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beneficialbug@... wrote:
Increasingly, we’re getting the following questions posed to us regarding the County Vector Control:
To: <beneficialbug@...>
Sent: Monday, May 14, 2007 4:31 PM
Subject: Unusual ballot
> I meant to ask you yesterday whether you'd received from Alameda
County
> a proposed Vector and Disease Control Assessment guide and ballot. A
public
> hearing will be
held July 10th on rodent and disease control, but why
are we
> being asked to approve it? Are measures like spraying planned? I'd
like to
> know what you think of this issue when you receive this Official
Notice
and
> Ballot Information Guide. I'm suspicious of it; perhaps the
department in
> charge wants to say we voted for it. All home and property owners are
> receiving this. Perhaps it's more a matter of preparing us for
increased
> taxes to take care of this.
RESPONSE:
5/14/07
I am aware of this Alameda County Vector Control Service District's ballot measure crying for money but haven't yet delved fully into details. I can tell you the following as I have dealt with the county Mosquito Abatement people and East Bay Pesticide Alert specifically prepared a large amount of information for them regarding facts around mosquitoes and the failed spray program in NYC starting in 2000. I did a 25-minute presentation for them in 2005 and it was clear that their board had no idea of some of the most basic factual information I presented (you can see some of this by going to our website at www.eastbaypesticidealert.org and clicking on West Nile Virus on the left side of the page).
They were asking me questions, which on one hand was a good sign in terms of their not being totally closed-minded, but was shocking nonetheless in that they were preparing for a spray approach dictated by the state and were getting funding which was SPECIFICALLY for a spray program, specifically NOT ALLOWED, I was told by them, to be used for preventative measures such as door-to-door housechecks which could be used to help residents understand what we all can do in our own yards to avoid water buildup which can give mosquitoes a place to breed. The fact that they were in the process of preparing to spray when they didn't seem to know what has been shown country-wide and worldwide, that when you spray insecticides for mosquitoes you get MORE mosquitoes... it is resistance being built up similar to anti-biotic resistance in the medical world, might we agree that this is a travesty?
But here is another perspective I can give you prior to more carefully picking apart this ballot measure: around 4 years ago a group in San Leandro had an Earth Day event at a tiny local park right by a creek running through San Leandro. There was a massive Alameda County Vector Control booth at which I tried to offer their representative some of the East Bay Pesticide Alert materials as I was trying to ask some questions around the county's pesticide use via their program. He backed away from me, refusing to even take our couple brochures, all facts with citations on a separate sheet, and said he didn't want to talk to me. I asked why not. His reply as he held up his hands almost like someone trying not to be seen by someone with a camera "This is how I make my living: every day of the week I am out spraying pesticides."
That is what Vector Control does. They try to make a big deal about the few less bad preventative things they do. And do have a few better preventative approaches. But their overarching practice and their mindset and funding are for pesticide application programs. They get pleasant articles written to make it all sound benign and nice, and they plead poverty, but you need to know as you consider their requests that a typical licensed pesticide applicator salary BEGINS at $125,000. Who knows what it is when you add benefits. Now, think of all the ways you can crunch numbers to do non-toxic preventative work with such sums of money.
Here is another related perspective to take into account: when conventional wine grape growers in central California were starting to see some problems due to a "pest" called the Glassy-winged Sharpshooter (late '99), they immediately used words like devastation and suggested that California's economy (based on wine?) was going to collapse. Organic growers, predictably, were having no problem. I started to refer to the "pest of the month" syndrome in organizing with Sonoma Pesticide Alert. A couple activists with whom I was working on pesticides issues drove down to that area and photographed and reported back that EXACTLY as we had known they'd find, there was no wide devastation, but there were some lost vines in conventional, unhealthy vineyards to which "pests" are drawn. The wine industry saw a chance to get a big bailout after it had made its own mistakes. It was a manufactured crisis, just as is West Nile Virus. But they got all the backing in the world from Agricultural departments across the state as these departments, exactly like Mosquito Abatement and Vector Control departments, manufacture crises on average every 2-5 years in order to ensure rounds of funding. A basic job works program.
