HomeMy WebLinkAbout8/16/2022 Item PC, Schmidt (2)
Aug 14, 2022
Re: City use of herbicides
Action Requested: That Council either
1. Affirm city has existing policy prohibiting use of herbicides/pesticides in routine city
operations, or
2. If cannot do #1, adopt such a policy and direct staff to follow it.
Dear Council,
I recently wrote to Derek Johnson asking why massive herbiciding was taking place on city
streets in apparent violation of an anti-herbiciding (actually anti-pesticiding) policy I was aware
of from involvement in this issue once before, in the 2010s. I have received no reply from
Derek, nor any other answer to my question, so I’m calling this to your attention.
I did receive a nice note from Brian Nelson (cc’d to you) explaining what’s going on (massive
city-wide 26 mile slurry seal project) and confirming what I already knew, that the herbicide
application was part of that project. But Brian’s letter was not a response to the policy issues I
raised with Derek (nor should it have been as Brian’s a technical guy, not a policy wonk) – i.e.,
why the city’s apparent violation of a policy that should have precluded this massive application
of herbicide to city streets.
I do find it interesting Brian cites the herbicide application as consistent with Best Management
Practices (BMPs) for the project, i.e., the application of glyphosate to 26 miles of city streets is
the “best.” So I’d like to take a swipe at the notion of BMPs, which staff is fond of citing when
communicating with the council, for if ever a BMP claim shows how utterly unimpressive the
term is, one associated with this project does. What does “best” mean? Best for whom, for
what? For the adhesion of slurry coat? For the health of laborers doing the work? For the
environment? See how slippery this gets? If you read through this letter you’ll see there’s no
“best” here for people, nature, our creeks. BNP seems simply a way to verbally glorify the
conventional way of doing things, nothing more. It’s like when I was a kid, we were told our city
had the “best” way to handle sewage: get it all into a pipe and dump it into the river. Thus we
could go out on the Ohio River and see toilet bowl floaters all around us, which was merely the
top layer of a microbiological/chemical stew of urban/industrial wastes that a few miles
downstream would become some other city’s urban drinking water source. What I describe is
gross, but it’s not too different from what happens when SLO spreads glyphosate on streets
that drain into our natural streams, except that on the Ohio there were visible indicators of
contamination whereas with herbicide runoff it’s quite invisible, but still toxic.
Glyphosate is an herbicide widely marketed by its makers as a “safe” herbicide. It is currently
marketed globally in an estimated 750+ different products. (The city’s formulation, Ranger Pro,
is marketed by Bayer/Monsanto.) Unfortunately, decades of use have shown glyphosate to be
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anything but safe. A wealth of solid science documents its problems.
The chief initial problem is glyphosate doesn’t stay put where it’s sprayed. It drifts through the
air, through water, binds to soils and stream sediments, moves into and through streams and
lakes, sometimes works its way into ground water, and finds its way into organisms from the
bottom to the top of the chain of nature. It has been found to adversely affect the very base of
the aquatic ecosystem, harming algae and phytoplankton. It has been found to harm
amphibians, a class of creatures increasingly at risk. It is implicated in the decline of fresh-water
mussels, another at risk group of creatures. It has been shown to harm fish. And on and on. So
San Luis Obispo’s use of glyphosate on streets where it ends up in streams is a very serious
ecological sin, one that cannot be excused by merely saying, “Well, that’s what we do to
maintain our streets” or by making reference to “best practices.”
Compounding the matter is glyphosate-based herbicides like Ranger Pro don’t just contain
glyphosate. There are other undisclosed “trade secret” ingredients that may also affect toxicity.
Some are actually more toxic than glyphosate itself, at least in combination with glyphosate.
(Ranger Pro, for example, has 59% undisclosed ingredients, including up to 10% of an
undisclosed surfactant; some surfactants are known to increase harm to aquatic species.) The
city has no way of knowing what these other ingredients are, let alone their individual or
synergistic harms to life around us. (Ranger Pro has “41% glyphosate,” and this comes in the
form of a particular salt that’s been found to be up to 10x as toxic as another form of
glyphosate.)
Like undisclosed ingredients, some of glyphosate’s breakdown products also potentiate its
harmful ecological impacts.
Glyphosate’s impacts on mammals should also get the council’s notice, for we’re talking about
us and our own health and well-being. The herbicide has been found to be an endocrine
disruptor, can harm various mammalian organs, is mutagenic and tumorgenic. In humans
research has found glyphosate is linked with a risk of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (a blood
cancer), liver and kidney problems, and disruptions in the body’s hormone systems. The World
Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer has said glyphosate should
be classified as "probably carcinogenic to humans." That produced howls of protest from
glyphosate’s commercial apologists, who are accustomed to successfully mucking up regulatory
actions. But the WHO finding has strong legitimacy because, as noted by the staid folks at
Consumer Reports, the “decision was made unanimously by a group of 17 oncology experts
from 11 different countries who were selected not only for their experience in the study and
treatment of cancer, but also because they met WHO conflict of interest standards.”
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Most of the research I cite comes from the PubMed database of the National Institutes of Health, and not from
random internet sources.
Regulation. In the USA, national regulation of glyphosate is minimal, due to the political power
Monsanto and Big Agriculture hold over regulators. So it falls to localities, like our city, to do
what is responsible within their own jurisdictions. The situation is different elsewhere in the
world. Particularly in the European Union glyphosate is under regulatory attack. Seven nations
have banned or severely restricted the compound’s sale and use. Others have enacted
regulations that go far beyond those in the USA. Germany has pledged to ban glyphosate this
year. Many cities have taken their own regulatory actions. In France, 20 mayors have banned
glyphosate within their jurisdictions. This year the EU itself is supposed to consider a ban. There
are rumblings of a possible ban to our north, in Canada. And California has listed glyphosate as
a Proposition 65 chemical.
