 Now we're going to turn it over to Drynell, who's right in front of me. Head over here to Mark. She's got a pretty good car. She's got a pretty good car. She's got a pretty good car. She's got a pretty good car. She's got a pretty good car. She's got a pretty good car. And, anyway, let me see if she's got a bandage on her. I still don't know. Yeah, I'm going to throw that off. I got a bandage on her. She's got a really strong band on her. She's got a pretty good car. She's got a pretty good car. She's got a pretty good car. She's got a pretty good car. Well, since everybody would like to see Why Stop, I'm going to invite the Vice Chair of the At the top, I'd like to thank everybody for coming tonight. I'd like to thank you for giving me the access to this event, to your broadcast, and to the public, since they have access to television. I'd also like to thank city staff, and especially John and Mirny, who have helped put this together, and to all of the speakers that will follow me. As an initial note, please turn off your cell phones. And this is scheduled for two hours. I'm going to try to keep myself to five minutes. I was allotted. And I will try to do the same for the following speakers, so that there's plenty of time for questions and answers. So we're here in part tonight, because some of the speakers that you'll hear from later, the emphasis for this meeting is the City Council's goals for this upcoming two-year period of time. Goal three, this is on environmental sustainability. And one is to manage city-owned parks, green-belted open spaces in an environmentally sensitive, electric approach that focuses on operations that are going to increase x-y function, reduces maintenance operation costs, optimizes energy and wonder efficiency, and enhances habitat conservation. And that is quite a mouthful. Specifically, one of the City Council's goals was to continue to support best management practices for integrated S-management, and present a new IPM policy to the City Council for adoption and consideration. So as part of that goal, we will be discussing the potential provision of the IPM policy. I also wanted to highlight the other goal, which was to expand the existing, quote, green parks program. And there are three parks listed in the City Council goal, but I understand that already the City has probably gone beyond just those three parks. And Alan, I believe, Alan Pryor will speak to the Fair Zone concept later, which is also highlighted in that goal. I'm also going to quickly go over the timeline in terms of the City's goals of getting this IPM policy to City Council. Oh, sorry, okay. So we already have a joint meeting of the Natural Resources Commission, Recreation and Parks Commission, and Open Space and Habitat Commission. Tonight is a public forum on pesticide use in particular, but I think probably more broadly, integrated pest management. In the future, in the early spring, later, there's going to be a discussion on service levels, which I think will speak to the trade-offs that are involved in implementing an integrated pest management program. Hopefully to follow, and probably before February or even, I believe we'll start discussing concepts or revisions of the integrated pest management program. And the goal is to get it to City Council by June. So the goals of the City in particular are to provide a holistic review and update on the IPM policy, although I think tonight we'll probably hear some particular concerns that we've heard from citizens. And tonight is also about hearing the community's particular concerns and general concerns about the IPM policy about management of public spaces in Davis. The City also reasonably would like to make sure that interchanges are going to be feasible in their implementation for the City. And lastly, to be proactive in IPM management, to implement pest management practices and my support of dating to follow State and Federal law. I'm sure one of our speakers to follow will agree. At this time, I'd like to introduce City Council member Will Arnold. Will is a lifelong City of Davis. He was elected earlier this year to the City Council. He's been involved in many, many community groups and local campaigns. He served as district representative for an outgoing State Senator at Lowell School. And he and his wife Nicole now own mother and baby source in downtown Davis. So with that, please welcome Will Arnold. So, and I thank you Steve for the very kind introduction and thank you all for being here on the rain Wednesday night in the middle of this holiday season. I'm sure you all agree a very important issue for our City to be taking up. I'm really pleased to be here tonight as many of you know and possibly evidenced by the store we decided fit our entrepreneurial desires. My wife and I have three young children. They're all at that age where everything one way or another ends up in their mouth. And there's so many things out there that are dangerous by their nature for them to be ingesting or touching. So it has always baffled me a little bit that we would then willfully add toxins and poisons to things that would otherwise be benign for them to be ingesting. And that was really the reason that I became passionate about this issue of pesticides used in the city. Of course, with young kids we're all frequent users of the parks and open spaces in the city. Obviously a particular concern for me and for others are certain specific chemicals that are used in the city. Roundup is what we know it as but any of those other brands apply to stay along with the immune-inducenoids that are insecticides are chief concerns. So that's what a major part of what we're here tonight to talk about. Though I would take this opportunity to thank our city staff that is ongoing to review our integrated pest management policy as a whole. And this is a very important but still just a piece of that and so there's still a lot of work to be done, not just on the pesticide management front. But it was as a member of the Recreation and Park Commission which I served on immediately prior to my election at the city council where I became closely involved in this issue. We as a commission unanimously supported working with the Open Space Commission and the Natural Resources Commission to take a really hard look at the pesticide issue in particular and which is why I see this as an important step that we're taking tonight because this was directly talked about when we were having those discussions among our mission that we needed to engage the public, have these public workshops and educate folks but also mobilize folks that want to see us take this issue very seriously. I'll get a little specific as to some of my personal beliefs on this issue. I want to see us go to 100% green or organic in our parks. I think that's achievable and I want to get us there and something I've talked about I think we can do it and my time will not have been wasted on the city council frankly if that's something we're able to achieve or take you know, measurable steps for and I also I call it a plan for zero and it doesn't exist yet but I want a plan for zero use of in particular the worst of these poisons city wise maybe it's many years away maybe there's a lot more heavy lifting to be done but that plan I want to begin to plant the seeds of developing that plan for zero and I think again tonight's public workshop is a very important preliminary step in moving us toward that goal so again on behalf of my family I just want to thank you all for being here tonight and I'm really looking forward to a great public workshop, thank you and you will, you know one of the things I missed in the fire that I just introduced is that I saw that Will was described as a mensch and that's by all accounts and actions to be the case so thank you all another mensch I'd like to introduce the director of the California Department of Pesticide Regulation, Brian Levy Mr. Levy is the director of the California Department of Pesticide Regulation of this issue that he's held since his appointment by Governor Brown in February 2012 and he's been an organic farmer in both California and Nebraska a legal aid attorney the executive director of California certified organic farmers and then the California Association of Resource Conservation District and he's been the assistant director of the California Department of Conservation's Division of Land Resource Protection please welcome Brian Levy Steve forgot to mention that I'm also married to Teenie Anna Levy a fellow lawyer at the Waterloo you know it's a real honor pleasure to come here and speak to the public with Davis so let's see what happens I have to tell you I have been given talks about organic and pesticide in agriculture since the early 80s I think the first organic crop we grew the entire market was 78 million the local newspaper called the American Food Change the question part of chemistry so I used to go and talk to the Lions Club and LIBO about growing rice without current chemistry not burning and no one ever called me and said oh you got to be careful this is going to be heated I had six people call me about tonight so this should be fine are you going to move the lights for me so when I'm really Martin called me I talked to Martin before like me he's a early organic farmer of recovery and wanted to talk about who DPR is a little bit but a lot of the urban issues that we're really looking at as we do pesticide regulation so I think a lot of you know that DPR gave the city of Davis an IPM award and while I was at Martin talked I gave him the little round bag to come in and explain what's possible resource management at an urban level so there's the only picture of who so the next one thing we're really talking about of course is open space space for people to relax and feel safe this is where we take our children so parts play a very important role in the society and it's like there are kids there who want to be safe and there's nothing like this little magic to get people's attention so and that's part of what we deal with in these regulators is peers and well-being it's interesting anxiety if you have an event that's causing anxiety is that something you need to deal with just feel like it is so we have to be very careful I think so I gotta step back and remind you that there's this thing called a pest treadmill the reality is that pests have threatened human existence since day one you know I have a few up here that some urban things are in from our rats and rodents to the cockroaches we've gone out to another school up in North Coast we've had a major invasion of cockroaches we have another school down in the Southern California where we're going to go to the space to hunt for the rodents we have to deal with that we have termites, people like their homes so they make sure they do pest control in their homes we have mosquitoes people like mosquitoes themselves that come from about 750,000 deaths a year they're pretty major pests to be attended with even here in California we have people die of lesion on so pest management has been a huge challenge and I only have half the pests here because I don't have the stuff that we use I'm in a program for all the germs basically the things that you worry about you know that would give you disease and illness and the reality is that in the State Department we fund ourselves on something called the Mill Assessment and so every point of sale first point of sale in California for what is considered a pesticide 2.1 cent for the dollar goes to run our program your county ad commissions programs to help a couple of other agencies that generates between that and the registration fees we're looking at about $100 million in a year and more than half of that comes from the non-agricultural side of pesticides so everything from the chlorine to the pools which has been some of our worst incidences to the amicrobials people use to make sure that your hospital is clean or the daycare center and we've been really looking at this urban non-agricultural use and we're finding most of our illness in that side is because the people the workers who we ask to use these amicrobials and things like that on a regular basis they're not getting the same training they're not getting the same oversight that the agricultural workers are they happen to follow the different jurisdictions of the departments and we're really starting to work just to give you an idea we did research grant with in terms of Cisco on daycare centers we found that the people that are changing kids diapers didn't really understand how that material works the bleachers and things they're sterilized they didn't understand some of the anodors that they use so they weren't necessarily going to a great job of sterilizing and they weren't necessarily going to a great job of protecting themselves so it turned out that to become a licensed daycare provider you didn't have to have training in animal growth use but it's part of your job so now we're working to get that as part of the work so it's a very important part of a pesticide regulatory program so anyways we've got pests we've got to do so that means we use pesticides pesticides are chemical controlled pests fairly new we've been able to scheme with things we've been