Documents: EPA Shunned Yakima Community Water Pollution Effort While Courting Sue-Happy Anti-Farm Activists

Save Family Farming is making records publicly available showing EPA built relationship with anti-farm activist groups while agency backed out of Yakima community groundwater effort involving farmers

(SEATTLE, Wash.) At the same time as it was developing a routine of private strategy coordination with anti-farm activists suing Yakima-area farmers over groundwater nitrates, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Seattle office was backing out of a community-led effort to work alongside farmers and others to address the Yakima groundwater issues.

Public records expose a flurry of activity between EPA’s Region 10 office and a sprawling network of anti-farm lawyers and activist groups in the months prior to the federal agency’s June 2024 lawsuit against three Lower Yakima Valley dairies.

It was during this same time that EPA leaders had stopped substantively participating in the community-led Lower Yakima Valley Groundwater Management Area (GWMA) process that included a broad base of agencies, community groups and farmers actively working to address the nitrate issues. The 2024 EPA lawsuit accused the farms of not doing enough to protect groundwater, despite the dairies spending millions on improvements over more than a decade since the last time the federal agency sued them.

“This is not environmental enforcement. This is an agency hijacked by activists and weaponized against farmers,” said Ben Tindall, Executive Director of Save Family Farming. “The EPA is supposed to enforce the law impartially. When you follow the paper trail, it’s clear: the EPA had become a tool for activists, not an impartial regulator.”

Save Family Farming obtained the documents, which include emails, meeting invitations, reports, and summaries, via public records requests. They expose a timeline of repeated and coordinated engagement between Edward Kowalski, Director of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance for EPA Region 10; Eric Winiecki, Environmental Protection Specialist for EPA Region 10; and individuals with a history of suing Lower Yakima Valley dairies, including activist attorney Charlie Tebbutt, Jean Mendoza of Friends of Toppenish Creek (FOTC), and representatives from Food & Water Watch, Center for Food Safety, and Public Justice.

The documents, which Save Family Farming is making publicly available online at kmrnd.com/SaveFamFarm26/epa/, reveal repeated, private meetings—sometimes spanning hours—between EPA officials and activist litigators. They include:

• November 16, 2023: Activist attorney Charlie Tebbutt met exclusively with DOJ and EPA Region 10 officials for three hours to discuss nitrate contamination litigation. No other voices or perspectives were a part of this meeting.

 

• January 12 & 26, 2024: Jean Mendoza proposed—and reiterated—establishing quarterly meetings with EPA, FOTC, Center for Food Safety, Food & Water Watch, and Oregon Rural Action. The EPA complied.

 

• March 2024: The first of these quarterly “Check-in” meetings was scheduled and held on March 21, with subsequent meetings continuing through the rest of 2024. These meetings were initiated, coordinated, and led by EPA staff, including Kowalski and Jeff Kenknight.

 

• April–December 2024: On a quarterly basis, EPA staff shared internal agendas and received strategic demands from activists. Amy van Saun of Center for Food Safety explicitly called on EPA to escalate enforcement actions against dairies.

 

• September 12, 2024: a DOJ meeting invitation was circulated titled “U.S. v. Cow Palace et al Coordination.” The invitation listed participants including EPA’s Eric Winiecki, DOJ attorneys, Charlie Tebbutt, Amy van Saun (Senior Attorney at the Center for Food Safety), and others. This meeting raises serious concerns about federal agency coordination with known litigators in the context of active or potential litigation against farms.

 

• December 18, 2024: EPA met again with FOTC, Center for Food Safety, and other groups to discuss ongoing litigation and permitting frameworks—again, with zero farm stakeholder participation.

These closed-door sessions weren’t mere information exchanges—they were coordinated strategy meetings to pursue activist litigation goals, using the full force of federal enforcement authority. No farmers, farm groups, or agricultural scientists were invited to any of these sessions. Instead, the EPA allowed itself to be steered by some of the most aggressive anti-agriculture litigators in the nation.

“This is regulatory capture in its most blatant form,” said Markus Rollinger, President of Save Family Farming. “The very groups that brought lawsuits in the notorious Cow Palace case are now participating in private EPA strategy meetings. This isn’t just the fox in the henhouse—the EPA has handed over the keys. Washington’s family farmers are exhausted from battling both economic pressures and regulators who appear driven more by political agendas than by fair oversight.”

In response to these findings, Save Family Farming has launched a new public resource: kmrnd.com/SaveFamFarm26/epa/. This online portal houses all documents, emails, agendas, and records obtained through FOIA, provides a developed timeline of these actions, along with background on the broader history of EPA bias against agriculture.

Washington’s farm families are demanding accountability. Save Family Farming is calling on EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin and EPA Region 10 Administrator Emma Pokon to investigate the actions of EPA personnel, particularly Edward Kowalski and Eric Winiecki’s role, and to end the practice of politically biased enforcement.