CALIFORNIA COMMENTARY : A Fly in the Ointment : Fighting the Medfly war on an emergency basis let officials forget the rules and throw caution to the wind.

California’s current Medfly policy represents an imperfect attempt to dress up some basically political decisions about who should pay and who benefits from some frequently uncertain science, all in the name of an overriding but rarely identified public interest. When it comes to swatting flies, some confusion is inevitable. But the current mix hasn’t served George Deukmejian any better than it did his predecessor.

At the moment, it appears that the governor has rejected the direction chosen by his agriculture chief, who had earlier overturned the advice of his scientific advisers, who disagree, in turn, among themselves. As a result, the malathion-spraying helicopters that were scheduled to be grounded in May will instead be flying more often than ever in June, although over a smaller area of Southern California. But that, too, could change. New Medflies keep turning up, just as they have, year after year, for the last decade.

Many people assume that the state is doing such a poor job of stamping out Medflies because the bureaucrats despise this kind of politically dictated crisis management. But in fact, they love it--maybe too well. People in the agencies, after all, soon learn that they have to couch even their best ideas in words of mush to avoid offending anyone. Each new initiative must go through months of public hearings, formal comment periods and regulatory reviews, subjecting every vital part to laborious modification, mitigation and mumbling.

A good emergency proclamation, however, like the ones that Jerry Brown and then Deukmejian issued whenever there was a major outbreak of Medflies, offers more than a way to cut through all that red tape. For some in the agencies, it’s a chance to get even for a professional lifetime of frustration--and to do it with helicopters! For others, it’s an opportunity to provide some help that might otherwise never be permitted to their clientele.

Deukmejian’s Medfly emergency proclamation, for example, enables the agriculture department to bypass most environmental requirements, to hire companies to do the spraying without competitive bidding, and to get the helicopters into the air without regard for local ordinances or some of the usual federal aviation regulations. Perhaps most important, the emergency proclamation makes it possible to pay for all of this out of the state’s contingency funds, which means that all California taxpayers are footing the bill.

Given the severity of the threat these pests pose for California agriculture, no one can doubt the need for a speedy response. But there are lots of reasons to regret some of the shortcuts in the way the current outbreak has been managed. Small but nevertheless persistent uncertainties about the safety of malathion remain unresolved, for example, and even larger questions have been raised about the helicopter company the state picked, which has a history of safety problems as well as repeated violations of state pesticide regulations. Spokesmen for the Department of Food and Agriculture insist that the company’s record is no worse than anyone else’s in this business. But it’s hard to tell how they know that, since they also concede that they never check anybody’s safety record when they’re renewing pesticide-applicator licenses.

Better planning and administration would correct a lot of those mistakes. Clearly there’s a need for more research into the Medfly’s habits as well as the safety of the chemicals being used against it. The Legislature is already working on some bills to provide just that. It helps, too, that all three of the leading gubernatorial candidates have expressed an intention to take the state agriculture department out of the pesticide business entirely. That means that whatever agency is assigned the task of dealing with the next outbreak won’t have the burden of overcoming the public distrust that has plagued Deukmejian’s Medfly managers.

The question of financing, however, remains. When an emergency strikes, nobody wants to haggle over costs or wonder about who benefits. But the Medfly battle is one that the state has had to re-fight every year. Before the current major infestation, there were eight outbreaks in 10 years in Los Angeles County alone. It takes nothing away from the severity of the problem to suggest that when its recurrence becomes this predictable, strictly speaking, it’s something less than an emergency.

It’s also very expensive. The Medfly outbreak in the Santa Clara area nine years ago cost the taxpayers $100 million. The estimated tab for the current infestation is at $40 million and counting. Those totals don’t compare to the much larger losses that the people who grow soft fruits and vegetables might suffer if the Medflies ever got out of hand. But they still add up to a substantial public subsidy that the public doesn’t generally provide for other industries--or even for many other farmers.

If a business is in an area subject to flooding or some other similarly predictable natural hazard, it is expected to pay a portion of the costs of building a dam to protect itself, usually through its property-tax assessments. Taxpayers in general may wind up covering a hefty share of those costs as well. But at least there’s an effort to apportion the expenses fairly and rationally among the beneficiaries. That’s not the case with Medflies.

The taxpayers usually don’t buy pesticides for other farmers, either. When the cotton industry is faced with an invasion of boll weevils, the growers pay the costs of eradication themselves. For other infestations, the farmers whose crops are at risk are commonly required to cover at least half the bill and the state pays the rest. For Medflies, however, the public pays for everything.

Agriculture officials justify the present financing system by pointing out that Medflies, unlike weevils and many other agricultural pests, threaten more than one crop. But the list of commodities that might be affected by the spread of Medflies into the Central Valley is not infinite or even mysterious. It wouldn’t be hard to determine which growers should pay an assessment to fund an ongoing program of research, eradication and control.

Farmers argue that if they have to hire all those helicopters themselves, they’ll pass the costs along to the public anyway through higher prices. Maybe that would occur. On the other hand, if it was their money at stake, perhaps they’d demand a little more efficiency, creativity and initiative in the way it’s spent. Even if a change means paying slightly more for certain fruits and vegetables at the grocery store, that’s a much more efficient way to distribute those costs among consumers than forcing them to pay through their tax bills. At least then, the people who are getting the benefits of Medfly eradication through the peaches they eat will be paying an appropriate share of the bill.

The point is that we shouldn’t continue to treat each outbreak of this pest as an extraordinary event justifying huge public expenditures from the state’s already deficient budget simply to benefit a select group of agricultural producers. The price of fighting this pest should be treated as what it has in fact become--just another part of the cost of living in the Golden State.