able to just make remarkable progress and keeping tests at bay but it needs a good regulatory program as I said California has a very intense regulatory program we're pretty close to what the U of CPA spent and we've offered a second layer of screening for everything the U of CPA does and we've had it in a very California specific manner you know our farm workers you know I farm in Nebraska you can sit on a tractor to the curvature of the earth and see maybe two or three other tractors in California if you go to the state of the coast you might have in a small area hundreds of workers some harvesting, some thinning and planting and some just going to filter out and many crops is really different California has developed a very intensive program unlike anywhere else in the country but to do this kind of work the foundation needs to be science based the Department of Justice Regulation we have about 400 employees I think 300 of them are considered scientists we have I think some of the best scientists in the world like the higher M.C. Davis we have a lot of medical toxicologists we have a lot of people a very international group we have people as they introduce the first day of the work you find out they have graduate degrees from three different continents so it's a very highly educated scientific based organization that science only takes you so far so we also have to use this management so that's what I practice in my team science only takes you so far and you have to really kind of think okay how am I going to get this into a good practice on the ground that actually changes behaviors so we have a science based organization we have a core mission we have kind of a three-fold mission the first foremost is the protection of human life as pesticides are applied in society as legal pesticides are used how do we ensure that human life is protected farm workers the first most at risk are applicators people actually handle the material and then we look at farm workers we look at community we look at adjacent see how it breaks down so that's the core of the program as science replied how do we keep them on target and protect human life the other half is the environment and the environment is very broad from your pollinators to your neighbors pet to water quality so this is becoming more and more what we're looking at and we'll talk a little bit about that later as it affects the urban area the protection of human health and the environment the third leg of our mission is to reduce risk of pest management now one way to do that is to regulate heavy human life we're using certain stuff in a way but there's a lot of protection in place there's a lot of restrictions on how they can be used we add the cost of quite a bit we market pressures on as you protect you but we have a really dedicated time to figure out how to do pest management and that's basically IBM IBM is basically how do you do the job and we've reached the most of the nine manor so that's kind of our four, that's who we are we really have made remarkable progress in the world of pesticide in the last 35 years especially on the ag side I used to farm it out in the fields up in Chico area my neighbor would be doing almonds and doing dormant sprays and your probe would start to lock up a little bit and then a thousand people would disagree and get that too much coffee it's a little organophosphate poisoning for the day your neighbor would be on his tractor and he'd wave and wave back go home and throw his clothes and get his laundry all of that's gone most of the chemistry is gone we work with those growers they don't do dormant sprays and the most part is very rare if they have to, they really don't want it in our state a couple things really happened one was we started to get serious on our regulatory program we started to get serious on science and so US EPA when we really started to demand real studies a lot of chemistry disappeared and so pesticides are probably the most regulated item of commons right now we really have a pretty good understanding of what's going on before something is introduced into the market where all is learning and science evolved the pollinators are a perfect example of that to get a new chemistry in the market now four times more studies than used to be required to address pollinator issues so it's a process of learning and evolving but it is very heavily regulated so part of this app but a big part is that on the ag side if you're using agricultural chemistry your licensed training profession we license the ag users if there's a lot of education required to be in PCA the structure side is under a different agency but they have a license as well so if someone's coming out to your house they have a license, it's educated and the reality is education works you know pesticide label is a law if you don't follow the label you're breaking the law and that label has been pretty well thought out especially here in California where we really are good at the national academy of science look at our program one of the things they acknowledge is that we are just very good at figuring out how to we call mitigator basically how to use that product that tool so that it does the job controlling the pest that you're worried about doesn't move offsite and do economic harm in the environment and you got to remember it's a big deal that if your agriculture pest site moves offsite and gets to your neighbors and destroys your neighbor's crop that you've got real issues there as well and California California does a very good job the insurance companies will tell you that loss from the pest site is very low and you're going out but it's professional and these right here we do a lot of training with the schools we have a state schools act we train the folks that are going to try and do everything to make sure that the football field doesn't have go-for-holds to sort of make sure your grass is taken care of and then grubs and inside as well how you build a building to really remember what kind of pest pressure you have so education one of the things that's really changing is right now it's water so the urban issue is for a long time on the ag side we have these ag coalitions and still they start working with the farmers to make sure that they're pesticides that they're applying weren't going off their farm and into streams and watersheds so we've done that for a long time but now it's the urban site and as you all know California is a pretty neat place in Mediterranean climate rain events come and go in the 30's 20's and 30's Southern California has some big floods as a consequence they decided to move water off the land as fast as possible to the ocean that's the LA river and everything the water that you all use or you know water their lawns and doing all that it ends up in this sort of LA river so that's changing we're really starting to look at how we want to use water we're finding that we want to recycle water we want to rebuild the LA river we want to take that cement up and create it so that it actually captures water that recycling water using water building your downwater tables it's cheaper, it's more reliable and importing it from somewhere else and as a consequence water districts all over the state are really looking at pest societies we're trying to go to register in the chemistry every time the registrants register chemistry with us we're getting a lot of comments from the water districts association, the folks that treat your water they're really pushing hard to make sure that that new chemistry or existing chemistry is used only as thoughtfully as possible so that's that mitigation game can you control ants in someone's house with the least amount of pest sites we're really looking right now to take kind of a second hard look at Fripp & Nell which is a lot in the urban area so you can kind of see that that's what's happening and so one of the things I did a few years ago was I got some of our other agencies to work with us on landscape so I think we had four meetings throughout the state we really talked about landscape this is my front yard as it happens on 4th generation Southern California grew up in a house that didn't have long my grandfather was a water engineer and so trying to get people to rethink their lawn you know makes a lot of sense for a lot of reasons I think from the recycling, cut that grass take it down, use a lot of water but also uses a lot of pesticides herbicides and fertilizer and so this lawn makes sense a lawn makes sense in Illinois or England but it doesn't make a lot of sense in the Mediterranean so that's basic IPM is what is appropriate for your own ecosystem for your own region but that's breaking the behavior I mean the first time I talked about lawns I was on a planning commission in Chico in the early ages and I said well we should look at landscaping and every person on that committee said shut up kid we don't want to hear about that you're not touching my lawn and now L.A. watershirts can do to take the lawn out and that is at the core of IPM in a way looking at what you're doing seeing if the lawn makes sense in the ecosystem in which you live and then see what can I do to prevent those pest pressures that I don't want to do to damage myself so and then as a city I forget the folks that people tend to so this is an award we gave up in San Jose they have a park there doesn't use the best side free landscaping you know they've been all the things you want to do that they're gilts just trying to get yourself to do more team rather sorry but you know people look to the city people come to this park and if you can see up you can see all the airplanes landing on the airport the side you can see if you know this is where all the runoff of everything would go if you had one up with Maligón so I think this is an encouragement for cities to take the lead and show their citizens that you can have beautiful landscaping and really greatly reduce your reliance on chemical control so I don't know if I signed up for questions or not but I'm done talking I didn't have any questions but I'm from the state so when you guys get to your local issue I'm going home and having the glass of wine with my wife so yeah that's what we're going to say we're going to have questions at the end I think if you'd like to ask Brian a question we stick around maybe go back for a second I'll have something back for you thank you very much Brian appreciate it this is our local IPM coordinator and a long standing resource for me personally and for others who've been looking at this issue and that's Martín Grana Martín is a former Peace Corps volunteer in Ecuador with agricultural degrees from UC Davis and Cal Poly San Luis Obispo he is a certified California past control advisor and has experience working in as an extension agent for the Colorado River Indian Tribes Reservation with the University of Arizona as a sustainable agricultural specialist with the National Center for Appropriate Technology and he's currently the integrated past management specialist for City of Davis so without further ado welcome Martín I'm going to briefly just go over what IPM is half of you know that already but no more than that I'm going to sit here so what is IPM it's an ecosystem based strategy that focuses on long-term prevention of past I think that's key trying to address an issue and not go back and use the same practices in particular pesticides to take care use a combination of techniques such as biocontrol other kinds of regulation cultural practices so principle monitoring pests and treat only if needed according to established guidelines target the treatment to control only identified pests use the less toxic technique or strategy that is useful apply in a matter that minimizes risk to health human health beneficial and non-target oriented so I like to use this graphic pretty much the definition of IPM you look at this and you see the base of it being cultural practices such as site selection making sure you have good drainage good variety, existing variety case of agriculture physical mechanical controls such as the use of mulch the use of weed lacquer just not physically it's nice water if you will biological control for views other including organisms too prey or parasitize target pests and then the top tier chemical use pesticides that divide them into two tiers the less toxic approach some might be considered organisms such as soaps and oils baking soda for example fungicides and then the conventional pesticides on the top tier and you can see these arrows of course toxicity of the pyramid and then that prevention through intervention so the precautionary principle isn't necessarily incorporated into IPM in the case of urban we have or I have in the form of a site hazard avoidance and reduction zones which I'll get to admit but for those of you that aren't familiar with it this state said in the action or policy has a suspected risk of causing harm to the public and to the environment in the absence of scientific consensus the burden of proof that it is not harmful falls on those taking an action that may or may not be a risk the principle implies that there is a social responsibility to protect the public from exposure to harm with scientific investigation it's found