As I interviewed Ag. Commissioners and sometimes Deputy Ag. Commissioners county by county in 2000 for Sonoma Pesticide Alert, and later for East Bay Pesticide Alert, as the governor declared a state of emergency (what?!) and provided all kinds of sought-after money, several things stood out. First, supposedly there was a massive crisis which required a state of emergency be called; yet, Ag. Commissioners in contiguous counties of the central California area that was supposed to be the center of this crisis had differing stories about what had transpired in only a few months' time. They didn't even know details of what the Ag. Departments were doing one county over, nor did they actually accurately know statistics which I was giving them about what had been seen in contiguous counties to that point. Further, repeatedly they told me (as they of course told concerned residents in their counties) that Malathion, Carbaryl and Imidacloprid, the insecticides that were going to be used, or were already being used as part of the program, by direction of California Department of Food and Agriculture, were safe. They are terribly unsafe, each, and you can read their toxicological profiles with citings, often government studies in fact, by clicking on 'Glassy-winged Sharpshooter' from the homepage of our website, or the direct link at www.dontspraycalifornia.org/gwss/index.htm. You can read a few examples of the interviews with Ag. Commissioners, and entomologists about this manufactured crisis and get a lot of perspective about that dangerous program.
Beyond all that, several Agricultural Commissioners were very happy to tell me about how this program was allowing them to buy lots of new trucks, create lots of jobs, and that they were guaranteed funding for a 5-year spray program, with the option to renew after 5 years. There was no question that they'd back the concept of a crisis. They are in direct conflict in that they profit greatly by the cyclical funding of such programs.
To get yet more perspective, you can go to the website at www.eastbaypesticidealert.org/wpad.html to see how these assessments are pushed, misrepresented and how they pan out, in this case the Oakland Wildfire Prevention Assessment District (WPAD). People agreed in November, 2004, to a self-assessment in the Oakland Hills believing due to the misleading advertising for it that this would be for more goats eating "weeds" and more house-by-house checks for safety assessments by the fire department. We exposed those lies and so far have held off the City of Oakland from going forward with yet another exemption to their sham "ban" on pesticide use by the city. So far at least the City of Oakland is not using toxic pesticides on the thousand+ acres they oversee in the hills, at least not as part of the WPAD, though the Oakland Public Works Agency is exempted to spray any part of the city they oversee, and you'd better believe the city continues to get heavy pressure from the East Bay Regional Park District; EBMUD; PG&E; UC Berkeley and other agencies which all use toxic pesticides in the hills surrounding those 1000+ acreas, contaminating people, wildlife and the whole watershed.
The city has succeeded in collecting this extra 1.8 million dollars/year and their plan was to hire a licensed pesticide applicator to oversee wide pesticide use. That was the overall plan... to be using pesticides, not to be applying that money to pay people to do manual, safe removal (which also would mean over time removing the source of the supposedly unwanted plants), or to be paying the goat companies to bring in more goats, nor to do the house-to-house checks to help people understand dangers around their homes. They also were NOT going to use that money for wood chipping trucks to support people's home brush removal or anything else that would help people doing manual removal. They had no plan even to remove the "weeds" they planned to kill, even the tall broom or thistle plants. Their plan was to join E. Bay Regional Park District's way of spraying plants and leaving them where they are, thereby creating an increased fire hazard. Frankly, maybe the easiest way to get a handle on that whole manufactured crisis is to read the piece I wrote at the time, called “There Is No Quick Fix!”, which was published in the Berkelely Daily Planet, and which you can find at the WPAD link on our website.
