With less than a month to go before aerial spraying gets under way to combat the light brown apple moth in Santa Cruz County, all eyes are on Monterey County, where a Superior Court judge is expected to rule next week on whether the state has the right to continue spraying a pesticide whose safety has been called into question.
The city of Santa Cruz is weighing whether to join that legal fray -- after the City Council voted Tuesday to fight spraying here. City Attorney John Barisone said the city has the option of joining the lawsuit now pending in Monterey County, in what is referred to as a "motion to intervene."
The city's other option is to drum up support from neighboring communities and file a separate joint lawsuit in Santa Cruz County Superior Court to halt the spraying.
"This is a regional issue, and if we want to stop this chemical cocktail from being dropped on us, or at least suspend it, it's going to help us to have other jurisdictions involved," Barisone said Wednesday. "The burden of proof is going to be on us."
While spraying was halted over the Monterey Peninsula Wednesday, it is still on schedule next month in Soquel, Live Oak, Santa Cruz, Capitola, Aptos and Scotts Valley.
As of Thursday, Barisone was waiting to hear from the attorneys in Watsonville, Scotts Valley and Capitola on where they stand on the issue of spraying one of two controversial products, CheckMate OLR-F and CheckMate LBAM-F, both of which are manufactured by the Bend, Ore.-based Suterra LLC.
He's also waiting on a decision from the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors when it meets next week to discuss the issue, which has pitted agricultural interests against safety concerns in town meetings from here to Monterey in the past month.
While state Agriculture Secretary A.G. Kawamura has repeatedly said millions of dollars in damage to crops across the state could occur if the moth isn't kept in check, and other countries might not accept local products, concerned residents say the pesticide could be a threat to human safety.
At issue is one of the ingredients in the carrier of CheckMate OLR-F, a biopesticide that replicates the scent of a female moth, confusing the mating instincts of male moths.
Opponents say that the ingredient, polymethylene polyphenyl isocyanate, has been known to cause respiratory problems in high concentrations and daily exposure. But many chemists concur that the most toxic part of the ingredient is the isocyanate when isolated -- not when all three are combined and working together.
The state and the manufacturer of the product have stood by the safety of the pesticide. At the urging of Assemblyman John Laird, D-Santa Cruz, the state Department of Pesticide Regulation said it will re-evaluate the ingredients of CheckMate.
In his ruling late Wednesday, Monterey County Judge Robert A. O'Farrell wrote that he needed more scientific information on the pesticide and its ingredients, which to date have been protected by the state and federal trade secrets laws.
The ingredients were erroneously provided to the Sentinel by the Environmental Protection Agency and published last month.
"Neither side has had an adequate opportunity to submit reliable scientific evidence on that issue and consequently the court is not in a position to rule in a vacuum of information," O'Farrell said, in temporarily suspending aerial operations over the Monterey Peninsula.
According to the attorney for Helping Our Peninsula's Environment, which filed for the injunction last week, it's not too late for Santa Cruz to join the lawsuit in Monterey County. Attorney Alexander Henson said the entire area of the state's eradication treatment is "one big operation" that was "piggybacked" onto the state's decision to spray Monterey.
Henson said he's preparing to square off with the state Attorney General's Office next week in court.
"The unspoken thing that nobody's talking about is that it's illegal to pollute," said Henson. "As long as this stuff they're spraying around isn't a pollutant, then it's fine. But if it's not safe, if it's a contaminant and if it's going to make people sick, it's a hazardous substance. And so far we've shown that people in Monterey have reported the same kinds of symptoms that the ingredient, PPI, has been known to cause."
But the Attorney General's Office, in its response to the lawsuit filed by HOPE's executive director David Dilworth, has defended the state's aerial spraying, saying "The declaration of David Dilworth is the result of another Internet search. The declaration does not present admissible evidence and is objectionable on the following grounds: It lacks foundation that Mr. Dilworth is qualified as an expert in anything, it consists of wholly inadmissible hearsay and multiple hearsay ... provides no reliable information about the role if any polymethylene polyphenyl isocyanate may have in CheckMate LBAM-F ... or the concentration that may be in the sprayed product."
Contact Tom Ragan at tragan@santacruzsentinel.com.