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State plans to cut emissions
| Tuesday, May 30 2006 10:30 PM
Last Updated: Tuesday, May 30 2006 10:34 PM
State pesticide regulators will both fight and follow a judge's order to cut pollution from pesticides.
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The state Department of Pesticide Regulation can't let stand an April court ruling that says it violated the Clean Air Act, said Glenn Brank, the agency's spokesman. There was no such violation and the case would set a "faulty legal precedent," Brank said, but the agency agrees with the spirit of the judgment, which would require a 20 percent cut in smog-forming emissions based on pesticide data from 1991.
On Monday, the department unveiled a new air quality initiative that would achieve greater pollution reductions than the judge requires, Brank said. Under the initiative, the state pledges to cut at least 20 percent of smog-forming pesticide emissions by 2008. It proposes to reduce dependence on toxic fumigants, explore alternative pest control, reformulate products and change the way pesticides are handled, among other measures.
The state appealed the April ruling on Friday.
The suit's plaintiffs aren't reassured.
"It's just talk," said Brent Newell, staff attorney for the Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment and lead attorney for the plaintiffs.
Environmentalists brought the suit because the state wasn't cutting emissions on its own, he said. Without the order, they doubt it will get done, he said.
Tom Frantz, whose Shafter-based activist group, Association of Irritated Residents, is a plaintiff in the case, agreed.
"They're speaking out of both sides of their mouth right now," he said. "They're using all the propaganda right now to say they're going to do the right thing, but if they're appealing the case, it says they don't mean it."
The judge's ruling "helped crystallize us" on the need for a comprehensive pollution reduction program, Brank said. However, the makings of the department's clean-air initiative were already in place, he said. The state recently canceled 100 products for lack of emissions data, and it has a good track record of working with industry to achieve reductions, Brank said.
As to environmentalists' criticism, Brank said, "You would think that anyone genuinely interested in improving valley air quality would be pleased about this" because it goes beyond the judge's order.
Pesticides are fourth on the list of smog-forming emissions sources in the San Joaquin Valley, according to the state Air Resources Board. Kern's farmers and households used 23.9 million pounds of pesticides in 2004.