Newark Star-Ledger (New Jersey), February 25, 2007, Sunday

Copyright 2007 Newark Morning Ledger Co.

All Rights Reserved

Newark Star-Ledger (New Jersey)

February 25, 2007 Sunday

FINAL EDITION

SECTION: BUSINESS; Pg. 7

HEADLINE: Later, not sooner, say foes of beef processing plant

BYLINE: JUSTIN JUOZAPAVICIUS, ASSOCIATED PRESS

DATELINE: HOOKER, Okla.

BODY:

People started giving up on this place years ago.

The drug store and five-and-dime closed. The Ford and Chevrolet dealerships left, too, along with the tractor-parts retailers.

Vacant brick storefronts with sheets of yellowed newspaper taped in the windows are reminders of what once was in this speck of a cattle town in the Oklahoma Panhandle, a place where there are more cows and hogs than people.

A couple months ago, the lumber store shut down. It was a last gasp.

"It's a damn shame to see a town like this," said Earl Meng, a member of the city council who has lived here for 60 years, as his pickup rolls over Hooker's cracked streets one recent morning.

Salvation, some locals hope, lies in a slaughterhouse.

Specifically, a Smithfield Foods beef processing plant to be built a few miles east of town, a $200 million project that will create as many as 3,000 jobs and put Hooker back on the map.

This would be the largest beef plant built in the United States in two decades, even as U.S. beef consumption has remained steady.

It's planned for an area that ranks among the nation's biggest producers of beef, grain and farm supplies. There are an estimated 600,000 head of cattle on farms within 25 miles of the proposed plant.

When the plans for the plant were announced in October, locals were ecstatic. But love turned quickly to loathing for a large group of residents who saw the plant as an attack on what was left of their struggling town.

They fear that the bulk of the jobs will be too low-paying and attract immigrants who will overwhelm city services.

"I'm not opposed to change, I'm just opposed to takeover," said Don Ukens, a Hooker native who shuttered his Main Street TV and appliance shop in the 1990s.

Beef plant workers earn around $10 an hour, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The jobs are dirty, strenuous and sometimes dangerous and attract a high number of immigrant laborers at plants across the United States.

"It's a hard and relatively low-paying job, but it's the only opportunity that exists for many of these workers," said Cornell University professor Lance Compa, an expert in labor law and international labor rights. "These companies take advantage of these groups, they get super-exploited."

Critics of the plant accuse local and state officials of rolling over for Smithfield and wonder who will pay for the expansion of the school buildings, fixing the streets and hiring more police officers as the town of 1,700 balloons.

Industry experts have concerns, too. Days after the plant's announcement, JPMorgan Chase analyst Pablo Zuanic wrote that a processing plant that size - that would process 5,000 head of cattle daily - would add too much capacity to the industry and worsen the plight of beef packers, already dealing with a glut of meat and poultry in the market that has held prices down.

Zuanic also questioned whether Smithfield was even going to build in Hooker. He theorized the real goal might be to buy out longtime rival Swift, and the threat of another plant would help achieve the takeover.

Last week, Smithfield Foods said it expected to report a decline in its fiscal third-quarter profit compared with a year ago. Last fiscal year, it had earnings of $172.7 million on $11.4 billion in sales.

As residents traded facts and rumors about the plant in Sunday church, farmer Jackie Stevens said she prays to God every night not to let the plant come.

"It's going to destroy the life we know," Stevens said.

Rancher John Hairford is the unofficial leader of a group of 140 residents who oppose the plant, fearing it will lead to increased taxes, a crowded town and an influx of illegal immigrants.

"I have nothing against Latinos coming up here legally to work," Hairford said. "What we don't need is the gangs; we don't want the criminals."

Meat operations in nearby Guymon; Cactus, Texas, and Liberal, Kan., have attracted thousands of Mexican and Guatemalan laborers to the area in the past decade. Many have settled in Hooker.

Retiree Howard Kopel, who lives a couple miles from where the plant will go, said, "We're going to give our community to a bunch of strangers. I don't care if they come from old Mexico or New York City, but they're strangers and they bring another culture."

Hooker's demography is already changing because of the neighboring meat plants. Dozens of residents attend the Primera Iglesia Bautista, an outreach of the Baptist church here. Their kids go to the high school, where at least half the candidates for basketball homecoming queen were Latina.

"They live here, they're going to buy groceries here, they rent houses," said Ruth Thompson, who teaches Sunday school at the iglesia and travels to Mexico every year on mission trips. "They do everything everybody else does."

GRAPHIC: 1. Rancher John Hairford is the unofficial leader of a group of 140 Hooker, Okla., residents who fear their way of life will be transformed for the worse by a proposed Smithfield beef processing plant.