Pesticide Bill Clears Senate Panel

Legislation allowing for the continued use of the farm pesticide methyl bromide passed its first committee test Wednesday in the state Senate, despite critics who attacked the state for faulty testing of the chemical.

Two Democrats joined three Republicans on the Senate Health and Human Services Committee to approve a bill that would keep methyl bromide on the market at least until the end of 1997. A similar bill was approved by the Assembly last week.

The committee vote was a crucial loss to environmentalists, who said the panel offered them their best chance of killing the proposal and forcing the state--which is one of the nation’s largest users of methyl bromide--to remove the pesticide from distribution.

The committee is headed by Democrat Diane Watson of Los Angeles, who along with three other Democrats voted against the bill.

Both sides predict that the extension will be approved by the Legislature and signed into law by Gov. Pete Wilson, who called a special legislative session to obtain approval for continued use of methyl bromide. The pesticide is injected into the soil to kill pests for crops such as strawberries, flowers and carrots and to fumigate export crops and structures.

Opponents cite the highly toxic pesticide’s effects on farm workers, residents who live near treated fields and schools, which at times are affected by escaping fumes.

Officials from the Wilson administration’s Department of Food and Agriculture and the Department of Pesticide Regulation, along with virtually every Republican lawmaker and key Democratic allies, tend to discount the dangers.

However, state Sen. Henry Mello (D-Watsonville), who introduced the bill approved Wednesday, won the addition of amendments calling for further review of potential health risks of the chemical. He said, for example, that buffer zones between gassed fields and homes and schools might need to be expanded.

Democratic foes on the committee grilled administration officials at length on a laboratory test conducted for the state on dogs exposed to methyl bromide fumes. The test was to have taken four days but, according to a Department of Pesticide Regulation report, was stopped after two days when the dogs went into the convulsions, slammed themselves into cage walls and appeared to be near death.

Department official Steven C. Monk said the test was abandoned to save the animals’ lives to comply with federal animal protection regulations.

“Shouldn’t that have raised a red flag” that the chemical posed a danger to humans? asked state Sen. Teresa Hughes (D-Inglewood).

The committee also heard from William Pease, a UC Berkeley toxicologist and member of the Environmental Defense Fund, which opposes the use of the chemical.

He said that by removing the dog inhalation test from criteria used to judge safety levels, state officials were ignoring evidence “indicating that methyl bromide is toxic at much lower doses than we thought before.”

Pease said the reports showed that state scientists were discovering possible new health risks in the widely used chemical that their supervisors were not acknowledging. “[There] seems to be an internal war going” within the department, Pease charged.

Monk said the dog test represented “bad science.”