Our Klamath Basin Water Crisis
Upholding rural Americans' rights to grow food,
own property, and caretake our wildlife and natural resources.
Our Klamath Basin
Water Crisis
Upholding rural Americans' rights to grow food,
own property, and caretake our wildlife and natural resources.
|
SEPTEMBER 9, 2005 California Farm Bureau Friday Review Legislation to impose on California employers one of the highest minimum wages rates in the country is on its way to Governor Schwarzenegger for his possible signature or veto. The measure, AB 48 (Sally Lieber, D-Mountain View) passed the Senate to the Governor, on a largely partisan vote of 26 to 14 Senator Abel Maldonado, (R-Santa Maria), was the only Republican casting an “aye” vote. The bill would increase the minimum wage to $7.75 per hour over a two-year period and thereafter would be increase yearly based on the California rate of inflation. ACTION ALERT County Farm Bureau’s and their members are urged to immediately write Governor Schwarzenegger asking him to veto AB 48. Please refer to the CFBF ACTION ALERT web site http://capwiz.com/cfbf/issues/?style=D for a sample letter. Governor Schwarzenegger has vetoed legislation actively opposed by Farm Bureau that would have required growers to pay their piece-rate employees extra wages on top of their piece-rate earnings for state-mandated rest periods. AB 755, (Hector De La Torre, D-South Gate), sponsored by the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation, virtually identical to legislation introduced last year, was also vetoed by the Governor. The Governor stated in his veto message that the provisions of AB 755 would essentially require that piece-rate workers be paid twice for their rest periods. This is unreasonable and overly burdensome on employers. After hours of negotiation and endless legislative hurdles, AB 1011 (Barbara Matthews, D-Tracy) was approved in the last hours of the 2005 legislative session. AB 1011 will insure a fair and open marketplace so the growers in California will now have the same plant protection tools that the other 49 states are able to use. These important changes will streamline and expedite the registration process of the Department of Pesticide Registration and insure that pesticide manufacturers who have invested resources in this state to maintain California only data requirements will receive a share of costs for producing that data. AB 1011 will also require retailers that sell home and garden pesticides to be subject to the same pesticide mill assessment that agricultural users pay on their pesticides. This provision should result in at least $4 million in additional annual fee revenues. This will allow DPR to track more closely the use of urban pesticides. Assembly Member Barbara Matthews worked tirelessly as the author of AB 1011. She is to be commended for the effort it took to shepherd this important legislation through its many political challenges. Many thanks are also due the County Farm Bureaus, their members and other agricultural associations who joined the coalition to support AB 1011 and contacted their legislative representatives. It received strong bipartisan support in both houses and is fully expected to be signed by the governor. Despite united opposition from a number of agricultural organizations, including California Farm Bureau Federation, legislation that will significantly expand the causes of action to impose civil penalties for pesticide violations was approved by the legislature. The Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR) and the California Agricultural Commissioners and Sealers Association spent the last year jointly developing and adopting an enhanced Pesticide Enforcement Response Policy that will help ensure consistent application and compliance with statutory and regulatory mandates relating to pesticides. The agricultural community asked DPR to take the additional step of adopting this new enforcement policy as a regulation to avoid the often made claim that policies are “underground regulation” and therefore unenforceable. The fact that SB 455 (Martha Escutia, D-Whittier) is premature and the regulations should be allowed to be put in place before further restrictions are put into law fell on deaf ears during the legislative process. SB 455 reduces the flexibility for county agricultural commissioners to impose penalties to match the problem. ACTION ALERT Please contact Governor Schwarzenegger on the CFBF ACTION ALERT http://capwiz.com/cfbf/issues/?style=D for a sample opposition letter. Please let the governor know you oppose SB 455. SB 453 (Charles Poochigian, R-Fresno), the bill to extend the sunset on the Central Valley Rural Crime Prevention Program finally passed both houses last night and is on its way to the Governor’s desk. The bill included an urgency clause, which means it goes into effect immediately upon receiving a signature by the Governor. All of our members in the Central Valley put significant effort into getting this bill passed. ACTION ALERT Now we need to keep up the pressure to ensure a signature by the Governor. Please send letters of support to the Governor soon. A sample letter is available at CFBF’s ACTION ALERT website http://capwiz.com/cfbf/issues/?style=D. The legislature acted on two water bills opposed by Farm Bureau, defeating one and sending the other to the Governor’s desk. During the final hours of the 2005 session, the Assembly decisively defeated SB 646 (Sheila Kuehl, D- Santa Monica) a water quality fee and enforcement bill, on a vote of 30 in favor and 43 opposed. A broad bipartisan group of Assembly members opposed the bill, which would have derailed current collaborative water protection efforts and replaced them with bureaucracy, fees, and penalties. On the other hand, the Assembly gave approval by a 49 - 27 final vote to Senator Kuehl’s SB 820, which will require farmers and ranchers statewide to install water meters on their wells and report their annual groundwater use to the water rights regulators at the State Water Resources