As you can imagine, I could regale you for, oh, maybe a few weeks without break except to eat and sleep but I won't bore you too much further. I think you can get the idea that agencies which make their living spraying and otherwise using pesticides will always promote pesticide use. In Oakland we actually had a public debate with Jean Quan as she had started to substitute the word 'spritz' for 'spray' in order to try to greenwash her hills pesticides plan and make people think it was no big deal. Yes... we enlarged the dictionary entry which showed that those words mean the same thing. We understood exactly why she was trying to downplay her very dangerous plan. One best would question why she, and the rest of the Oakland City Council, continued to try to find a way legally to go forward with their toxic, fire-dangerous plan in spite of the myriad safe alternatives which that money would easily fund. We had to invoke the California Environmental Quality Act's requirement of Environmental Assessment related to two Prop. 65 chemicals that were part of their plan and still, while City Attorney John Russo turned to me and said, "Okay, you got us. You're right, it does fall under CEQA," the City Council's new plan became how to move forward with their spray program without being sued, vs. looking at doing actual wildfire prevention work. Oh, how I could go on. Read all about it in that article and our website.
About the way this tax issue was weighed by the Vector Control Service District: they hired a consulting group which went into one area and did a mail response survey which they said suggested that 60% of respondents would support such a tax. So first the Vector Control Service District claims poverty, then it pays a private consulting company to go into a suburban area where pesticides are used widely by people who often are having two parents working outside the home to support a big suburban house, and then hire gardeners to do work in their yards, not even knowing what their gardeners are using. They aren't home watching the pesticides being sprayed, or it is so ubiquitous a practice that they are lulled into believing that it is safe. You will notice that the consultants (or the Vector Control District) chose Fairfield as their test area, not Berkeley where there is much more general understanding of the dangers of a pesticide approach and toxic pesticide use, and therefore less pesticide use by individuals and the city, which, by the way, has formally adopted the Precautionary Principle as a guiding principle for the city as it considers toxics issues, and has something much closer in place to a pesticide ban than most municipalities. Then the consultants or Vector Control put out these various articles saying that this tax is supported. This is the second article I've seen within a couple months in the Trib.
When I studied statistics, we spent most of a semester tearing apart statistics presented publicly to look at how studies were set up specifically to guarantee a certain outcome. An intended outcome was paraded as a statistical survey, as though it were representing surveyees who had carefully studied an issue and had thus responded with opinions based on knowledge of the issue. No way. I have not yet seen the actual survey done via mail to Fairfield residents, but notice: no public meetings at which residents were getting together, asking questions in a public setting so that they could, together, either find the obvious holes in the plan as it was represented, or decide for themselves that the plan was one which seemed safe based on more thorough information.
Based on my experience, however, my expectation is that it was presented as something along these lines: Do you like having rats eating breakfast with you? Are you afraid you will die of West Nile Virus? And do you want to watch a parade of ants in your house? Ick. Don't worry... a mere $11.28 this year (and a bit more each following year) will take care of it all for you. You can relax and kick back with your daquiri and stop thinking about it.
Now, what about if they'd used the probably $50,000- $100,000 they paid the consultant and instead paid for a blanketing of the county with a one-page flyer with solid information about the myriad ways to repel "pests" and safe ways to deal with them if they really are a problem in your house. Money well-used and no one sickened. Hmm. Now imagine if people did self-assess that $11.28/year and it were used to pay people $20/hour to do house-by-house informational campaigns blanketing one neighborhood after another, a cyclical thing which would result in each neighborhood being blanketed every couple/few years at least with information and people who could answer questions and provide a list of the specific ways to repel, or to kill the "pests" in a way totally safe for people, animals, the environment. Now wouldn't that be a novel idea.
Having worked as a door-to-door canvasser for several years in my younger life around toxics community right-to-know ordinances and anti-nuke work, I know the ins and outs of the logistics involved in something like this. Very easy, very straightforward. We were doing it in person for 4 hours per afternoon/evening, 5 days/week, and were each able to interact with 15-40 people a shift, even in hills areas. And that was asking for money, always something taking longer than this program idea would. With an informational canvass, one person could personally interact with 25-50 people per shift.