possible risk these protections can be relaxed only if further scientific findings emerge that provide sound evidence that they're so as I mentioned when I developed the policy I incorporated this concept known as pesticide hazard and exposure to reduction zones and this was developed by gentlemen down in Santa Barbara Phil Bottas and he was hired by the Ventura School District and also Santa Barbara to develop a plan where you can incorporate IPN pretty much in form of the public what's going on in this public space a series of maps here we have a map for example where there's yellow zones and the non areas, the non-marked areas are green zones this is a classification of certain pesticides green mean of course less possible in the yellow mean convention in cases like this for example and all these areas that we know are going to be sprayed out one time but if we do have spots spraying these areas might be the ones that policy has worked we have programs working here we see city-wide use of pesticides from 2006 to the present I came on 2008 and if you look at the blue line there that's are you surrounded that orange um there's this herbicide called Psyde which is soap-based herbicide um so you can see when we started using the product you know there's a spine but there's a gradual decline basically all pesticides over each batch of years can we go further depends you know maybe we'll be upon a richer plateau but so far it seems to be we're going to start with questions thank you Martin thank you Martin and I will add that Martin will be back at a later panel for more discussion and I think we'll also be around for questions like if he's extremely knowledgeable and helpful as I think that he already you know next I'll honor to introduce Alan Pryor who you are still a natural resources commission member at a great point he was disappointed he was a third term on the natural resources commission so he's also been a long standing force in this city I think probably before that as well Mr. Pryor has been farming organic almonds and peaches for almost 35 years and has lived in Davis for more than 20 years. He is a past visiting scientist at the UCD department of eventology and he is and has been a commissioner of the Davis natural resources commission so welcome thank you I'm going to expand on what Martin started talking about the city of Davis currently manages about 1,500 acres altogether of public lands in which they may or may not use pesticides depending on the need it includes parks, green belts and streets states about 500 acres of open space 20 acres of transportation to the sidewalks and streets where you may have a crack in the street with weeds growing in there they have to address they have an extensive storm water conveyance system to move storm water out of town it's typically through ditches it has weeds and problems associated with them we have an extensive wastewater system we have an extensive wastewater transmission system almost 489 acres and a lot of sewer problems the sewage you can have roots going into those those have to be treated with some type of product that will not only just rot out their weeds or the roots but you've got to have them with great courage so we'll be treating areas of parks green belts and open space we have a wastewater plant there showing at the lower right roads and facilities if you need weed control we have an overland wetland system there this is a sprinkler system through there that's spraying the water out on there typically we have a lot of problems with weeds growing up in there and getting caught up in the sprinkler those have to be dealt with typically with the herbicide that will be voting away in the future with a new upgrade to the wastewater treatment plant we're working on these as I mentioned transportation roadside streets light paths often times we'll have weeds associated with them we have to clear them out of their cracks and on our storm waters typically these are just stitches that convey the wastewater out of town in the most expedient way here you see the north data stitch through there the big slide of the overland flow I have there we have an example where we have root intrusion sewage you'll have to come in and de-root those this is a whole list of the chemicals that are currently used in Davis and they're broken down in many cases by their toxicity one being the highest toxicity one methamsodium it is very widely an agriculture for humiliation hasn't been used here for de-rooting sewer lines in some years you also have a garland which is a post-market herbicide we're rapidly moving away from that and into garden 4 which is considered a more green pesticide we categorize these also by the green ones site fiesta and suppress suppress actually has an organically certified herbicide and then intermediate ones that we're concerned with and trying to minimize as much as possible including roundup malice which is a bit of a clover insecticide nicotinoid very rarely used in Davis we're going to be addressing that seeing if that can be eliminated entirely next slide please of these we are currently using the most green material is siph which is a coloronic acid it's a soap based product it enables the roundup typically it's used in conjunction with roundup a lot of work martins have been doing with scy shows that we can drop down our concentration of roundup from 2% to 1% and add in a mixture of scythe into that and get even more effective control and simultaneously reduce the use of roundup or the glyphosate and that spray mixture substantially next this shows citywide how much has been used martin showed you this one slide previously so we'll go through it very quickly this graphically looks at it and here you can see the roundup is far and away the largest with the exception of scythe the largest chemical we use in the city we use an awful lot of herbicides here although as you can see in conjunction with the use of scythe and proper application of ICANN principles we've been able to throttle this down quite a bit in recent years we've had a recent uptake here by the way all these slides are showing these are only in 2016 through August 31st so it's not exactly out of those apples but pretty close comparison next and then we want to take a look at which departments we're using the most pesticides or herbicides and all of these here are herbicides and you can see the public words in many respects because of the nature their operations they use far and away the most herbicides there both glyphosate and scythe they're using approximately 75% of the glyphosate in the city and about 50% of the scythe in the city the adjuvants and almost all of the herbicide used in the city this is a percentage scale here of the total so 100% is lying right here we have a parked contractor that does a lot of routine work in the city for the parts that are contract to us they're the next largest user here you see the glyphosate amount they're about 25% for the scythe used in the city the city employees used both glyphosate and scythe our own city employees have been the most aggressive and it's really kind of throttled down the use of extensive use with scythe in that mixture and open space it's done an excellent job over the past number of years completely eliminating the use of herbicides occasionally they'll have flare up some of the open spaces we manage start this or something like that really can get out of hand if you don't appropriately treat it so this looks at summary of the annual pesticide use in public works and on average it's kind of been steady over the past number of years haven't seen the drops in it that we've seen with some of the other departments again this is Remba here and this is Sythe here with a garland of transline and telar this is in our parks by the city employees and once we started fixing scythe and the fatty acid and soap based material in with the roundup we've really been able to dramatically reduce the amount of roundup used on an annual basis and we're hopeful this ultimately can be brought down to zero this is our parks contractor again they initially really embraced the use of sythe with roundup here you can see how the numbers rose here this is a new program trying to get ahead of the curve and reduce the background but once we accomplished that we've seen steady drops over the years there and again ultimately we hope to bring those down to zero and finally open space with the exception of a few flare-ups we've had with really noxious weeds there and they've really plummeted and held at their very low levels relative to the rest of the city and Martin spoke of this he showed you what the fair zones are the yellow zones again are where you may see spring there all the other areas in there that are not marked yellow outside are trees where they may come in and occasionally spray the tree water so that concludes that presentation and thank you at this point we're actually going to a panel format so can I just get another microphone yeah yeah exactly okay so I apologize so I would like to at this point introduce Jennifer House Jennifer known to many as Koko is a local organic farmer and agricultural consultant and a teacher she currently teaches farm management at UC Davis for the agricultural economics department and provides healthcare support to individuals as they're practicing ethno-potness welcome can you hear it? alright okay so now you know something about my background William and we're going to that's alright now I'm sorry so what I'm supposed to talk about is the collateral damage in our war on weeds we've had a war on weeds and a war on insects for quite a few years now primarily chemical and I'm going to talk about the collateral damage and in particular we're focusing in this form on two chemicals the glyphosate based on the size and the neonate class of insecticides and we're talking about that as the controversial come controversial round up alright how's that okay glyphosate this is what people are familiar with glyphosate as round up that's the most familiar product for most people systemic broad spectrum herbicide systemic means that it was taken up by the plant into the plant body and translocated by the plant throughout the plant's circulatory system so it's in the plant now you've been hearing in the news about adjuvants all glyphosate based herbicides are mixed with adjuvants because the adjuvants are combined with the glyphosate to get into the cells of the plant so that it can be moved around so are glyphosate herbicides effective? yes they're very effective the systemic stuff works like an adjuvant now we've got another issue about the resistance that set that aside glyphosates have been assumed to be safe we've been told that for a really long time the manufacturer told us they were safe and our government has told us that they were safe and they're the most glyphosate herbicides they're the most widely used pesticides globally and Davis has no exceptions we just looked over on that there are lots of other products besides Roundup that have glyphosate in them there are about 750 products that are glyphosate based so how much glyphosate is used? this is referring to agriculture and gives you an idea of the trend of what's happening provided by the USGS glyphosate was patented by Monsingato in 1969 and then marketed in the years subsequent to that you could see how the egg use has really increased with the see the green part that expands there that's soybeans see that huge increase with the advent of the Roundup Ready GMO crops which were designed to be used with the glyphosate used with the Roundup ready corn with the roundup ready corn was developed so it's interesting too if you can see the wheat is brown you can see how more and more glyphosate has been used over time on wheat that's kind of interesting the Roundup Ready crops don't actually break down the glyphosate in their bodies they actually have learned to tolerate they have other metabolic mechanisms to survive with the glyphosate in their bodies so that means that there are more glyphosate in the foods that we're eating so over time our government has allowed higher levels of glyphosate in the food and so that allowed this use of glyphosate on wheat but after the wheat crop is near maturity they're now spraying the wheat with glyphosate as a dry down so they don't spend as much money drying the crop so you see that there with the wheat but that gives you an idea of what's going on with glyphosate the glyphosate trend it's a pretty strong increase over time all right we have three industries that are really dependent on using glyphosate and they glyphosate model for their production and their system and production agriculture we just saw some slide looking at the amount of glyphosate it's used it's an approach and it's a way of farming that has been very effective and a lot of people have embraced that and used that so now that we're having some controversy contributions arriving about glyphosate these production agriculture is going to be hit really hard by this because it's really dependent on but we do have an alternative been developing over time the national organic program was implemented in 2002 we have organic agriculture and glyphosate never has and so we have