Medfly Battle Will Cost $30 Million : Infestation: Estimates rise as federal government allocates $15 million to aid California’s fight.

It will cost at least $30 million to wipe out the Mediterranean fruit fly in Southern California, agricultural officials estimated Friday as a new allocation of $15 million in federal funds for the eradication effort was announced.

U.S. Agriculture Secretary Clayton Yeutter on Friday approved an emergency allocation that brought total projected expenditures by the state and federal government for the eradication program to about $30 million.

Officials previously had estimated that the program would cost $25 million. That number could grow higher if additional Medflies are found this spring, requiring more rounds of aerial spraying.

The 1980-82 infestation in Northern California cost $100 million to eradicate. Growers lost an additional $100 million in sales because of a quarantine blamed on then-Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr.’s decision to delay aerial spraying of pesticide.

Officials could not provide an expense breakdown. But a state official said at a Los Angeles school board hearing Friday on the safety of malathion that the state has spent $230,000 alone to buy 10,000 gallons of the pesticide used in the aerial applications.

Included in the estimate are the costs of breeding, transporting and releasing millions of sterile flies, which are used to breed the pest out of existence, helicopters to fly sorties over infested Southern California neighborhoods and the rental of dozens of cars for an army of agricultural inspectors flown into Los Angeles from around the country to enforce quarantines.

In approving the emergency appropriation in Washington, Agriculture Secretary Yeutter said that fruit flies “could severely disrupt the $12.3-billion fruit and vegetable industry and cost a half-billion dollars annually in lost export markets.”

But during the hearing at school district headquarters, E. Philip LeVeen, an agricultural economist and lecturer at UC Berkeley, said the Medfly’s threat to agriculture is “overstated.”

LeVeen, a critic of spraying in urban regions, complained that farmers have a “tremendous incentive to cry wolf here because they don’t have to pay for it,” referring to the eradication program.

School board member Jackie Goldberg complained to agricultural officials at the hearing that they are exposing Southern Californians to possible health risks for the sake of agriculture.

“The problem is that in order to prevent what might happen there,” she said, referring to state agricultural lands, “you expose all of us to risks which all of you agree we can’t entirely assess. You say they’re safe, you think, but we have heard that statement before about things which 20 years later turned out not to be safe.”