Ag & Natural Resources Committee rejects pesticide regulation bill

The State Senate Agriculture and Natural Resources Committee resoundingly rejected a bill that would have allowed local governments to regulate pesticide use in their communities, after a nine-hour hearing and 93 witnesses.

The bill’s sponsors, Senators Sonya Jaquez Lewis, D-Longmont, and Kevin Priola, R-Henderson, in an effort to keep the bill alive, tried to water it down, but that didn’t fly with the ag committee either. Senate Bill 22-131 died on a 1-6 vote, with three Democrats voting with the three Republicans against it. The only “yes” vote the bill got was from Jaquez Lewis, the Committee’s Vice-Chair.

SB 131 is intended to protect pollinators, stating that the decline of bees and other pollinators has implications for the State’s food supply and for the health of its citizens. 

The March 3 hearing lasted nine hours and drew 93 witnesses, many from the agricultural industry that said local governments don’t have the personnel or the expensive equipment that would be needed to accomplish the bill’s goals. As introduced, the bill also would have limited pesticide use on school grounds and day care centers, allowing only “organic” or “minimum-risk” pesticides to be used. 

The study section of the bill would have required the Department of Natural Resources to develop recommendations on how to improve pollinator health. But DNR staff told the committee they didn’t have the expertise to do that kind of work. That expertise is in the Department of Agriculture, which regulates pesticides and deals with pollinator issues. The bill would have allowed DNR to contract with experts, such as at the Department of Agriculture.

SB 131 also attempted to ban neonicotinoid and sulfoximine pesticides, although the bill provided an exception for agriculture, for preserved wood products and on golf courses.

But the Capitol was abuzz with rumors that the bill was in trouble long before its initial hearing. That led to the amendment that stripped the prohibition of pesticides on school grounds but left in the study as well as allowing local government control of pesticides.

Jaquez Lewis told the committee that 28 states have passed laws on the topic, with 16 just in the past three years, including Nebraska. But Nebraska’s legislation was nothing more than a request for an interim study that hasn’t yet been approved by its legislature, according to an email from the Nebraska Department of Agriculture.

The bill’s main premise, that pesticides are responsible for the decline in pollinator populations, was disputed by committee members. Sen. Don Coram, R-Montrose, pointed to a University of Minnesota study that said 90 percent of the decline in bees is tied to varroa mites, not pesticides, yet the bill doesn’t address the mite problem, he said.

Jaquez Lewis said the sponsors decided to remove schools from the bill because schools had been through so much with COVID-19, but that led Sen. Cleave Simpson, R-Alamosa, to State that ag also has been through a lot in the last two years.

Among those who favored the bill, the Colorado Municipal League, which represents 270 cities and towns across Colorado. Heather Stauffer of Colorado Municipal League told the committee that local communities are limited in their ability “to make meaningful changes,” such as creating pesticide free buffers around facilities with vulnerable populations or requiring signage around pesticide use.

Scientists, including Rella Abernathy, an entomologist with the city of Boulder, testified they are seeing deformities in pollinators, including bees, wasps and flies and declines in the populations of fireflies and dragonflies, which she “assumes” is because of pesticides and increases in mosquito populations.

JaSon Auguste of Mile High Farmers, who lives in unincorporated Jefferson County, told the committee he understands the relationships among pollinators, people and produce. 

The bill will ensure the science is there to back up the claims around pollinators and give local communities the autonomy to address the negative impacts of pesticides on “human living conditions, especially for the children of Colorado,” Auguste said.

Alan Lewis of Natural Grocers also spoke in favor of the bill, in testimony that at times got testy between him and some of the committee members. He spoke at length about the impact of pesticides on human health and said SB 131 would allow families to protect their children within their neighborhoods. He also called the bill a “baby step,” leading Sen. Jerry Sonnenberg, R-Sterling, to question whether the backers have ulterior motives.

Lewis responded that “there is good in this bill that needs to be considered and that local governments “rarely overstep” on something like this. He also claimed the Department of Agriculture, while it regulates pesticides, doesn’t enforce the laws around pesticide use. “All we're doing is trying to carve out local enclaves of safety,” Lewis told the committee.