this evolving model of how to farm without glyphosate and it's a very different model it's done very very differently it works on building up the soil and looking at the health of the plants working with the soil and looking to balance the plant life the vegetation life there rather than everything is dead conventional production agriculture uses so successfully with glyphosate we've got this Food Safety and Modernization Act that's coming on that's really affecting farmers and that is really based more on a glyphosate model and so that's the system where everything is dead with the crop plant and the only safe food is dead food so their issues are going to be conflict here this is a that's going to be a strong a lot of problems a lot of conflict on ideologies how to do this landscape maintenance very dependent on glyphosate used everywhere the days of the broom long gone replaced by leaf blowers hose long gone but this is changing especially in California and Northern California I just was talking to a PCA from the Peninsula area who works for a big landscaping company and there's pressure and interest on the part of their customers to have glyphosate free landscapes and so people are responding to it providing that and people are getting used to a different look the most different and we have the speaker a little bit later who's a local guy who does landscaping without glyphosate so that's emerging new businesses okay, ecological restoration very very dependent on glyphosate extremely so we and that's going to have you're going to have a really hard time changing that part of it is because we've got this really strong war on weeds that got started and initiated in 1999 along with the chemical companies and the public partnership got set up that way and so a lot of our ecological restoration is based on that way of thinking so that's a really big thing and it's changing so where's it coming from next slide here we are in America things change, change is in the legal realm we're starting to get pressure because of a lot of lawsuits against Monsanto trying to put responsibly on Monsanto because of health concerns and this is about a multi-district litigation because there's so many lawsuits over this non-Hodgkin's lymphoma they're gathering but they're all together this is the same thing they did with the asbestos suits this is very current, this was all done in like 2016 and it's moving along here so we're going to see more of this and I'm not sure if you can read that you can find that on the internet it says right here it's talking about how they're conflicting opinions and data regarding the dangers relying on the FDA and other oversight agencies rulings that permit the use but the plaintiffs are citing scientific studies of data from outside of the US which are directly in opposition to that idea of safety so Monsanto's expected to fight this, litigate this extensively probably for a really long time kind of like asbestos stuff that took decades before they included that still not done with it Monsanto is also looking to lay down properties in California's proposition 65 which we started like in 1986 in unconstitutional ways to eliminate that so we don't have that anymore so that's the litigation stuff that's creating this pressure and that's coming from the science so okay, next one here is a very recent paper this is new science that contradicts the old science with new methods, new models and new questions being asked so that's why we're having a controversy this is a 2016 publication in the Journal of Physics and Chemistry and it is talking about biological plausibility for some of these problems the epidemiological study was done earlier and then we're starting to look at the main issues how this actually happens and what this particular article is about is really interesting because glyphosate is actually made out of glycine which is an amino acid that our body uses so it's an altered version, glycine and what they're finding is that the body can't tell the difference so the body is incorporating glyphosate into its bodily structures and enzymes rather than the glycine which is the normal natural amino acid and so that has a lot of consequences and so this glyphosate substitution for the glycine is explaining a whole lot of illnesses so those are listed there so that's a recent thing here's some examples of other things that have come up one is and these are all new these are all like things through 2015 we've got some new science that's come out that's talking about the problems that are caused by glyphosate because of its action as an antirecrobial agent there's no question that does that Monsanto actually patented glyphosate as an antibiotic in 2010 but unfortunately it kills most of the beneficials and the only things that really can survive glyphosate are like clostridium DPCL and things like botulism so the salmonella so this is all the microbiome stuff that we're very concerned about these days this is why people are taking the probiotics and prebiotics and stuff is to deal with these kinds of things here's some others is she can make pathway is the second one here and this we were originally told that glyphosate is safe because she can make pathway is not used by animals it's only used by plants and microbes so therefore we can rest assured that glyphosate would be safe but now we're learning about the microbiome we've got the huge human microbiome project that was launched in 2008 it's the new genome the microbiome so that results in all of these problems and all you have to do is if you're not up on that do a little search look on the internet put in your favorite disease like Parkinson's or something and put in microbiome and you'll get a couple hundred thousand hits it's really very current as far as disease goes and we have some others here quite a few things are coming up new science new lungs new questions being asked and new things yeah and what another particularly interesting one is that glyphosate is a key layer it binds to these minerals does it for plants does it in the soil so that's why the plants and people end up with these nutritional deficiencies and problems because of that but anyway so next we're going to have Matthew Keiko talk and she's going to she's an ND and she's going to talk about these some of these effects of these pesticides so I'm a graduate of UC Davis I've been a physician for 30 years and I work here in Davis at Kaiser Permanente in South Davis and I take care of adult patients I also am the Armenian physician for Kaiser Permanente Sacramento and Roseville area which means that I look at how our environmental health affects the health of our patients I also look at how our operations affects the health of our communities and work towards mitigating those effects so I just wanted to speak to support the integrated pest management from a medical or human health perspective and basically we're looking at in the world climate change and we're looking at a lot of industrial chemicals out in the environment and both of those are human health and that is kind of an emerging understanding so we're all placed for learning more about that but in terms of the chemicals the pesticides are endocrine disruptors and you can see this definition about endocrine disruptor but basically the endocrine system is a communication system so a lot of chemical messengers that basically regulate everything in the body so coordinate things one part of the body talking to another controlling growth of different organs so it's basically the whole communication system of the body and the reason it's important with pesticides is that there's these vulnerable populations so vulnerable people in particular would be women who are attempting to get pregnant women who are pregnant fetuses infants, children and the reason for that is that their bodies are growing really fast so there's this whole sort of you think about embryogenesis there's this whole sort of like symphony of growth that occurs where everything's growing rapidly there's a lot of communication going back and forth it's this very nuanced kind of system and if there's an endocrine disruption so there's some kind of communication problem somewhere along the line that little glitch can really turn into a big problem so these endocrine disruptors we're looking at the kinds of effects that people are concerned about are anything from behavioral problems to problems with a genital tract not forming correctly so from the fertility problems with childhood cancers problems with cancers later in life one example of that is the whole thing with DDT so DDT was certainly safe at the time that it came out my husband tells this really interesting story of how he used to ride his bike behind the DDT fogger my name is a kid they took over the neighborhood and all the kids would ride their bikes through the fog because it was so exciting kind of like flying through the clouds but then what we found out women were actually girls who were exposed to DDT before the age of 14 had increased risk of breast cancer after the age of 50 so 35 years later this endocrine disruption was discovered to have this effect also there's the case of DES which was a hormone given to women who were pregnant back in the 1970s that caused all kinds of problems with their offspring having difficulties getting pregnant and malformations of the genital tract so some of these things were not obviously seen at the beginning and recent studies that were done at UCSF chemicals in women showed that there were 163 different chemicals in the bodies of women and they were included things like flame retardant solvents plasticizers just a huge number of different chemicals and a lot of times we have some data on different chemicals but we don't have data on all of those chemicals and how they interact together so you can imagine if you had a couple different endocrine disruptors occurring at the same time it might be very dependent on exactly when a woman or a fetus was exposed to those chemicals depending on how that would cause some kind of effect later on so I just want to let you know that the American Pediatrics Association and the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology have physician papers on this they basically encourage physicians to educate patients about the risks of exposures to chemicals they support physicians going out and supporting things like integrated test management in their communities because of the concerns of physicians for the health of our patients and first doing no harm okay wait this is our ToxicStreetGavis ToxicStreetGavis.org even.com new website that volunteers have put together so need to be tolerant because it's got some glitches yet but some of the stuff that I was talking about the controversy that's come up about glyphosate you will find some things on that you can see that up here at the top and stuff about integrated test management you will find that on this site you can add some more things especially about restoration ecology because that's such a big converse over the enormous thing so we're going to have more things coming up on this site so you can look forward to that now next our next person is going to talk I know we are next person is going to talk about wildlife and animals and pets we just started off talking about humans focusing on humans and now we're going to broaden that to cover the rest of the environment and all those animals and stuff and our speakers are going to be Greg House whom I know quite well he's my husband he's an organic farmer and a cultural consultant he does a lot of expert witness work in agriculture on agricultural matters and he's on the open space and habitat commission so we're going to do this as a volunteer and take it away Greg I've been a ham on in Davis by the way since the 1980s since 1972 so we're going to talk about we're not quite done yet but what will be the mistake at the end we want to talk about this we want to get this subject up we're going to do it realistically alright so neonicic noids first these are common very common pesticides so neonicic noids are broad spectrum insecticides broad spectrum insect kills a lot of different insects and creatures important thing to recognize is that is a systemic just like ground up goes into the body of the heart of death or the other things and that's why this is a particular concern it's so much concern that EPA has started to do some research and this is the new label we were talking about how to protect pollinators and other things from the effects of this thing alright so you just see it's a relatively new chemical and it's just a rapid meteorite rise and it's used as 2000 and as you can see here this is in crops but the same thing is happening all over the world alright sorry so the first thing everybody I've been a lot concerned about bees and pollinators and just recently the EPA has confirmed that neonicic noids green and disoriented kill honey bees these effects include decreases in pollinators as well as less honey produced this is from the EPA's press release we're on to it we know what's going on and we're going to talk more about how we're going to handle that but certainly we know that neonicic noids kill bees they also kill other stuff this