Quick Take
Several Pajaro Valley organizations, including a local teachers union and the Center for Farmworker Families, filed a lawsuit this week challenging the approval of pesticide permits that they say have caused harm to the majority-Latino communities.
Several Pajaro Valley organizations, including a local teachers union and the Center for Farmworker Families, filed a lawsuit this week challenging the approval of pesticide permits that they say have caused harm to the majority-Latino communities.
The complaint, filed Thursday in Monterey County Superior Court, accuses the Monterey County agricultural commissioner and the California Department of Pesticide Regulation of failing to analyze the cumulative health impacts of the use of two pesticides on local residents and of violating the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA).
Specifically, the organizations are targeting six pesticide permits approved in July and August 2023 for six ranches located near three schools: Ohlone Elementary, Hall District Elementary and Pajaro Middle schools. The schools, which are 98% Latino, are located in Monterey County but are part of Pajaro Valley Unified School District.
Attorneys Gregory C. Loarie and Elizabeth Fisher of San Francisco-based Earthjustice environmental law firm are representing the organizations. Loarie said they’ve been working with Pajaro Valley organizations for about three years.
“What we want is a government regulator to come to grips with the cumulative impact that pesticide use is having on human health and needs to be giving serious consideration to alternatives,” Loarie told Lookout.
In addition to the PVUSD teachers’ union and the Center for Farmworker Families, the attorneys are representing the Monterey Bay Central Labor Council, Safe Ag Safe Schools and Californians for Pesticide Reform. The organizations represent staff and teachers who work and have children at the schools, farmworkers and their families as well as nearby residents and concerned community members.
Compared to any other county in the state, Monterey County has a higher percentage of schools and students in areas with the greatest pesticide use, affecting 29 schools and 18,525 students, according to a 2014 report from the California Department of Public Health.
In the lawsuit, the organizations focus on six permits allowing the use of two pesticides: chloropicrin and 1,3-dichloropropene. The California Health and Safety Code classified the pesticides as toxic air contaminants meaning they’re air pollutants “which may cause or contribute to an increase in mortality or an increase in serious illness, or which may pose a present or potential hazard to human health.”
Monterey County ranches and farms applied over 2 million pounds of chloropicrin and over 700,000 pounds of 1,3-D in 2021, according to the lawsuit. Also known as “restricted materials” by the Department of Pesticide Regulation, the department says the pesticides are part of a list of the most “highly regulated pesticides” and are therefore subject to strict requirements.
Center for Farmworker Families Executive Director Ann Lopez says she sees the harmful impacts of pesticide exposure on families everyday, and demands an end to it. She hopes this lawsuit will help.
“As long as I’ve been working with farmworkers, I’ve been meeting children from families who have various anomalies, including brain cancer, bone cancer, leukemia, learning disabilities, ADHD [attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder], autism,” she said. “And in South [Santa Cruz] County here, it just seems to be an epidemic – almost every family either has a relative or a close family member with these anomalies.”
Lopez and the organizations say the impacts of pesticide exposure amount to environmental racism.
Lookout sought comment from the Monterey County agricultural commissioner, Juan Hidalgo, and from the Department of Pesticide Regulation. Monterey County spokesperson Nicholas Pasculli said the county wouldn’t comment on pending litigation.
The Department of Pesticide Regulation declined to provide someone to talk to Lookout in an interview but emailed a statement from Leia Bailey, assistant director of communications and outreach. DPR officials say before a pesticide is sold or used in the state, department officials do a “thorough evaluation for human health and environmental risks.”
“Evaluating the potential impact of pesticide exposure on sensitive populations, including children, is a part of DPR’s registration review of pesticides as well as part of its continuous evaluation process,” the statement reads.
Loarie said the department’s response is insufficient as they have yet to show they’re following requirements to analyze cumulative pesticide impacts and adequately seek out alternatives to using the pesticides.
The lawsuit says that the county agricultural commissioner’s office, as part of its pesticide permitting process, must comply with CEQA’s “broad policy goals and substantive standards” which include an analysis of cumulative impacts. However, the organizations say the county agricultural commissioner failed to evaluate the cumulative impact of permitting the pesticides on “schoolchildren, teachers, farmworkers, and communities.”
For example, in the lawsuit, the organizations say that the department and the agricultural commissioner didn’t do an individualized analysis of the environmental impacts of approving the permits for each of the ranches. Rather, the agencies focused on “program-level mitigation built into the pesticide regulation process” including the initial approval for the use of the pesticides generally in California and the “product labels and safety data sheets for these restricted materials.”
Additionally, the organizations say in the lawsuit, that the agencies don’t consider as part of their review, the recorded levels of 1,3-D at Ohlone Elementary. For almost every year since a monitor was installed about 20 years ago, they say, the levels have exceeded the “safe harbor” established by the California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment.
“The lifetime cancer risk at Ohlone Elementary continues to be more than twice OEHHA’s threshold when averaged over the 11 years of available monitoring data (2012-2022),” the lawsuit reads.
The organizations are asking the court to review the approval of six 2023 permits, to overturn the county commissioner and state department’s reviews of the permits and to prevent future permitting until the agencies comply with applicable laws.
“California officials are mandated by law to address the cumulative impacts of harmful pesticides on human health and consider safer alternatives,” said attorney Fisher in a statement. “The Ag Commissioner and DPR continue to rubber-stamp pesticide applications without doing either, disregarding the health and safety of our state’s most vulnerable people – young children.”
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