The SLO Municipal Code. If I were looking to prosecute the spreading of glyphosate on hard
surfaces that drain into our creeks, I’d start with code section 12.08 “Urban Storm Water
Quality Management and Discharge Control.”
This code section defines herbicides as pollutants, and prohibits actions that introduce
pollutants into creeks.
So, we have as fact the city has spread a pollutant onto the surfaces of 26 miles of streets. All
we need to show is this action will introduce the pollutant into a creek.
Our city has no constructed storm sewer system. It relies 100% on natural creeks to provide
storm sewer services. Therefore all streets drain into natural creeks. Our streets and their
gutters function as de facto tributaries to the natural creek system; think of them as seasonal
streams draining to perennial streams.
Polluting 26 miles of streets with a chemical like glyphosate therefore constitutes polluting our
creek network. (And we already know the nasty impacts of glyphosate on aquatic
environments.) The city is violating 12.08. In fact, at 26 miles of pollution (actually 52 miles of
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linear pollution since there’s a line of pollution up and down both sides of each street), the
city’s “business as usual” is a really big violator of 12.08.
This certainly cannot be called “best practices!”
Is the use of herbicide really necessary? In the current instance involving applying glyphosate
to 26 miles of city streets, we’re told this is essential to prepare the streets for slurry coating.
The target of glyphosate is apparently weeds growing in the crack between concrete gutter and
asphalt street pavement (although I witnessed some more widespread applications of
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I suspect the city will argue 52 linear miles is too many since not every linear inch of the streets is sprayed. That
may be correct. However, I have personally observed many blocks sprayed from one end of a block to the other
end, continuously, despite the presence of weeds being sporadic rather than continuous. Clearly there’s a huge
amount of chemical applied to hard surfaces from which the first rain will wash it into a natural waterway.
glyphosate across street surfaces). These weeds need to be removed prior to slurry coat, at
least according to the city’s thinking.
However, glyphosate doesn’t remove weeds; it may kill them but the weeds are still physically
present. So workers with tools must come back to physically dig out glyphosated weeds from
the cracks. (See photos illustrating this.)
Caption: These weeds in a crack between asphalt and concrete on Luneta had been sprayed with
herbicide 4 days prior to this photo. They still look very much alive; spray needs 1-2 weeks to
kill them. Later that day they were chopped out and tossed into an adjacent natural area, thus
contaminating nature with fresh toxic product. The blue tint isn’t your imagination – it’s dye in
the spray.
Caption: These weeds from the crack at top of photo were chopped out on fourth day after spray
and left to dehydrate on the pavement.
Thus, it’s hard to understand why glyphosate is even used. If manual physical weed removal is
required even after use of glyphosate, why use glyphosate at all? Why not just send workers
and trucks out one time, to physically chop out the weeds? (Weeds will grow back regardless of
how they’re removed or whether they’re herbicided – weeds growing in pavement cracks is as
predictable as the sun’s rising in the morning.) Use of glyphosate for slurry coat preparation is
thus clearly unnecessary.
Manual weed removal is one non-toxic alternative the city could adopt for slurry seal
preparation. There are others: mechanical abrasion (for example, a rotating steel brush
designed for this purpose, perhaps operated on a street sweeper), heat (steam or flame – weed
flamers are commonplace in organic agriculture), non-toxic chemical treatment (for example,
white vinegar plus a touch of isopropyl alcohol burns most plants). And there are surely yet
other alternatives.
The council should adopt a no-herbicide policy for such operations if one does not already exist.
What is existing city herbicide policy? As stated in my letter to Derek Johnson, copied to the
council, some years ago (2011) the council adopted a non-herbicide policy that would have
prohibited the current 26-miles of glyphosate application. Derek has not responded regarding
that subject, but Jan Marx did, noting that my memory was correct.
While Jan’s chief interest (pesticide-free parks) was somewhat different from mine (pesticides
running off into creeks), it all came together in the policy. I recall the parks-plus-other-places
reach of this policy because my involvement concerned the Murray Street median, a charming
grassy tree-filled public promenade I’d always assumed was a park. My ire was provoked
because of a sudden change in city maintenance of the median: instead of having a contractor
come out from time to time to mow the grass and weeds the city decided instead to have a
contractor come out from time to time to drench the entire median with herbicide, in the
course of which lovely plantings residents had nurtured for years were destroyed and unknown
quantities of herbicide runoff went into adjacent Stenner and Old Garden Creeks. When I
complained about this mistreatment of our “linear park,” I was informed the median wasn’t a
park at all, but was “like a sound wall” and could therefore be herbicided as the city pleased.
The council in response adopted a non-herbicide policy that applied not just to parks but also to
things “like a sound wall,” which I take to include hardscape like streets and gutters.
So, there’s an existing non-herbicide/pesticide policy.
Of course, this council could also just step up and adopt a policy prohibiting the use of
herbicides and pesticides in all city operations unless there is some compelling need for which
no non-toxic alternative exists (termites in city hall? Even that, though, has non-toxic
alternatives). The city of Watsonville, among others, has such a policy. Shouldn’t we?
The key thing you need to do is to step up and prohibit the city’s use of herbicides and
pesticides in any manner that results in their distribution or release into the natural
environment, including explicitly running off into riparian areas.
Thank you.
Richard Schmidt