is a study that was done on a 100 page study it was a meta type research meta 200 studies this is Dr. Pierre Vino he says that neonicic noids can be lethal to birds one seed one seed is encoded with neonicic noids to kill a songbird Pearson and Chesapeake Bay they're causing crabs a lot of damage that's another study why are neonicic noids so bad they get in the environment a lot of different ways first of all, farmers apply them in the seeds and the coated seeds and that dust comes off the tractors it goes into the air it's in the rain the birds eat seeds and it goes into the soil and it can go into the water it goes into the water it's in the air and it's in the water you've got the plants they pick it out insects and so on so it's in plants eventually it gets into the entire food plant so you can see that it's a very it's one of those ones that just gets everywhere okay okay, pets here's something that may startle you but neonicic noids are actually used on pets so you might want to check next time you are treating your pet or your fleets you might have a second thought about that okay this is just kind of a reminder to you that dogs do like to run on grass, they like to roll in they like to eat it and the other thing about dogs and cats too all the cats, they don't get to change the clothes like we do so that's kind of a serious problem for them and it's going to accumulate under bodies and so it's something that may bring them into your house too that's just something okay we're going to take a quick break here and talk about, again, the size of just a minute because these are also a concern to not only wildlife but also pet owners and John is in the city and he's going to give us just a great agreement for them to talk about what he knows about them okay, thanks, I appreciate that so I introduced the idea of pesticides and their impacts on wildlife certainly we know that there's issues with some of the chemicals, great chemicals for insects and weeds and these sorts of things but these are kind of the hidden issue that's not so hidden anymore, it's become more present and obvious for challenges with the poisoning of secondary and non-market wildlife so good, next slide so this was research done by the Department of Official Wildlife California State Department of Official Wildlife and essentially what they did was to help put together information throughout the state to look at mortality on wildlife and exposure to rodenticides and rodenticides, anticoagulant are broken into two generation or FGARs or second generation FGARs and really the one of most concern for non-target wildlife poisoning is the second generation anticoagulant and the reason is it's intended for a single dose feeding, so these are higher doses in one feeding of like a rat or a mouse which means it's carrying around a lot more chemical on its body as it's staggering around looking for a place to die it becomes more obvious to potential predators and therefore consumed pretty rapidly, so that predator then picks up that high dose of the chemical it's also very persistent in tissue so that's problematic the animals that do eat it as a secondary non-target species eat it, it persists in their livers at sub-legal doses which then have effects on those animals these right here are the primary second generation anticoagulants that are actually still used to this day in state California these were widely available over the counter up until 2014 next slide and you can see just kind of the second generation anticoagulants toxicity in canids the LD50, my gram per kilogram so this is essentially how much of that product needs to be fed in order to kill well, kill 50% of the sample population, so you can see here pretty low numbers, these are the second generation anticoagulants in red 4, 8.1 quarter to 1 milligram per kilogram and you can see for reference these are the first generation anticoagulants a little bit higher doses but still it's problematic, they know that these things can't kill wildlife so this is a decent tissue again here are the secondary generation anticoagulants this is Brody Fadcombe 217 days persistence in litter tissue samples again contrasting example Orvin and Orphan and Diaphasinone lower resistance but still an issue so just real quickly the state of California like I said looked at all kinds of different data from up in the state some pretty shocking things they found long-term study this is the San Joaquin Kipox 87% of 90 that they sample tested positive for anticoagulants 74% of those 90s had the second generation anticoagulants and I should premise this that these are these are dead animals that are collected and brought into the lab for the testing so there's question when it first comes in how did it die so then they use possible analysis and they find these high concentrations in there their first generation anticoagulants much less still and you can see raptors again 89% of 96 that were tested had second generation anticoagulants so these are the nasty ones 89% that's pretty high similarly bobcats and outlines 100% of 14 sample in southern California by EFW in 2011 had anticoagulant rubric anticides and then both first generation and second generation so this stuff is in the environment it's not just specific to the rats that rise in around their homes next slide so this is the current regulation on second generations in 2014 California Department of Decide Regulation restricted it limiting its purchase and use of anticoagulants and it's been a long time since pesticide applicators only and as Brian had mentioned earlier these are educated people who will hopefully are trained in appropriate placements and honestly are looking for other ways hopefully to reduce or use alternatives instead they're no longer available at home owners best control companies which is kind of a concern for the city and we are working on communicating to these groups about the continued use of those we definitely see examples in city locally of raptors versus prey that have been poisoned by second generation anticoagulants so it remains in the area first generation anticoagulants are still available by homeowners to use because they have a lower toxicity and persistence they don't find them quite as frequently in wildlife but they're still there they're still kind of an issue one of the kind of challenges right now with the current regulation is that these are restricted first generation anticoagulants are restricted in their field applications so a lot of agricultural applications you know the farmers may not be able to use those products so they look possibly to second generation anticoagulants it's an easier choice for ag applications so that's a little bit of a challenge that still needs to be worked out and I just want to point out here too that the city of Davis doesn't use anticoagulant road intersides road management the city of Davis supported a resolution to help outreach to the community about second generation anticoagulants and their problems as well as reaching out to the businesses to help them basically look at what pest control company activities are going on around their business to switch those up and try to implement less toxic control in their quality of things okay so now we're going to I'm going to roll back and we're going to talk about Roundup and Life and Safe so we've all seen this so let's just keep going we know Roundup is Life and Safe let's go I just want to talk about a little history of Life and Safe you've heard some of it but these studies these monitors they did some monitoring studies on the typical lab type of animals that they passed and they had no toxic effects that they saw so what they're doing is that they're feeding them with Life and Safe to see if they're killed and of course they find well it's not really very toxic in that way it is mildly toxic to birds but basically they did it in 1994 they didn't find a lot of problems alright so but we know that in plants this is an agriculture now and this is a soybeans we have but also corn and all the other crops that are used Roundup is spraying directly on them with this Roundup ready technology they're actually getting nutrient deficiencies and so this gives you some idea of how Roundup works it's actually a metal chelator as we said and so manganese is one of them you've got iron, zinc, copper all these minerals that are in the plant become tied up and so the plants have deficiency well these guys are really agriculture is really good at taking care of some problems and so they spray minerals back on the plant and so that's taking care of the problem but I just wanted to throw in as you have some idea of the mechanism of action that's built ok so here's another thing that Roundup has been implicated in and that's a habitat of hemillinumination this is a picture I took just outside of Davis a month ago you can see here this is a newly planted completely bare how much wildlife do you think is in there now I'm not saying that this is all of you Roundup certainly there's been a lot of ground cultivation but you can't have zero weeds right next to every tree without using a herbicide and that's more than likely Roundup ok the controversy is that modern butterflies and other pollinators are being there habitat is being destroyed by so much Roundup being used and I can testify to that myself as a farmer who's been in the area for over 40 years I know when I was a young man that started out in agriculture we used to have in the fields around here there would be weeds that were this tall by springtime and that was a lot of vegetation there was a lot of habitat weeds are actually habitat for a lot of animals and insects pollinators all of them so since then of course now if you drive around in the country you will not see you can see what you saw here like 8 months of the year bare ground next slide here's a different model this is an organic farm this happens to be my farm we grow organic apples and how much wildlife do you think there's a lot of insect habitat right now it's a lot of grasses but there's also always flowers for them beneficial insect habitat that is an important part of our IPM strategy so that we don't have to use anything to control toxic materials just in contrast to think about what this looks like and what the other one looks like so I'm thinking about why are there no longer moths windows seals at night where did all these creatures go they got no place to be they're not reproducing next slide so this one is telling us that the EPA has raised the acceptable levels of wildlife safety found in fruits and vegetables in 2013 they went from these crops here flag soybeans from 20 parts to 40 sweet potatoes 2.2 3 parts we went 5 parts per million for carrots so we're getting like way 15 to 25 times the previous levels why are they doing that well because so much around it is being used that's why and let's just we're going to go on the next slide right right facade is now being looked at in a different way we're seeing some problems but we're seeing some long term effects this one is having trouble reproducing next slide there's one on amphibians we're having trouble with this paper saw that rung up is extremely lethal to amphibians so we were talking about tadpoles, snails and so on ok for you pet owners that came tonight here's something to think about for the glyphosate the in some ways maybe this study that I told you was looking at says that animals can tolerate but they weren't looking at these adjuvants, these surfactants that might be causing a lot of toxic reactions so here's some things that might happen to your animals, weight loss, lethargy excessive fluid volume diarrhea don't forget the dogs need grass this test is showing that dog that you know when they eat that they can get grass that's between them and have a toxic reaction so let's go on protecting your pet ok this is from a veterinarian site that just pulled on don't apply pesticides and if you use a gondola don't use the chemicals pretty common sense don't allow your dog access to any lawn unless you defer additional pesticides they can use again common sense if your dog is down there you know so these are just some things that you might want me to think about next slide this is this is a study that shows that bees again are being hot now injured by glyphosate they're having trouble getting back to their pot spatial burning this slide is talking about this is from Monsanto and we're trying to dig in here Monsanto says that these glyphosate does not affect on bees it's not a serious problem and maybe this is the reason here what they're talking about they're talking about acute toxicity and John showed you that LD50 thing this is something that if you take it and you're going to die almost instantaneously or very quickly what we're now finding out is maybe this isn't the only thing that's happening but certainly this is what Monsanto is referring to and this is what the EPA says how they're supposed to do it okay let's keep going now because of all these next slide please because of all these things that have been going on and all this controversy just keep going that's it computer acting up what you're going to see in a minute the EPA is this is very recent this is like last year when they're