Pesticide
use in Westchester could decrease
By TOM ANDERSEN Publication date: 6/12/2000
The Journal News
Numbers aren't necessary to gauge the extent of pesticide use in the suburbs. A quick drive through the green subdivisions will suffice -- the small yellow signs that indicate a recent pesticide application seem as common as buttercups.
But years of activism may be changing government pesticide policies, and environmentalists hope the changes will lead to a smaller amount of poisons being sprayed and spread throughout Westchester, where residents have used as much as 801,000 pounds of pesticides a year.
On Thursday, the federal government banned the use and manufacture of chlorpyrifos, a chemical contained in Dursban, the most commonly used pesticide in New York state, because of its potential effect on the human nervous system and brain development.
In Albany, the state Senate and Assembly are working on a bill that would require that neighbors be notified before a company applies pesticides to a lawn or trees.
Westchester County Executive Andrew Spano proposed last week that the county phase out pesticide use on county property, and he asked the Board of Legislators to pass a resolution calling on the local governments to do the same.
And the state and county have said that pesticide spraying would be the last resort to control mosquitoes that spread the West Nile virus.
"I think what you're seeing here is the convergence of a lot of effort across the country, at the national level and at the local level," said Audrey Thier, the pesticide project director for the Albany-based Environmental Advocates organization. "It's not that people haven't been raising alarm bells all along, but I think the enormity of our use of pesticides has had a ripple effect and is making people ask questions."
Westchester has drawn the attention of anti-pesticide advocates because it ranked fifth among the state's counties in gallons of pesticides used and sixth in pounds used in 1997, the last year for which complete statistics are available.
Putnam was in the bottom half of both categories. For comparison, Westchester residents used about 0.9 pound per person, while Putnam used 0.3 pound per person.
"It's no secret that Westchester County residents use more pesticides than almost any county," said Susan Tolchin, the county's communications director. "We want to reduce the use of pesticides all over."
Spano's proposal is to ban the use of the most dangerous chemicals on county property by next year and to completely phase out pesticide use, except for emergencies, by January 2002.
The chlorpyrifos ban was the result of an ongoing federal review of numerous pesticides, including a class of chemicals called organophosphates, which attack the central nervous systems of animals exposed to it.
Chlorpyrifos is one of several pesticides that had been recommended for use against deer ticks, which cause Lyme disease.
"The reason they're effective is that they are potentially harmful," said Thomas Daniels, the head of the Vector Ecology Laboratory at Fordham University's Calder Research Center in Armonk.
It is because of the potential for harm that environmentalists have been pushing for a neighbor notification law for at least five years. State Senate and Assembly staff are working on a compromise, and the sponsors of the bills were optimistic that an agreement would be reached before the Senate ends its session tomorrow.
The Assembly bill would require commercial pesticide applicators to give neighbors 48-hour notice before the companies spray pesticides on trees or spread it on lawns. Schools and day-care centers would have to notify parents before pesticides were used in their facilities.
Under the Senate version, notice would be required only when spraying involves trees taller than 5 feet and within 150 feet of a neighbor's property, or when it involves plants shorter than 5 feet within 15 feet of the property line.
The Assembly bill would be mandatory throughout the state. Under the Senate bill, counties would have to choose to participate.
The sponsors -- state Sen. Carl Marcellino, R-Oyster Bay, and Assemblyman Thomas DiNapoli, D-Thomaston -- both said they believed an agreement would be reached.
"We have moved significantly in the last couple of days in either direction," Marcellino said.
But the prospect of having to inform neighbors has made pesticide companies unhappy.
Daniel Greto, owner of Central Tree Service in Rye, said that if the notification bill passes, companies will have to hire clerical staff to send out the notifications, which will raise costs and make tree protection too expensive for all but the wealthy.
"We're going to lose a lot of landscape plants and trees, and we're going to be losing jobs," said Greto, who is past president of the Westchester County Tree Protective Association. "Once these, quote, tree huggers find out how many trees we're losing, then they're going to look back and say what a mistake we made."
Daniels of the Calder Research Center said the notification law might make people who want to hire a pesticide company wary of antagonizing their neighbors. That could lead to an overall reduction in pesticide use, he said. But it might also prompt unqualified homeowners to apply pesticides themselves.
"I think it can be useful, and it makes sense for public health,"
he said. "But I can see it causing problems."