Former state senator to win Kennedy award

Monday, May 3rd 2004, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) _ A former state senator who led the fight to pass environmental restrictions on the hog and chicken industries will receive a John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award.

Paul Muegge, who didn't start out being an environmentalist, is one of three people who will be given the award from the Kennedy Library Foundation in Boston on May 24. It is given annually to public servants who stand up to strong opposition.

Gov. Frank Keating said Muegge ``was at the front of the pack'' in fighting what became known at the state Capitol as the ``hog wars'' and the ``chicken wars,'' legislative battles in the late 1990s that produced some of the toughest industry regulations in the nation.

Paul Hitch, president of Hitch Enterprises Inc., a Guymon-based hog-farming corporation, is not a fan of Muegge and other environmentalists like him.

``I don't like them, and I don't like him,'' said Hitch. He said Muegge's legislation ``stopped the growth of hog production in Oklahoma.''

Muegge, 67, of Pawhuska, majored in animal husbandry at Oklahoma State University. But at OSU, he said, ``I was a misfit.'' Muegge chose ``people business'' subjects, such as history and political science.

He became a lobbyist for sheep ranchers, arguing for the right to kill predator coyotes. The experience left him thinking farmers and environmentalists had things in common.

Still, Muegge insisted, he had little interest in environmental causes, even when he was called on to fight a proposal to locate a hazardous waste facility near his farm.

``I'd always kind of got sucked back into these issues,'' Muegge said.

The reluctant environmentalist was pressed into service again shortly after he won his first political race and became a state senator. A promoter wanted permission to spread New York sludge on farmland, leaving Muegge to argue the environmental side again.

In 1997, lawmakers skirmished over hogs. The next year, the fighting intensified. Muegge was chairman of the agriculture committee.

A bill tightening chicken-feeding and waste-disposal laws was first up. With heavy backing from Agriculture Commissioner Dennis Howard and from Keating, the bill passed. That paved the way for the clash over hogs.

That skirmish ended with a new law that made it more difficult to expand hog operations.

The fight made Muegge one of Governing magazine's 11 ``public officials of the year'' in 1998, and it won the praise of people like Keith Smith, lobbyist for the Sierra Club, who called Muegge courageous.