Judge orders stop to pesticide spraying
A judge has ordered a halt to a statewide program of spraying pesticides on public lands and some private property, saying California officials are required to assess the potential health effects of spraying projects in advance and have failed to do so.
The ruling by Sacramento County Superior Court Judge James Arguelles follows a state appeals court’s decision in October that found the state Department of Food and Agriculture “significantly” understated the amount of pesticide it uses and failed to provide protections for waterways and for bees and other pollinators that can be harmed by the chemicals.
Arguelles ordered the department to suspend all spraying under the Statewide Plant Pest Prevention and Management Program within two months except for projects that had been separately authorized and won court approval of their environmental impact reports. More than 75 pesticides have been used in the program, according to environmental and health organizations that sued the state along with the city of Berkeley.
“This court ruling stopping indiscriminate pesticide spraying by the state is a huge victory for public health, the environment and species impacted by toxic pesticides,” said Rebecca Spector, West Coast director for the Center for Food Safety.
The Department of Food and Agriculture said it is complying with the order “as we fulfill our mandate to protect California’s agriculture, environment and habitat from invasive pests and diseases.”
The order and the appeals court ruling rejected an environmental impact report that the department issued when it authorized the current program in 2014. But Nan Wishner of the California Environmental Health Initiative said the department actually started a version of the program nearly 40 years ago by declaring that Japanese beetles or other insects posed emergencies that required spraying on local crops, often without advance warning to the property owner.
The department contended its individual spraying projects were adequately assessed by a statewide environmental impact report that concluded the pesticide program caused no overall harm to living creatures or their habitat.
But the Third District Court of Appeal in Sacramento said the department’s report acknowledged that only about one-third of pesticides used each year in California are reported to the state, and some of the report’s conclusions lacked evidence.
For example, the department concluded that its statewide pesticide-management practices would prevent further harm to waterways that had already been polluted, but “no facts supporting the department’s assertions are provided,” Justice Louis Mauro said in the court’s October ruling. Likewise, he said, the state failed to document its conclusion that its policies, federal regulations and warnings on product labels would keep chemicals out of waters in agricultural areas.
And while the department also acknowledged that “pesticides can poison bees,” Mauro said, it failed to back up its claim that its “management practices” would minimize harm to bees and other pollinators.
Because of the state’s obligation “to alert the public about environmental decisions,” the court said, sitespecific environmental impact reports, rather than an overall statewide report, are usually required for actions conducted or approved by the state with potential ecological effects. But the court, and Arguelles in his recent order, did not rule out the possibility that the department could remedy the defects in its EIR and prepare a new report that adequately disclosed the impacts of its pesticide use around the state.
“They could try, but they would end up with the same problem,” said Wishner of the California Environmental Health Initiative. “How could you analyze every ecosystem, every pesticide? ... Defining it as a statewide program will never fly.”