studying these studies now they decided they're going to start looking at chronic effects of pesticides on pollinators and so they decided they're not going to just look at that acute situation that they're going to start talking about chronic effects and so that's going to give us a lot more information that we would like to this is the chart that they're talking about now they're going to start looking at chronic and they're going to start also looking at not just individual insects but the whole columns and trying to figure out what's going on because we're definitely using these something to think about when we're looking at those studies I like to say we got to hold these people's feet to the fire it really matters like who pays for the studies it turns out that the EPA uses studies that have been submitted by the chemical manufacturers and in fact in this particular one we're talking about they had something like 25 or 27 studies that they used and only three of them were actually independent the rest came from Monsanto so I'm not saying that that's there's anything wrong with Monsanto's doing I'm just saying that we got to be the watchdog you know the price of liberty is let's say there you go okay so we're back to the precautionary state principle and I'd like to end this little portion of my talk with this thought and a little tribute to the two women who have been pioneers and I think they've been getting a lot from their wisdom Theo Colburn is the one who's talking about the different disruption in the environment and of course we all know Rachel Carson so next slide please okay that's it so now I'm going to pass the baton off we've got a one of our neighbors is here Mr. Paul Steinberg would you please come up and he's going to give you a new and positive of something that might be done that is thank you for going on thank you I feel like it's too long to be preaching to the choir I should just want to start off with something that tonight's just reminded me I'm going to digress a little bit Slide Hill Park if any of you know it I've been in the park there's a lovely pool there my kids I have two children 13 and 15 some of we use the pool extensively and this year something happened in the pool which could have just really caught me off guard they closed the diving water out why did they close it? Forgive us anybody in this room because he was part of that department but some child didn't listen to the rules apparently and I talked to one of the lifeguards went against what they were instructed to do and he filled off the diving water the top diving water and I believe he broke his arm that was it as a result the pool has closed the diving water for everybody and may impact the rule and I'm looking at that the same piece how could that be a business that we suddenly closed on the pool yet what you're hearing tonight about glyphoside and all the other poisons we don't think about that same mentality when it comes to the dog and the kids play in the park there are babies that are sitting in the same area the kids at the pool who play in the park if there's a dog park there we'll start to talk about the dogs all the dogs are in there so it's just amazing first slide please so I came across this and walked in my dog as you can see on what it says here this sign was posted on June 5th and they said the date of application is going to be June 7th and I was like oh my god how did this happen and how do we have any time to talk to somebody of course there's a number there and I called the number and I did get finally inspired to Martin and I must say I'll take my head off to the gentleman all the discussions that I had Martin has turned out to be an incredible support of this even though this is a mandated program for dogs if you worked with me over a couple days of talking about it they ultimately agreed not to do the spraying of the park we would take it into our own hands so I actually actually bring the copy of the poster but I put a poster around in the park asking the people of Martin and I had spoken about if we could do the weeding ourselves and spread them out they would not spray I have my two kids on the right there and neighbours and I put signs of all over the park and got an enormous amount of interest everybody was able to turn up and Martin through the city delivered to me a handful of tools so we had a whole pile of tools to use next slide please so this is what it looked like before and it's very difficult to see in my infant I didn't take too many but four pictures but you can see little bits of weeds there they're not a great picture and one of the discussions that I had with Martin about this was why do we have to do this who cares if they're weeds there they're not that bad no one's getting a harm problem these are just little plants and I recognise that there's a reason why weeds are removed in certain places but these weren't any of the weeds we saw but nevertheless we took this on next slide please you can see here where the plants that are supposed to be there and then the weeds that were not supposed to be there next slide please so work in progress a bunch of neighbours turned up you can see this over here it was fabulous not only was it fabulous from a perspective of abating the need for using pesticides but we actually got to talk and meet people who we see daily and then we talked to and people came to talk to us and to a person practically everybody one man there sent an email and he criticised he said why do we have to do this the city gets paid taxes they should be paid for it needless to say he didn't turn up even to watch that said we even had people who came by and said I can't make it this time and this is a significant part of what I want to talk about so I said we can't make it this time but if you're going to do this again please call on me and they gave names and numbers one woman came on there it was very hot on June and for ice creams for everybody who was doing the work so it was very much a community building exercise in addition to these are the after pictures June 16th so this was a few days off and you can it's difficult to see in the light there but there were no more weeds left here and by the way the other side of the pop there was a scarf called the girl's scarf we did it there too slide please pretty much nothing no weeds have come up the mulch has been spread and re-spread and it's actually worked since June there has been no mulch no weeds no additional mulch very little additional mulch next slide please so really again I have to thank Martina and the group for enabling us to do this but the real message here was that when we took it into our own hands not just an activity for us as members of the pop but people really wanted people wanted to do this and people came by congratulated us and asked us if they could get involved in the future time so I did have one comment one of the things that strikes me is when I talk about the cool of the beginning it's also a wedding with our daughters and I go to stores in town and see ground up solving what I'm facing I'm wondering why we don't talk to people Derek Downey is a local landscaper and I'm going to let him introduce himself in terms of business and what he's up to thank you give me a nod so I'm going to keep this short I know everyone's been patient and we want to hold their comments I'm here to just basically inspire people to not use round up and to not use pesticides when they do their landscaping I started a company with my friend John Scott we both have lived here for a long time we're residents I'm a father I'm a beekeeper I have a lot of interactions with wildlife and with ecology so I'm very inspired to minimize any biocides we don't need them for the most part I know some people would argue we need them on a large scale for some reasons but I'm not speaking about them you're front yard or your back yard so what we do in Davis is we convert lawns into water-wide landscapes we're in a drought they're beautiful landscapes you can create that don't need much water and don't need much maintenance so we also install rainwater catchment systems that catch the water and the tanks that you can use to grow your veggies you can also store the water in the ground through swales, natural drainage we install drip systems we also like to plant edible landscapes so fruit trees, nuts berries herbs all our landscapes have pollinator friendly plants we like to feed bees we like to feed hummingbirds there are 80 plus native species of bees accounted for in Davis alone we can talk with Robin Thorpe at the E-Bio facility these are just some examples of bees in my yard I had a lawn I took out the week before I was to become a new father and my son is a year and a half now the yard is completely full of flowers most of the year I hardly ever watered once a month I had the water more the first year to get things established I have a drip system I turn it on once a month get a deep water in don't need to worry about wasting water I would like to point out that some places sell plants including flowers that they advertise are good for bees but these plants were sprayed with muenix pesticides and I would like you to see your nursery suppliers to verify that they are not using these pesticides because you buy these plants they've been sprayed with muenix or they have them in their system you plant them in your yard and then you're killing bees not feeding bees using native bees such as those provided by those suggested by the algorithm all starless those are good ideas to start with I would suggest you go pesticide free obviously we don't need pesticides in our landscapes maybe just a little bit of attention to how you design and install your landscape will go a long way to avoiding weeding in the long term next slide this is an example this is my front yard that I installed a week before my son was born the plants are bigger than he is they've grown very quickly some plants such as the nicotiana you see in front of you bloom most of the year you can plant other things like ladder pod which also feed lots of bees and they don't require much water next slide so what I want to show you is very quickly in the next few slides how you can go from a lawn a plane slate to plant perennial drought tolerant plants so if you start off with the lawn you can go in with a sod cutter you can rent that at a local rental place like all star rentals take the lawn out this is an optional step but it really helps to avoid like if you have bermida or other issues to just get that root stock out of there as quickly as possible next step cardboard very simple I get these huge rolls they come in like 1500 square foot rolls they're like 6 feet tall you roll it down over the soil very simple very relatively cheap and inexpensive if you get your own cardboard from like bike stores or depends on how much the land you have and then you apply mulch 3 to 4 inches of mulch it goes a long way to preventing weeds keeping the sunlight from hitting both spots mulch buys you time to basically establish the plants that you do want so there's no sunlight hitting the bare spots in the future where weeds would want to grow so if there's sun hitting the soil weeds will grow life happens on its own if you want to avoid weeding in the long term get that ground covered with plants ground covered with perennials there's a lot of different things you can put in the ground and there's a lot of resources in Davis we can go on there's other things you can do if you have a raised bed you can put it in oil pots I've been trying this out with some clients we install a rainwater tank we want that water to go the longest way they basically we put oil pots it's a clay pot that isn't glazed in the raised bed the wider part is in the ground you fill the vessel with water and it wigs out through the base over the course of a week you can look into that this is a garden we did where we basically installed a few thousand gallon water catchment system and the overflow goes into natural drainage soil water through trees and then we just install a simple hose attachment that they can fill their oil pots with make the water last as long as possible because you're filling the water vessels the water is wicking out under the surface of the soil it's not going to water in the surface where there's a lot more potential for weeds so you get fewer weeds these are some examples of plants you can put in the ground that are very colorful they support wildlife they don't need much water they don't need pesticides they're more rigorous next slide I'd also like to reiterate to not use rodenticides if you know anyone any businesses please tell them to stop using rodenticides we don't want our owls our raptors our pets to be eating rodents that have ingested this poison that is not necessary go to the food court, look in the tree there's an owl box up there and we need to prevent the biocides from getting into the environment this is a project we did recently it's one phase of three phases the Davis Spook Co-op we're showing how to catch water off the roof and get it into the landscape at the same time feeding bees minimizing water use and building soil and they've eliminated a lot of their maintenance needs they've actually