Report due on state of pesticide information
Pilot schools notice, civil grand jury response headed to county board
SALINAS >> Public information and notification on pesticide use in Monterey County farm fields whether for area schools or the larger community will take center stage at today’s Board of Supervisors meeting.
During the county board’s morning session starting at 10:30 a.m., the county board is set to hear a report from Agricultural Commissioner Henry Gonzales on the Pesticide Notification Near Schools pilot project, and during the afternoon session starting at 1:30 p.m., the supervisors are scheduled to consider a formal response to the 2019-20 Civil Grand Jury report entitled, “Enhancing Public Access to Pesticide Use Information, An Opportunity for the Agricultural Commissioner’s Office.”
In the morning, Gonzales is poised to present a report outlining the history of the pilot project, which tapped state funding to conduct public outreach and set up an online pesticide notification system, and which he promises to continue despite the expiration of the state funding earlier this summer.
Launched in 2016 and funded by $75,000 from the state Department of Pesticide Regulation, the pilot project began with public outreach aimed at providing pesticide information to parents, students, teachers, school employees and the general community at three northern Monterey County schools in the Pajaro Valley Unified School District, including Ohlone Elementary School, Pajaro Middle School, and Hall District Elementary School, through stakeholder meetings and focus groups.
Expanded in 2018 with an additional $94,420 from the state DPR, the project saw the launch of the bilingual website FarmingSafelyNearSchools.com, which offered people the ability to register to receive notification by text or email of all scheduled fumigant use within a quarter-mile of schools along with information such as health facts, pesticide and fumigation regulations, and maps of schools and their proximity to farms and ranches.
Growers are required to provide the Ag Commissioner with five-day advance notice of the planned pesticide use near the schools.
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The information is then posted on the website and notification is sent to those who have signed up.
The project also expanded to North Monterey County Unified School District, including North Monterey County High School, North Monterey County Middle School, Castroville Elementary School, Prunedale Elementary School, Echo Valley Elementary School, Elkhorn Elementary School, and Central Bay High School.
However, Gonzales noted the public outreach effort for the North County district was hampered by a lack of interest and response from the school and general communities, though the district’s schools were added to the website anyway.
Gonzales reported that his office also kicked in $100,000 in “in-kind” support for the pilot project.
While all state funding dried up on June 30 and Gonzales initially indicated he would end the program, he promises in his report to continue operating the website and notification system, calling the cost “de minimis.”
Since its launch, the website has had 4,778 users, including 2,117 from California, as well as 73 signups for text notification and 161 signups for email notification, according to the report.
In his report, Gonzales noted a few challenges the project faces, including changing state regulations that prohibited most pesticide use within a quartermile of schools on weekdays between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. when most school activity is conducted.
Also, Gonzales reported that working with stakeholders in the agriculture, labor, activist, and education sectors “proved to be both beneficial and challenging.” He noted the notification component of the website had prompted “a higher level of scrutiny” from advocacy groups
around fumigation applications and that the activist group Safe Ag Safe Schools apparently used the notification system to attempt to stop scheduled fumigation applications, albeit unsuccessfully and also may have led to a “very time-consuming permit appeal request” that he said, “required extensive work with the grower, pest control company, adviser and the DPR.”
Monday morning, the Safe Ag Safe Schools and Monterey Bay Central Labor Council organizations called for the county board to order the Ag Commissioner to expand the “only pesticide notification system in the state” through the FarmingSafelyNearSchools.com website and post all notifications on the county web site and promised to deliver a petition with 300 signatures to the supervisors at today’s meeting.
In the afternoon, the county board will take its second shot at approving the response to the civil grand jury’s pesticide use information report, which called for the Ag Commissioner’s Office to expand its public outreach on the subject by setting up a bilingual “general public-focused” website that “publicizes relevant pesticide information directly to the Monterey County community” and other measures in the next year.
“There is a prevalent and genuine need for residents of Monterey County, and other interest groups, to have access to unbiased, scientifically reviewed information about pesticides,” the civil grand jury wrote in its findings.
In the first proposed county response, which the supervisors considered at last week’s meeting, Gonzales and other county staff flatly rejected the civil grand jury’s requests as not warranted and not feasible due to a lack of state funding. The initial response noted the office already has a website and a relatively new Facebook page that offers access to the requested information and conducts public outreach efforts while struggling to meet all its legal mandates even before the COVID-19 pandemic.
A split board voted 3-2 to call for the county response to be “less defensive” and “more respectful” of the civil grand jury, though the majority did not call for agreeing to the oversight body’s recommendations, and a revised report is gentler in its denial of the recommendations while pointing out that it already provides the information.
In addition to the website, the civil grand jury called for the Ag Commissioner’s Office to expand its use of social media and offer more printed material on pesticides, as well as links to other sources of information, and should use its expanded public outreach to “support contingency planning and public notifications for any incidents under the MCACO’s purview that might develop or create public interest or concern.”
After initially arguing that the civil grand jury’s finding that there is a “prevalent” need for county residents to have expanded access to pesticide information was just about “self-proclaimed anti-pesticide non-governmental groups,” the revised county response simply disagreed with the finding and notes the Ag Commissioner’s Office’s existing efforts.
The Safe Ag Safe Schools and Monterey Bay Central Labor Council indicated the civil grand jury report “echoes” what they have been saying.