USA - Two federal agents drove to the Hasidic Jewish community Wednesday and inspected the village's closed poultry slaughterhouse after some opponents claimed the facility was butchering chickens against a federal judge's closure order.
The judge ordered the plant shut down in late December, citing a public risk due to unsanitary conditions and the chickens were not being inspected before going to market. Operators want to build a larger slaughterhouse in the same area off Route 45.
On Wednesday, the plant remained closed and inspectors with the U.S. Department of Agriculture didn't find any violations of the federal court order closing down the facility.
The plant accepted frozen processed chickens for storage, authorities said.
The USDA inspectors did not issue the operator any violation notices. The inspectors confirmed there were no problems or violations but referred all comments to the agency in Washington.
Deputy village Mayor Israel Spitzer said the operators and village cooperated with the inspectors after false information was disseminated.
"All that was done was the storage of frozen processed chicken, which were sealed in enclosed cases waiting to be transferred to the retail store," Spitzer said. "There is no processing being done on the premises."
Concern about the plant started Wednesday morning when an e-mail on a Rockland list serve was circulated describing a neighbor seeing five masked men dressed in white unloading boxes wrapped in plastic from an 18-wheel truck. The neighbor drove up to the plant, located along a narrow dirt road on the New Square-New Hempstead border.
She got an affirmative answer when she asked another man if the facility was accepting a delivery of chickens. Her observations went out on the list serve and led slaughterhouse opponents to contact the USDA, the U.S. Attorney's Office, the judge's office, and county government officials.
County Executive C. Scott Vanderhoef said his office and the Rockland Health Department were called.
"We had an unverified complaint that the plant is open or operating," Vanderhoef said. "I had the Health Department call the appropriate federal authority."
He said the oversight of the slaughterhouse is a "quagmire of bureaucracy ."
The Rockland Health Department has jurisdiction only on the conditions outside the plant, while the USDA oversees the plant rather than the state because the number of chickens processed exceeded a certain daily amount, Vanderhoef said.
In December, U.S. District Court Judge Stephen C. Robinson agreed with Assistant U.S. Attorney Tara LaMorte that plant operator New Square Meats had violated the federal Poultry Products Inspection Act and ordered the slaughterhouse closed.
Federal authorities said New Square Meats has been selling uninspected poultry since 2002. The plant supplies all the poultry to the insular community.
During an April inspection, federal investigators said they found poultry residue on walls and light fixtures and in the manager's office. Employee restrooms had no soap or hand sanitizer, and rubbish and foul-smelling pools of water were found outside the plant, court papers said0.
The closure order came as Adir Poultry, a company connected to New Square Meats, wants to replace the 5,000-square-foot slaughterhouse with a $3 million, 26,250-square-foot plant.
Tags · Feds: No new violations at New Square poultry plant
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