just removed their maintenance company I'm not going to say who it was but they don't need as much maintenance anymore because we're getting the mulch they're actually starting to use the leaves in the garden beds now it's like a no brainer free mulch I really hope more people do that because you don't have to do anything just let the leaves decompose on the ground thanks for listening this is a soil that we installed and it's going to use right now we're going to turn it back to Steve now we've got some more stuff but we're running out of time we really want to be able to talk with you Steve I think the idea from here I apologize if we didn't go behind I think to start with if we could get folks who are willing to answer some questions maybe either from where they're sitting or it would be easier to be at the expert panel we were envisioning here I think to begin with it would be great if we could get some questions maybe save the comments and if we get through the questions then we can hear people out for both questions and answers at this moment we can keep it brief ideally in a short question very short answers and I know that we couldn't get to everything tonight it's certainly not the end of it some Monsanto lawyers here it really looks like we're preaching to the choir and I just want to know who's the enemy and how do we approach him or her or them I just heard comments that the enemy is us I think that we need to be what we're trying to do is our understanding of what's going on the city has got IPM policy I didn't have time to scroll that with you because we talk too much but the city's got an excellent IPM policy we've heard some comments about some concerns from citizens that IPM policy isn't being followed and so that's what we're going to be talking about that earlier that that's where the city is going to be looking at itself now again we're going to hold the feet to the fire but our goal is to reduce and ultimately illuminate you know for years I've been hearing that IPM folks that the city has hired have been voted and intimidated and kept doing their job by senior staff that have felt that they could outlast any kind of city council person how do you put the governance of the city so that doesn't happen in the future so that IPM people can actually do their job and not be bullied and not be intimidated and so that you have a kind of a chemical market to control the city no matter what the people want how do you do that well I think that that's why we're here tonight but John hi my name is John I think I already introduced myself that well earlier I'm the city's lead on the IPM policy upgrade I'm going to be the project manager for this and one of my objectives during this policy upgrade is to not only meet those objectives that you saw earlier in the discussion but also look at how the integration pest management program is implemented to ensure that it is as flowy it flows as well as possible so this includes all management and talking with everybody staff all the way out to make sure that everybody's on board with the IPM policy as well as how it's implemented and we've been talking about transparency in this working group and working with ideas of a way to have an ongoing audit or a watchdog kind of thing and again I think it's just we have to be involved with the policy upgrade give you a really good example of being involved in a positive way but I think we also need to have that watchdog that's going to continue to look at well the city of Davis has some farmland it has three acres in Erty Farm that we all aware of five acres that are right against the city on the Mace Curve property and those we've been talking about having things be transparent and be a watchdog and I know that the open space we have technicians is recommending to the city council that that bourbon farm the lease required to be certified organic and that is a kind of way of having an audit it's either organic or it's not and you can't use these pesticides in an organic program so that would be one way of having the audit to be transparent that's not what's happening in the 25 acres but certainly if the citizens wanted that we should be talking to the city council that we want that 25 acres to be certified organic as well the city of Irvine has their organically they can do things organically and we're talking with certifiers about having a special organic certification for cities that we take it out of the city so that we have it audited annually that's what happens to us as farmers we're audited annually by another party to see that we follow all this then it would be outside of the cities checking itself instead it would be coming from another party and if we ask our parks and our city and our whole program to be certified organic according to the USDA National Organic Program that would be a way to do it looking around recognizing many people in the audience tonight and discussions I've had with them there is a very strong difference between least toxic IPM and IPM and in the slides and in other things there is not an emphasis on least toxic and until it is clearly written up there where you have chemical you have your pyramid and chemicals unless you say least toxic and unless you say that you are operating under cautionary principle IPM just becomes integrated pesticide management it might not be happening now it's happened in the past we need to find a way to incorporate into this program and into the revisions a very clear statement about the least toxic IPM and the precautionary principle other cities can do it and we can do it too and how are we going to do that and there was a second part and I don't remember what it was as far as the less toxic approach is what we try to emphasize on these things with the spares that we're talking about high exposure of course the policies apply to different divisions have different functionalities and different objectives to achieve but in the case of areas around products player in particular picnic areas facilities we try to implement burn down products we kind of show but we are using those Martin that's not what I asked I asked how do we incorporate very clear wording in policy that says we are going to make changes and follow least toxic IPM because I think that's what a lot of people want to see the change made and how do we incorporate in the precautionary principle not what's happening this is the process when you're gone when new senior staff comes in when we have all the problems we've had for 20 years here unless it's clear in the policy it's going to continue to be a problem we're going to see the same thing 20 years from now and that's one of the things we're actually working on now is redefining the IPM policy specifically address some of the concerns we're working on that that's the next step keep showing up I'm on the recreation commission and I guess I've noticed in the presentations tonight that there's been talk about controversy but I'm only hearing about one's perspective it feels like and that doesn't feel balanced to me so I'm not saying that I'm a big comment around that but I do feel like we're only hearing one side of the story and that this is not a full conversation so that I find kind of disturbing sir, question? actually I'm here from Monsanto I have been employed by Monsanto if it's a question we'll get to comments like okay, we're just in questions when I use the parks and green belts around Davis I noticed that there's certain cultural practices, maintenance practices being used that tend to encourage pests and the need for herbicides in particular a lot of shrubs are being pretty harshly regularly which causes a lot of stress and ends up encouraging diseases and I'm wondering if there could be some if that's being addressed or can be addressed as well to say that if we manage landscapes in a way that promotes health then we will decrease the need for these even beyond the use of just mulch many state professionals that have certain standards that they're used to applying and at the same time there's citizens that and that's I think what they try to address some of them we try to the other issues with the contractors too a lot of times they have to go through large areas and we really don't have the person how to cover everything so a lot of times pruning like that or certain practices trying to have a different perspective which a lot of this will bring on for example if we do reduce the around of the pesticides having more weed of the way certain landscape will be looking at so that's just things that we're going to have to learn and in fact we are planning another seminar in February where we'll be talking specifically about the standards of surface and what you would expect and what it's going to cost to achieve that in terms of by the cost for manual labor neighborhood and or neighbor interventions like Paul's own slide or use of pesticides so this is really going to be a decision that I think the community is going to make as a whole. Any other questions? I really like the slide here our story and I wondered if the city would consider making an option for neighborhoods to participate in that sort of thing I think a lot of people would do it I can answer that quickly yes that is one of the things that we're going to be considering if the neighborhood for instance once a organic park they will probably have to step up and do the kind of work that Paul's doing here if that's the comments we're going to get through the questions first then we'll go to the comments I'd like to remain a whole bunch of organic pesticides organic pesticides I can name organic there's pheromone disruptors there's suppress it's a herbicide there are VTs, bacillus thuringiensis there are meme oil sprays there are organic certified copper oil sprays there's hundreds of them suppress is the main one but I've heard there's several more that are coming on that I don't have experience not on a lot of them no that's what that's what we have those for well Paul's taking care of oh the question was do we have an alternative herbicide available that can take care of some of the problematic weeds like Bermuda grass for instance or bind weed and to my knowledge there is a not another herbicide that's particularly effective against Bermuda grass however I deal with that myself every day as an organic farmer and have it for 35 years and it's something you manage I'd just like to say that pesticides herbicides are not the only way you can control weeds I came up with a list that you can look at Tom Sixier Davis of 25 other methods that can be used to control weeds talked about some of them tonight there's a young woman here that came away from her files at UC Davis he's standing up beyond her her family runs a goat grazing service in urban areas that does move and goes love bind weed and so there are things that can be done it's not the old it's not the conventional method and I think that's what we're going to be talking about we want to talk about these things we want to think about these you've got to get out of the box of only using pesticides I don't think that's necessary thank you but thank you for your comment Tom I appreciate it so I hear a lot of comment about using some time you're focusing on life and safety I'm just wondering if anybody in the city or in this group is interested in measuring the cost of doing those things there's an economic tradeoff involved they're putting on mulch organizing a labor group from the neighborhood this was a one time event it's a much different thing when you try to organize a repeatable ongoing effort on a large scale I'm in favor of using Roundup I'm just worried that the tool is going to be thrown away without replacement I think judicial use is really appropriate we need to pay full attention to how it's used and where it's used but I don't think it needs to be banned outright that's what I'm hearing from this group we just need to ban it because we have questions because all these questions are being asked it must be thrown away without further consideration that's my observation I don't agree with this inquiry I just say that's what this is yeah, what's the cost of giving up this tool we don't know yet but that's one of the things we're going to be looking into in detail as we go through this process I'm Juliette Batman the mother here in Davis and I have a couple questions I've grown up with my children here on the green belt I'm just wondering what is the official notification policy in terms of site applications in the parks on the green belt in public spaces this evening I dropped off a playmate my daughter and her house and the father was a native American and he had collected SAGE because he'd seen a pesticide application warning sign and went out with his daughter and collected the SAGE in the region in the area before and supplied the park right here next to the Southern Chavos Elementary so the second question relates to any kind of consideration around environmental justice issues and how you look at how applicants might be affected disproportionately by the application of pesticide use that they're doing on a daily basis as well as indigenous native Americans in our community that gather Eldbury, Willow and SAGE routinely as part of