I would steer completely clear of such a tax. And want to know something interesting about who's being invited to make decisions? It's "residential, commercial, industrial and agricultural owners." So think about it. Here's an interesting consideration: all the thousands in the county living in apartments are NOT being asked their opinions, nor are people in nursing homes, jails, or any of the workers who might live elsewhere but are here 40+ hours per week working, and contributing economically to this county. But it gets better and more personal for me: we live in a mobilehome, the worst of both worlds I often joke. I am a homeowner; yet I am subjected to paying rent to landlords who have refused to deal adequately with various health issues at this mobilehome park, including stopping the use of toxic herbicides.
It's pretty funny for me, of all people in this world, to be glad to see them paving over just about every patch of soil in this place because in our crummy situation of chemical injury due to pesticide poisoning when we lived in Sonoma, what has become essentially one big parking lot means they spray only little areas of this mobilehome park.
I have not been mailed a ballot. I am a homeowner, but also a renter, and the county has no interest in me or the other hundreds of homeowners or residents here; instead, they are asking the park owners who don't even live on site and they are pesticide users. They don't represent me, not in the slightest. This county has thousands upon thousands of mobile home owners who are also renters and are being denied these ballots. But industrial business owners and other commercial business owners, vs. the workers who actually spend their days in this county working, are making decisions. And agricultural interests, big pesticide users, are being invited to weigh in, the votes being "weighted depending on the size, type and amount of development on individual properties." Consider this: big pesticide users of sprawling Livermore vineyards may be getting more say based on having more property than you. The mobilehome park owners here may be given the say equal to some 200 homeowners and we are given no say. The owners of massive apartment buildings and condos may be given the say of many individual homeowners, as will Wal-Mart and K-Mart and Safeway and on and on. Do we really trust these entitites with our loved ones' lives? Many are absentee landlords and will wrongfully think that free (to them) pesticide sprayings mean they will have to pay for less sprayings out of pocket. That is certainly how such programs are sold to some.
When the first Northern CA sprayings of the Glassy-winged Sharpshooter program were about to happen (November, 2000) first a group of us provided honest information to residents who showed up at the scary Ag. Commissioner's meeting about the GWSS program and the danger of the pesticides about to be used. Some residents said they were all for it, that they figured it was a free spray program and the more the merrier.
Two days after the Brentwood neighborhood was first sprayed (it is a repeat program as they all are... if your neighborhood is targeted by an Ag. or Mosquito or Vector Control Department, you will get sprayed on a regular basis for multiple years) a couple of us went door-to-door to do a health survey and the stories were stunningly familiar to me as my family and neighborhood had lived this in our life in Sonoma, being exposed to over 35 different pesticides, one of them Carbaryl which is central to the GWSS program. But here was one of the more interesting things we encountered: two different people, on different blocks, used the word 'snowed' to describe how this program was sold to them. They said strikingly similar things though we checked with the second person to see if he'd spoken with the first person who'd used that word... didn't know the person by the first name only we used, not wanting to invade privacy and use addresses or other indentifying information.
In fact, one person after another used similar language, though not that word, saying that the program had been presented as no big deal, the pesticides were said to be safe, but then suddenly there were massive trucks and massive spray, and they weren't warned adequately even to bring pets in. Person after person recounted stories about children having unusual behavioral problems, and many had tremendous nausea, dizziness, and other symptoms common with insecticide poisoning. And this was the first spraying of what has become a regular spray program. Based on the toxicological profiles of the Carbaryl and Imidacloprid used for that first spraying/drenching (their word), we can assume that many of those people have succumbed to related cancers; neurological problems; and derivative health problems which will stay with many for life, those who weren't killed already by the so-far over 6 years of sprayings there.
Personally, I would never vote for this assessment. As far as I understand it, it is another scam, just one in the long line of chemical industry scams.
Feel free to forward this to any friends you think would want the perspective and information.
Maxina Ventura
Chronic Effects Researcher
East Bay Pesticide Alert
www.eastbaypesticidealert.org
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