Farmers and ranchers and former ag regulators opposed to the bill attended in droves. 

Chris Wiseman, a County Commissioner in Pueblo and former Deputy Director of the Department of Agriculture, told the committee he worries about having to negotiate with other counties — Pueblo shares borders with seven — and that the issue should be dealt with on a statewide basis, not through local control. 

He wasn’t the only ag regulator opposed to the bill. Former Commissioner of Agriculture Don Brown of Yuma said it was sometimes his job at Ag to implement laws from lawmakers who didn’t understand the issue. He pointed out the Environmental Protection Agency spends millions of dollars to determine if a pesticide is safe. 

Brown also spoke to what local governments would be taking on should they decide to regulate pesticides: three or four inspectors, a pesticide expert attorney, and testing machines that cost $750,000 each. “There's no bigger expert than somebody that doesn't do it for a living. The Department of Ag and the EPA does it for a living,” he said. 

Mitch Yergert, also formerly with the ag department, said the biggest issue for pollinators in Colorado are all of the houses and condos being built. “They are eliminating many, many acres where no plant or anything to sustain pollinators can exist.” 

As to the bill’s efforts to regulate neonicotinoid and sulfoximine pesticides, Yergert said “clearly the sponsors don’t agree with the whole EPA pesticide regulation decision-making process.” All studies and EPA analysis are thrown out based on the sponsors’ beliefs. “I am not sure what more of an argument you make — either stick with the science or go with politics.”

“Science is science and you either believe it or you don’t. The EPA is charged with and funded to make these health risk decisions. To politicize all of this seems like a bad idea,” Yergert told the committee, and to Brown’s point, said the cost of just a bare-bones program would run a local government at least $100,000 per year, to cover the costs of education on the rules, inspections for compliance, enforcement of potential violations, and lab analysis to prove violations. 

In response to a question from Sen. Rhonda Fields, D-Aurora, Brown explained one scenario: two jurisdictions, with only a yellow line on a highway separating them. You could buy one kind of pesticide in one community and take it home to kill cockroaches in the other. The bill would create a situation where it’s impossible for citizens to be educated because they don’t know which pesticides are regulated in which communities. They’ll end up as “hapless victims” on the road to good intentions, he said.

“I like local control,” added Wiseman. but he said he also realizes that some things need to be done at a higher level and this is one of them.

Thea Walker, who spent 35 years at Colorado State University, including as an extension specialty for pesticide safety education, told the committee regulations regarding pesticide use and applications should be science-based, and not based on fear, emotion or for political reasons. She also blasted the bill’s backers, whom she claimed don’t know anything about pesticide regulations or the science around pesticides.

“I don't believe this bill is drafted in consultation with anyone who has an extensive knowledge of either federal or state pesticide regulations, which can be very complex. I do not see evidence in this bill that regulations should be based on peer reviewed science and evidence of adverse pesticide impacts to a community,” Walker said.

The bill’s language on local control would affect anyone using a pesticide, including private land owners who own land in multiple counties or municipalities, Walker added. In addition, the bill could jeopardize the state’s relationship with the EPA by taking away authority from the department of ag.

John Scott, with the Department of Ag, told the committee that out of 500 investigations on pesticide complaints since 2011, 20 dealt with pollinators. Not one was determined to be a violation, he said.

  Even the beekeepers didn’t like SB 131. Robert Murray, who farms in Logan, Morgan and Washington counties, and who represented the Colorado Professional Beekeepers Association, also testified against the bill, stating that the decline in bee populations is not established fact. Allowing local governments to control pesticides would create complications, such as with enforcement, which is handled by the Department of Ag.

Coram noted at the hearing’s end that the bill sponsors spent only about an hour in the hearing, missing most of the testimony, which he called disrespectful to the dozens of witnesses who came from all over the state to testify.

Fields, in talking about her “no” vote, told the committee that given that the ag industry brings in billions of dollars every year to the State’s economy, “surely we can take the time to do this right.”