Farm Office Regulators Hope to Sow Credibility

Eliseo Hernandez has plenty of things to learn about his new post with the agricultural commissioner’s office, but politeness isn’t one of them.

On a recent morning, the county’s newest crop cop stood in a celery field writing up the paperwork that would lead to a citation for a pest control applicator who forgot to wear a protective apron while mixing chemicals.

“There are so many restrictions, it’s easy to miss one,” Hernandez apologized.

He will need more than civility to restore trust in an agency whose integrity and competence have been severely challenged by reports suggesting it has been indifferent to public concerns and lax in upholding pesticide laws.

Those reports included a scathing assessment earlier this year by the state Department of Pesticide Regulation that the farm office suffered from shoddy investigations, lenient enforcement and poor record-keeping.

Hernandez, 24, is one of two enforcement officers hired in response to those complaints. He knows that restoring credibility to the damaged agency will not be easy, and will require a delicate balancing act.

On one hand, environmentalists and farm worker advocates continue to question the department’s commitment to cracking down on violators. On the other hand, farmers want to ensure the law is enforced without bowing to anti-pesticide interests.

But Hernandez, the Spanish-speaking son of farm workers who once worked the fields himself, doesn’t consider his new job as complicated as all that.

“I see my job as informing workers and employers about pesticide laws, because they are important and they are in place to protect people,” said Hernandez, who joins veteran state pesticide regulator Susan Johnson as the newest faces at the farm office.

“There may be a lot of people out there who don’t know the rules or just don’t care,” he said. “My job is to make sure they follow the rules.”

The new regulators arrive at a time when the county’s $1-billion agricultural industry finds itself increasingly at odds with its suburban neighbors.

Over the past three years, residents have become more vocal about pesticide use near homes and schools. Many have complained to the agricultural commissioner’s office, only to come away feeling their concerns were disregarded.

Environmentalists and public health advocates have taken up the cause, accusing the office--under the direction of longtime Commissioner Earl McPhail--of failing to adequately respond to residents’ concerns and of underplaying pesticide-related health hazards.

Supporters rallied to McPhail’s defense, saying he had become a target for groups intent on co-opting the commissioner’s office and advancing an anti-pesticide agenda.

The conflict came to a head earlier this year when the Board of Supervisors refused to renew McPhail’s contract, and gave him six months to fix the problems.

Supervisors reappointed McPhail to his post in July, satisfied he had responded to those concerns. Board members also increased funding for his department to add an inspector and a deputy commissioner.

McPhail has since restructured the office so that Johnson--who starts work Nov. 29 as a deputy commissioner--will be dedicated full time to pesticide enforcement, a first for the commissioner’s office.

The staff additions bring the number of employees to 42. That is still one less than McPhail had when he took the job in 1979, but he said it’s a step in the right direction.

“What it will do is give us more people out in the field so that we are able to do more inspections and make sure everything is done correctly,” McPhail said. “And I think that will help answer a lot of people’s concerns.”

Those concerns are emblematic of larger issues facing agriculture as Ventura County becomes more populated and housing tracts bump against farmland.

As the conflicts have increased, the commissioner’s office has had to take on a broader role of enforcer and educator.

Pesticide Enforcement Provided Initial Focus

None of this is new to Johnson. After earning an undergraduate degree in pest management from Cal Poly Pomona, she started with the Kern County agricultural commissioner’s office two decades ago, concentrating primarily on pesticide enforcement.

That was a seminal period in agriculture, one that allowed Johnson to cut her teeth on a range of issues, including the poisoning of hundreds of California consumers by a handful of Kern County farmers who had illegally applied the chemical aldicarb to watermelons.

She went on to earn a master’s degree in public administration from Cal State Bakersfield before moving to Kings County, where she oversaw the county’s pesticide enforcement program for 10 years. She has been with the state Department of Pesticide Regulation for the past three years, working as a liaison between the state agency and Ventura, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties.

As such, she has witnessed firsthand the problems that have plagued the local office. And she is excited about spearheading initiatives designed to remedy those deficiencies.

“I know exactly what the major issues are and the idea of being able to get in there and fix something is very appealing to me,” said Johnson, a Fillmore resident who accepted the $58,000-a-year post because it paid more than her state job and required less travel.

Johnson said she wants to immediately clear the decks of pending enforcement cases. She said she will also spend time educating the public on the department’s role in pesticide enforcement.

And she said she wants to crush any notion the commissioner’s office is too cozy with growers or is bending to the will of anti-pesticide advocates.

“I can tell you that I haven’t been cozy with anybody,” she said. “I believe in government that is as transparent as possible. People deserve access to public officials. They deserve a response, even if they don’t like the response. And they deserve answers to their questions and information on how they can affect the system if they want to.”

Those who have long advocated a more vigilant commissioner’s office are not yet convinced things will get better.

“I think it’s laudable that the commissioner’s office has added staff, but what is still of the utmost importance is that the agricultural commissioner exercise the appropriate leadership,” said legal aid attorney Eileen McCarthy, whose Oxnard-based poverty law firm provides free help to farm workers.

“Without that leadership, the extra staff becomes much less significant,” McCarthy said.

Johnson and Hernandez aren’t the only new kids on the block. Four other inspectors have been hired in the past nine months to fill existing positions.

The new hires are being trained to do pesticide enforcement and perform a range of other duties, from pest detection to fruit and vegetable inspection.

The training sometimes requires steady nerves. Just ask Hope Gerry, who spent a recent morning pulling the wings off of bees.

Because it was her turn to carry the killer bee beeper--a paging system established to respond to discoveries of Africanized honeybees--the 24-year-old Camarillo High graduate had been called out to inspect a hive near a Ventura home. The bees had been killed by the homeowner.

At her desk in Santa Paula, she peered through a microscope to measure the wings to determine whether they were of the killer bee variety.

It turned out they were regular honeybees. It’s sometimes hit-or-miss. She said she recently spent weeks setting traps at area nurseries for the red imported fire ant, using Spam as bait.

She didn’t find any fire ants. But she is now affectionately known as the Queen of Spam, a nickname memorialized by her co-workers with Spam wrappers and recipes taped to her office cubicle.

“I love the variety this job offers, it is a really good mix,” said Gerry, who comes from a family of local lemon ranchers. “I think this is really in my blood.”

The new inspectors are being trained by veterans such as Glen Hackworth, 63, a supervising biologist who has worked for the commissioner’s office since 1958. On a recent morning, the Santa Paula native climbed into his big white county pickup and followed Hernandez into the fields.

Hackworth said it takes up to three years before new inspectors are fully trained in all facets of the job. During that time, they take a series of state exams to certify their proficiency in areas such as pesticide enforcement and fruit and vegetable quarantine.

“You’re constantly learning on this job,” Hackworth said, pushing his county truck up a narrow dirt road bordered by strawberries on both sides. “It’s when you think you know it all that you get in trouble.”

After leaving the celery field, Hernandez moved to a nearby strawberry field, where he stopped to check whether the supervisor was complying with worker safety laws, making sure they had drinking water and bathrooms.

The operation got a clean bill of health. And again, Hernandez thanked the supervisor for his time, this time in Spanish.

“I don’t want to be a confrontational or a mean person, I want to do it the right way,” he said. “There’s no need to yell at each other. I think we’re all looking for the same thing, and that’s to protect workers.”