If Gov. Mark Sanford is really serious about pushing maximum power downhill to S.C. local governments, he might want to take a look at the hog-farm bill passed last week by the S.C. House. If the S.C. Senate also passes the bill, the state's 46 county councils will lose their home-rule authority to regulate animal farms - most conspicuously, corporate hog farms of the sort that rendered parts of North Carolina an environmental war zone in the 1990s.

The bill, sponsored by Rep. Billy Witherspoon, R-Conway, wipes out all present and future local efforts to regulate large hog-farming operations. State regulations would apply uniformly statewide.

That would be fine if the state rules, as adopted by the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control with close legislative oversight, were sufficiently stringent to guarantee that toxic hog waste will never pollute waterways and that hog stench won't render adjacent rural areas unlivable. But they're not.

That's why five S.C. counties, including several in the Pee Dee, have used home-rule authority to attack those problems - thereby prompting the corporate-hog lobby to petition Witherspoon and other agriculture-friendly legislators to take that authority away. Their concern is that some county rules were so restrictive that large farms could not be located there.

We understand these concerns and have some sympathy with House Speaker David Wilkins' concern that "our agriculture industry ought to have solid regulations that they can rely on."

But local concern about protecting residents' quality of life are equally valid. Not for nothing did Horry County Council go on record against the bill, for fear that it would disrupt local zoning and planning efforts.

The hope must be that the S.C. Senate - the proverbial saucer that cools the passions that boil over from the cup of the House - recognizes that this is a bad bill and kills it. If not, Sanford will have to get out his veto pen.