Leadership in the state House of Representatives killed a bill that would increase regulation over pesticide use in an 11th-hour move that’s attracting strong criticism from environmental activists who backed the measure.
House Bill 790 would have required agricultural companies and others who spray large quantities of pesticides outdoors to provide extensive disclosure about usage and alert facilities that serve children and seniors before spraying chemicals in their vicinity, among other requirements, or face potential fines.
The bill had a Thursday deadline to cross over to the Senate and was one of three bills placed on the day’s agenda for a full House vote. But House members didn’t take a vote on the bill and instead quietly recommitted it to the House Consumer Protection and Commerce Committee, effectively killing the measure for the year.
“We did not have the votes to move it out,” House Vice Speaker John Mizuno said in an interview.
Instead of allowing discussion on the bill and a public vote, he said HB 790 was recommitted as a “protective mechanism to not expose any member.”
Mizuno said that the bill was controversial and that if individual House members had been required to vote on it, they would have been flooded with emails and phone calls from constituents.
“No matter what side you are on, you are going to be attacked,” he said.
Measures relating to pesticide use, particularly among the state’s seed corn companies, such as Monsanto and Syngenta, have spurred heated debate and protests across the islands in recent years.
Following the bill’s recommittal, a coalition of community groups known as the Protect Our Keiki Coalition issued a news release warning lawmakers of continued political pressure on the issue.
“This kind of backroom maneuvering to serve the anti-regulatory agenda of industrial agriculture tells us that the power of our community is growing. It is only a matter of time until we win. Publicly aligning with companies like Monsanto is political suicide, so their advocates inside government are using back channels to get this work done,” Lahaina resident and advocate Kai Nishiki said in the release. “Today we remind every elected official that we are watching. We understand this process and we will not allow it to continue.”
Ashley Lukens, director of the Hawaii Center for Food Safety, said that Rep. Angus McKelvey, who chairs the House Consumer Protection and Commerce Committee, had inserted “poison pills” into the bill, such as expanding it to nonagricultural users of pesticides, to make it unacceptable to House colleagues.
“I think the public has a really bad taste in their mouth after this,” she said.
But McKelvey said that was false.
“You know what, I am very disappointed that (Lukens) would make that allegation and attack what I thought was a very good bill,” he said.
McKelvey said that he had prepared a speech that he had hoped to deliver on the House floor on Thursday in support of the bill, and was shocked when it was recommitted.