their cultural practices and impacts on their ability to harvest so-called bees in our community and any other sensitive populations or communities of color that might be impacted that I'm not aware of I'm wondering if you've done a thorough environmental justice analysis that's really important part of our policy making as well the third question is has there been any outreach or work done with landscaping companies which tend to be predominantly Latino in this community and efforts to educate them about alternative use because they're the ones doing a lot of the majority of the yard work in my neighborhood I see a lot of that and I'm just wondering what kind of educational programs we're offering to our fellow landskeepers Notifications we do post application at least 24 hours as you saw in the slide we contacted us at the end a few days to look at it and evaluate it in general we leave that posting up for at least 24 hours after it's been applied and one thing we do need to focus in on to determine or kind of demonstrate the areas that we do spray there's a misconception but the signs of that it's going to be a blanket spray where in reality it's just spot spraying and usually the common weeds that you can see like cheese weed or right now annual grasses growing in the Montserrat State and things like that we don't go out into the lawns for example spray unless we're going to do some type of receding and then we'll post it and make sure people are notified and in that respect you know the posting we could get a little more specific site location yeah we did do a training session with our particular contractors of the same employees but the other surrounding independent contractors you know they're very difficult to regulate and to do how we do it at the state level we do have to get certification for pesticide applications to do that I think there's some of a sensitive species and they're really doing their yeah so you know the only thing we go for are herbs and sages things like that that might be some drift we try to minimize that the things with some of the contractors so in that respect we're very careful not to apply when it's windy or you know the condition like I said notification and maybe improving on when our target is we're going to have to wrap this up at 9.30 sharp so do we have any more questions before we go to comments let's hit people we haven't hit the floor so I noticed the post office said our redwood trees there have essentially died and I talked to the postmaster about this he wasn't able to confirm my suspicion my suspicion is that the gardener, former gardener there in an effort to kill the ivy sprayed the ivy possibly around that which then could also control the redwood around the middle of it it's a great compact herbicide so it's very unlikely I think it's just the result of the trial there was a lot of redwood ivy okay thanks Rodney got a question they had an answer any other questions here people we haven't heard from before anyone? we'll go for a round to that is it possible for the city to better time the regions where they apply the plant poisons I lived on the end of the city park in the school every day and we noticed last spring that they were applying the plant poisons and precisely the time when the students were coming out of the school they were doing it right along the side walls good question yes we're making an effort to know defining the first-rate contract with the staff no should go together when the times like the tight traffic and high exposure rates have been brought to our attention earlier today that earlier this week I think that's one of the things we'll be looking at when we go through this IPM policy is the recommended procedures and finding them in much greater detail there hi I'm on the right of our commission I have a few questions too I'm just wondering if we're interested in doing what Paul did in his local park if there's a way of notifying us maybe by an extra neighbor if you know a couple of days ahead of time and we could kind of gather our forces to do kind of a we clear that would be great also at our last meeting with all the different commissions and stuff we had talked about the contractor West Coast I think who contracts for us and the actual amounts of mulch and I would see mulch as being a totally non-toxic option to to pest management and I would see that as possibly another way that the community could get involved you know be an extra neighbor or whatever you know I'm happy to do it in my area and certainly I think other people and if our current contractor is not able to provide the amount of mulch that they need perhaps we need to look at some other options for another contractor the last question I have is just a follow-up on one of the ladies over here that was talking about trimming the plants I also noticed that I walked into Greenville a couple of times a day I'm wondering if we have done any changes in the types of plants that we're currently planting now and the placement of the plants because I think that a lot of the plants are placed very close to the walking path and so require more trimming but just maybe planting them not as close together and different types of plants maybe like Derek had talked about more plants that are nectar rich and that provide more habitat and stuff as opposed to just landscaping plants as far as volunteers organizing there is a non-depart program and it's kind of had various phases like something like Paul has done if you can give us a notification for your attention we can schedule or try to schedule arborists to deposit chips at a certain location for that activity we do that frequently with different volunteers but in the case of neighbors as we did with Paul in the case of other neighborhoods and other areas getting together we have to make store and organize something at one time let's let us know and we'll do all the mechanics and try to accommodate the chips for that area as to the amount of chips we have that varies we have one contractor or arborist that provide us with tree services there are independent arborists that are selling some materials to other people sometimes they don't have a space of the time to get rid of it and they need to deposit it somewhere and they need to move to certain parts that are going to drop off chips so that's how we our arborist basically handles that as to the plan selection I'm not in the landscape I'm sure there's some issue that I haven't seen any new landscape to come in recently but it's kind of been what's popular as far as plan school is at a certain time and after a few years we've been going for the state to have certain kind of plans we're constantly changing different suggestions and the arboretum all-stars collaborations we have we know this ok just a couple more short questions so I'm on I'm on the open space and have that commission so my question is to follow up on this question about chips and wondering if that's crazy but the clock collection that we have now can that be a source can we kind of close the loop and use our own trees as a source for chips part of the problem is you get an awful lot of contamination in there foods, leaves other things that aren't particularly mulch worthy ok we have a couple more short questions we'll go to we'll go to calm and settle and like you said a lot of market and a lot of building themselves hi so I'm a student at UC Davis and I decided a large community that we need to be targeting is the collegiate community because a lot of us aren't aware of the things that are going on in the community but we're willing to help do you have any incentive of pairing with a sustainable agriculture class or creating a class where students can receive credits for doing projects such as clearing out weeds in the park or doing things that would benefit the community and receive some sort of credit or help toward a degree in helping the community so on absolutely Greg and I both teach at UC Davis we teach at ARE we get a whole of us we're only there one quarter a year we get a whole of us and we will be happy to work on an internship with you so that you can get credit and there are just a whole bunch of things that can be done you could work on top 6 free data if you want to Greg talk to us ok one more quick question upon that there are certain organizations that do volunteer with us and I'm sure if you're looking at a long term or extended period of time for example for a class we might be able to look into it ok I think I'm going to go to the comments now so I ask you please keep them brief folks we don't want long editorials we do have a survey sheet and go to Talks at 3 Davis you can put your comments there we will consider all of them and probably end up posting them at some point so folks who haven't spoke before and want to comment sir did you have something you want to say or I guess I got something for you ok any other people who haven't spoke yet who want to make a brief comment try to keep it to a minute or less yes sir hello as I mentioned already before I'm a former board senator I work on the earth side my impression here of this room is it reminds me of so-called echo chambers which we have heard recently a lot on the left as well on the right and it's an echo chamber where I see that the principle of chemical is basically an eviction especially a chemical which is synthetic versus a chemical which nature made maybe probably very few of you know that if you either tomato or apple or whatever organic or not if you take it to composition and look at the so-called secondary metabolites most of them have a safe issue data safe issue which is much worse than for example random so I see one of the slides I saw that there is triangle and those are the numbers of toxicity of different herbicides or pesticides and the organic there was one organic sky and round up cannot the same but sky is obviously no problem but round up is the problem so I would like you to remember it's all chemical manly or nature what counts is the actual science of the description of the respective chemicals and I would like to finish with Paracelsus which says everything is toxic and nothing is toxic so it's really a dose issue and I've seen a lot of these slides show data from papers which are completely fake data so it just fits so synthetic is bad naturally is good and everybody loves it but be aware there is exposure everywhere so we should trust Monsanto then well no the Monsanto actually round up has been studied by hundreds and hundreds of scientists and as a herbicide actually is probably the best thing to do that's a speak yet here we go I'm a retired academic science librarian I know the scientific literature not just fake news sites obviously round up and like to say it's been in my community for a couple of decades and this is giving the scientific community a chance to evaluate its effectiveness and as might be expected it took many of the most 10 years and generally for how saluted to this in their comments for plants and pests to adapt to the point that it was no longer effective requiring now the use of an additional pesticide or some sort of herbicide whatever to be added to the glyphosate and used in tandem and this new additional pesticide is very toxic so I am concerned about the fact that although we may look at decreasing levels of glyphosate in usage the end result will be required to add other toxic pesticides and to address this gentleman's comment about plants also having toxins yes they do however they are safe for us in our body it turns out as the key plants that have developed a resistance to certain insects and microbial pests they actually work in our own body to help us resist bad microbes so they are a culture great part of the question really we have been hearing a lot about application of parts but the data that we have shown says that the public works department is the one that is using the vast majority of the volume wise of these products so I think that how and why that is being used needs to be brought out this way okay last comment here I think it is very obvious I hope it is that the dose makes the poison and the whole point is so out of doesn't involve synergy that is old science 20 years 30 years ago okay the dose doesn't make the poison if that makes you happy but my point Mike what I am trying to say is what we are addressing is toxicity in our environment correct and I think it has been established maybe you disagree that granulated rubber as being applied in the playgrounds is toxic so I am wondering if this is relevant to what your project is we are going to have to talk to recreation and parts on that it is not perfect because we are not using that because at herbicide I think it is used more as a health and safety issue so when the kids fall on it they don't break bones but it is a valid concern that is associated with toxicity so I think with that we are going to have to call if folks are going to be hustled out of here thanks so much this is just the first step in the long ongoing process we will have more of these types of events in the future please come please share your concerns also please fill out we have survey forms in the back you can also fill them out online and thank you for your support thank you