Control Board. While most democrats supported the bill and most republicans opposed, several Republican members, from the Southern California service area of Metropolitan Water District, were instrumental on obtaining passage of the bill: Lynn Daucher (R-Brea), Bill Emmerson (R-Rancho Cucamonga), Tom Harmon (R-Huntington Beach), Shirley Horton (R-Chula Vista), Jay La Suer (R-La Mesa), and Todd Spitzer (R-Orange). A few Democratic Assembly members from agricultural districts did not support the bill, with Central Valley legislators Barbara Matthews (D-Tracy), Nicole Parra (D-Hanford), and Juan Arambula (D- Fresno) voting No, and Central Coast representatives Simon Salinas (D-Salinas) and Pedro Nava (D- Santa Barbara) abstaining from the vote. After passage in the Assembly, SB 820 went back to the Senate for concurrence in amendments taken in the Assembly. The bill barely passed the Senate on a 21-16 vote, where once again a Southern California republican, Bob Margett (R-Arcadia) provided the vote necessary for passage. Democratic Senators Dean Florez (D–Shafter) and Denise Moreno Ducheny (D-San Diego) joined the remaining 14 Republican Senators in voting against the bill in the Senate. While SB 820 has largely been an environmental activist-backed bill, the efforts of Metropolitan Water District were decisive in winning passage of the bill in the legislature. ACTION ALERT CFBF continues to oppose this bill, and urges farmers to contact the Governor’s Office to ask for his VETO on SB 820. A sample letter is available at CFBF’s ACTION ALERT website http://capwiz.com/cfbf/issues/?style=D Two bills opposed by Farm Bureau that did not get to the Governor’s desk were: • SB 109 (Deborah Ortiz, D-Sacramento) would have imposed both civil and criminal penalties for air quality violations and double the already large potential penalties and fines. Under existing law, the recovery of a civil penalty for an air quality violation prevents criminal prosecution for the same offense. SB 109 would have repealed that provision and would allow both civil action and criminal prosecution for the same offense. • SB 999 (Mike Machado, D-Linden) gave authority to appoint representatives to the San Joaquin Valley Unified Air Pollution Control District that were not accountable to the district’s voters. The current local appointment system in the San Joaquin Valley Unified Air Pollution Control District (SJVUAPCD) requires its members to be accountable because they must be elected city or county officials. A bill that was amended significantly in the last two weeks to create a new unfunded statewide regulatory program to deal with naturally occurring asbestos (NOA) was defeated on the Assembly floor and became a two year bill. SB 655 (Deborah Ortiz, D-Sacramento) would have had significant land use and fiscal impacts on the state, including agriculture. Despite the fact that US EPA has yet to issue the risk assessment associated with casual NOA exposure nor have any testing scenarios been extrapolated to better understand the potential health effects of long-term exposure, SB 655 would have created an unfunded CalEPA task force that would have developed project control mitigation measures to combat the effects of NOA. The task force would have also provided oversight to an unfunded $3 million mapping program to determine where NOA may be present. It should be noted that if NOA is discovered in the environmental review process of a project, local lead agencies already have the authority to mitigate the potential health risks. While Farm Bureau shares the author’s concerns about the potential risks associated with living, working and playing in areas with naturally occurring asbestos, the fact that certain serpentine rock formations exist in 44 of our 58 counties does not mean that there is automatically a definable health hazard to individuals. We reminded lawmakers that farmers and ranchers are all too familiar with the Legislature creating new regulatory programs without funding, only to find out subsequently that they will be the ones to pay for the bill through the imposition of “fees.” The bill fell 10 votes short of the 41 needed for passage and reconsideration was granted, so it will be considered next year. The opponents to SB 655 suggested that the bill be scaled back to a mapping program and that appropriate funding be sought in next year’s budget process. Nutrition was a big focus during this legislative session and led to some last minute wrangling to get SB 281 (Abel Maldonado, R-Santa Monica) passed by both houses. SB 281 creates the California Fresh Start Pilot Program, which dedicates $18 million to schools to use to purchase fresh fruits and vegetables for students. This program is one tool that schools can use to help teach students healthy eating habits and create lifelong consumers of California grown products. Also on the way to the Governor’s desk is AB 826 (Pedro Nava, D-Santa Barbara) to create the California Farm to School Child Nutrition Improvement Program. This bill works to reduce barriers that prevent successful implementation of direct marketing programs for California farmers to provide their products to California’s schools. CFBF supported both of these nutrition bills. Both houses also passed AB 1061 (Barbara Matthews, D-Tracy), which creates a streamlined process for growers to contest payments to CDFA’s Market Enforcement Branch for claims under $30,000. CFBF supported this bill. Senator Machado (D-Linden) decided not to try to jam through his two bills, SJR 16 and SB 905, dealing with Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy. Both bills try to set up a voluntary testing scheme to allow beef to be labeled as BSE tested. The federal government does not allow states to create their own testing protocols and CFBF is opposed to both bills. We’ll be ready to deal with them as soon as the legislature gets back to work in January. |
Home
Page Updated: Thursday May 07, 2009 09:14 AM Pacific
Copyright © klamathbasincrisis.org, 2005, All Rights Reserved