Newsom hopes farmers will foot the bill for his pesticide goals

As California faces one its worst infestations on record and grapples with a historic budget deficit, Gov. Gavin Newsom is proposing to fundamentally change the way government regulates pesticides, say industry advocates.

The governor has released a budget proposal for the coming fiscal year that would draw down spending across agencies. But the Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR) would see a massive expansion of its budget.

After a failed attempt in 2022, DPR is once again urging lawmakers to increase the mill assessment to shore up a longstanding structural imbalance in the department’s budget. The additional tax on pesticide sales would fund 117 positions and generate $33 million over the three-year phase-in period. The money would support aspects of the administration’s sustainable pest management (SPM) agenda, a controversial strategy for eliminating the use of certain pesticides by 2050, and it would also fund efforts to streamline evaluation and registration processes for new products as well as research into viable alternatives. The money would also create a committee to determine “priority pesticides” to phase out.

Environmental justice groups applauded the proposal, though they had pushed for a greater increase to the mill.

“If used appropriately, the increase in funds could help spur a much overdue transition to safer ways to manage pests other than toxic chemical use,” said Asha Sharma, a director at the Pesticide Action Network.

Speeding up registrations, however, would “jeopardize the rigor of the scientific review process,” according to Angel Garcia, a director at Californians for Pesticide Reform.

“The state must take steps to reduce overall pesticide use, not just the worst of the worst, since many chemical pesticides carry health and environmental harms,” said Garcia.

While agricultural advocates are warning of the industry impacts from such an overhaul, they are cheering the administration’s dedication of $22 million to combat the largest fruit fly infestation in decades. It adds to $100 million the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service dedicated last month to supporting emergency actions.

According to Michael Miiller, director of government relations at the California Association of Winegrape Growers, the state’s appropriation “recognizes that the threat is significant and we need all hands on deck.” CDFA Secretary Karen Ross has shared a similar sentiment in meetings with the agriculture community.

“We know that these are new species, that their pest season is lasting longer because of our warmer temperatures,” Ross told stakeholders in a press conference last week. “And we are also doing the work to better understand the high-risk pathways that are allowing things to pass into the state of California.”

Chris Reardon, who spent a decade in DPR before directing government affairs at the California Farm Bureau, has talked with former state officials who fought medfly outbreaks in the early 1980s. None have seen infestations on this scale before.

“Why don't we really focus money on pest prevention?” Reardon told Agri-Pulse, before lamenting about California’s efforts to cancel some pesticides. “We want to make sure we have the tools to combat [invasive pests].”

He worried that a mild winter in the Central Valley has not brought the low temperatures needed to kill off fruit fly populations, meaning infestations could be worse in spring. Despite the emergency funding, farmers with damaged fruit will continue to feel the financial impact, and Reardon hopes some state or federal dollars could help those operations stay afloat.

He called much of the new spending proposed for DPR unnecessary, reasoning the state has long been practicing sustainable pest management and that DPR’s new alert system for applications is repackaging information already available at each county agriculture commissioner’s office.

Renee Pinel, president and CEO of Western Plant Health, appreciated that the administration proposes to continue financing the notification program through the state’s general tax fund, since that was how the Legislature established the program. Like Reardon and others, Pinel was alarmed by the request for so many new positions and plans to engage with DPR to understand the need as well as the timing of the mill increase.

“This really is a year when [California] should be focused on just dealing with the existing challenges that sit before us and really not creating new ones,” Matthew Allen, vice president of state government affairs at the Western Growers Association, told Agri-Pulse. “One of the things that we're always looking for is stability.”

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Allen and Pinel support DPR’s request for $4 million to update the department’s process for registering new products.

“We continue to push the department on the urgent necessity to fix the pesticide registration system,” said Allen. “We need a system that is much more nimble and able to register new products faster.”

Reardon acknowledged that DPR does need more people to accomplish that goal, but he called the $33 million proposal overblown and said it comes as other agencies trim their budgets. While the money would not stem from taxpayer dollars, the cost would be passed on to consumers through higher food prices—after three years of already inflated prices, he reasoned.

Reardon estimated DPR is looking to increase the assessment by about 7 mill and said the department has told stakeholders it needs just 2.2 mill to meet its budget shortfall. The Legislature treats any mill increase like a tax proposal, requiring a two-thirds vote to approve it.

He appreciated that DPR dropped its pursuit of a tiered approach, which would have imposed higher fees on pesticides determined to be more hazardous. That becomes problematic when considering that about half of the mill derives from household consumer products used in urban settings, he explained.

Reardon and his colleagues on Friday spent hours discussing the budget with legislative members, including both agriculture chairs and their staff. He stressed to them that “not one minute” of policy discussion in the building has focused on the impacts to agriculture from “fundamentally changing” the state’s regulatory system for pesticides.

“There should at least be a discussion on it,” said Reardon. “You have this colossal industry here that feeds the world.”

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