981 and 2008, arriving at $118.11 per household. That figure was multiplied by households and increased by an annual interest rate of 3.83 percent to arrive at $361 million.

The $249 million plus $361 million equals $610 million.

PERSPECTIVE

The $610 million is more than 10 times the fiscal 2009 budget of the Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality of $59..2 million. Put another way, it’s enough money to build the Arkansas portion of the U.S. 71 bypass of Bella Vista - twice - with more than $100 million to spare.

The $610 million is the biggest number made public about how much Edmondson is seeking from the poultry companies. He declined requests for an interview, so it’s not clear if the $610 million is the full amount being sought.

Robert George, an attorney for Tyson Foods, said the $610 million figure carries little validity.

"The state should be seeking what it costs to clean up the watershed after they establish that it needs to be cleaned up," George said. "Here’s what it’s going to cost to clean up those damages. That’s a proper method."

’SHEER AMAZEMENT’

George wrote in an e-mail to a private attorney working for Edmondson on the case about his "sheer amazement" that Oklahoma would attempt to hide survey participants’ names. He said in an interview that the companies want to talk to the participants about how the questions were asked.

The survey was poorly done, and interviewers provided "misleading descriptions of the problem" in the watershed during their 30- to 60-minute, 57-question interviews, the poultry companies claim in a court filing.

Interviewers showed people pictures of the Illinois River with algae and without algae, saying that’s how the river looked in 1960. Phosphorus found in poultry manure is spread on farm fields and fuels algae growth when it gets into rivers and lakes.

Edmondson’s office contends

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that researchers spent 2 /2 years developing the household survey, then executed it perfectly last fall.

George wrote in court documents that researchers switched from two other surveys because the findings were "not beneficial" to Oklahoma’s beliefs about poultry manure and how it caused watershed pollution.

The first survey included 400 people interviewed at Lake Tenkiller in 2006. A later telephone survey involved 400 different respondents.

Court documents suggest researchers weren’t pleased with what they were hearing from participants. One document submitted to the court by the poultry companies included comments made in 2006 about the telephone survey.

"If estimated damages are to be significant, people will have to be educated about the injuries," wrote Edward Morey, a University of Colorado economics professor and one of Oklahoma’s hired experts for the federal lawsuit.

Edmondson, however, contends in court papers that the two surveys were pilot studies, describing them as a "precursor" to help develop the household survey.

Heidi Grunwald, interim director of the Institute for Survey Research at Temple University in Philadelphia, said survey firms commonly test questionnaires and other survey tools before deciding their best approach.