Administration Stirs Outcry With Proposed Pesticide Rule

Environmentalists and a Democratic assemblyman charged Tuesday that the Deukmejian Administration is seeking to exempt the use of pesticides from Proposition 65, California’s strict anti-toxics law.

In a departure from Proposition 65, the group charged, the state Health and Welfare Agency is proposing a regulation that would permit the discharge of cancer-causing pesticides into drinking water as long as farmers who applied the pesticides followed existing regulations.

“It’s not sufficient to say there are already laws in this area,” protested Assemblyman Lloyd G. Connelly (D-Sacramento). “Proposition 65 provides a substantial additional element of protection. If the voters were satisfied with existing law, they would not have voted for the initiative.”

Official View

Administration officials, however, contend that their regulation would affect relatively few pesticides. They say it would simply protect farmers who apply pesticides in accordance with previously established label instructions designed to safeguard water supplies.

Steven A. Book, Health and Welfare science adviser, said farmers should not be held accountable for the discharge of cancer-causing chemicals into drinking water supplies if they abide by all federal and state safety standards for a specific pesticide and have no knowledge of other cases in which the pesticide leached into the ground water.

“The farmer shouldn’t have to be a hydro-geologist,” Book said. “All the regulation is doing is trying to recognize how much science a farmer is capable of conducting.”

Under Proposition 65, anyone who discharges a chemical that is known to cause cancer or birth defects into a source of drinking water can be fined as much as $2,500 a day per violation.

14 Known Carcinogens

Environmentalists said that 68 different pesticides have been found in the ground water of California, including 14 that are known to cause cancer or birth defects.

The Deukmejian Administration regulation now under attack was issued as an emergency rule last October and has been in effect while the Health and Welfare Agency goes through the formal adoption process. The agency held a final hearing on the rule Tuesday and expects to adopt it permanently by early next year.

The rule spells out that a cancer-causing pesticide is “presumed not to pass into a source of drinking water” if it is applied in compliance with “all applicable requirements of state or federal statutes, regulations, permits and orders adopted to avoid surface or ground water contamination.”

However, the regulation would not provide legal protection to a person who “had actual knowledge that similar applications under similar circumstances had resulted in a significant amount of the listed chemical passing into a source of drinking water.”

Connelly and representatives of the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council, Campaign California and California Rural Legal Assistance protested at a press conference that the regulation would remove the farmers’ responsibility under Proposition 65 to protect drinking water from contamination.

“Farmers ought to have the burden to ensure (that if they use a pesticide) it’s not a substance that’s going to contaminate the drinking water,” Connelly said.

But Book minimized the effect of the regulation, saying, “It’s not an exemption of pesticides. The environmental folks have perhaps overstated what this regulation allows. This is pretty restrictive.”

A “statement of reasons” accompanying the rule notes that failure to adopt it could have “significant economic consequences” for California’s agriculture industry. “Resorting to the use of inferior methods of pest control could have serious effects on crop quality, production and cost,” it said.