In a split vote Tuesday, the Santa Cruz City Council decided to challenge the state's aerial spraying of the light brown apple on the basis the state failed to conduct an environmental review on the impact the pesticide will have on the people and the environment under the California Environmental Quality Act.
With City Council members Cynthia Mathews and Lynn Robinson dissenting, Mayor Emily Reilly and councilmen Ed Porter, Tony Madrigal and Ryan Coonerty voted to hire Sacramento environmental attorney Jim Moose to lead the city's fight against the state, said Assistant City Attorney Tony Condotti after the closed session.
Moose has worked with the city in the past, most recently in trying to stop UC Santa Cruz from expanding, Condotti said.
The Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday also condemned the state's plan to spray in urban settings until a full environmental assessment was completed. But the supervisors stopped short of pursuing the matter legally, a disappointment to the some on the City Council who hoped to file a lawsuit jointly, Reilly said.
The city hopes Moose can help them stop the state's spraying by claiming in Santa Cruz County Superior Court that the state should not have been exempt from an environmental review -- and that the declaration of emergency does not live up to the act's definition of what entails an emergency, Condotti said.
"The issue isn't the moth so much as it is the lack of environmental review and the regulations set forth in the state's Environmental Quality Act," said Condotti. "Having reviewed it carefully myself, I think there's a good argument..."
According to the language in the act, Condotti said, a declaration of emergency is "a sudden, unexpected occurrence involving a clear and imminent danger demanding an immediate action to prevent or mitigate loss of or damage to life, health, property or essential public services."
The state in early October filed an exemption from an environmental review on the basis that the moth, if not stopped, could cause significant damage to California's agricultural industry -- to the tune of some $640 million a year. The highest concentration of the light brown apple moth in the state has been found in Live Oak and Soquel with more than 7,500 trapped. The state says the moth has the potential to damage 250 crops and more than 1,000 plants including the Central Coast cypress, redwoods, oaks and other varieties found in urban and suburban landscaping, public parks and natural environment. Among the list of agricultural crops on the moth's diet are grapes, citrus and stone fruits.
But some residents in Santa Cruz and Monterey counties have opposed the state's tactics, saying the long-term health effects of the pesticides, CheckMate LBAM-F and OLR-F, manufactured by Bend, Ore.-based Suterra LLC, are unknown.
The state claims the pesticides merely confuse the male moths by replicating the scent of female moths, thus throwing the males course and effectively disrupting the mating cycle to the point where they die off.
While independent chemists contacted by the Sentinel say the pesticides are safe, provided they are administered in low concentrations, for some residents the issue has become a matter of individual rights versus what the state can or cannot do.
A similar lawsuit has been filed in Monterey County Superior Court by HOPE, or Helping Our Peninsula's Environment, a Carmel group. It lost its battle to stop the spraying last week when Judge Robert A. O'Farrell ruled that HOPE failed to prove that one of the pesticides used by the state, OLR-F, was linked to respiratory problems reported by more than 100 Monterey Peninsula residents after it was sprayed in late September.
But HOPE still plans to pursue its claim that the state needs to conduct an environmental review, according to its executive director, David Dilworth. Although the spraying was not stopped, he's hoping to stop it in the spring.
Spraying on the peninsula resumes today. Spraying over North Monterey County and parts of Santa Cruz County is scheduled for Nov. 4-9.
Contact Tom Ragan at tragan@santacruzsentinel.com.