Pesticide Complaints

Every year the State Pesticide Division fields many questions, comments and complaints. Joel Kangiser, Policy Assistant with the Pesticide Management Division give us a rundown.

KANGISER: We do about 130 investigations per year and that's down over several years ago, we were probably doing close to 200 and we've really made efforts to kind of filter our complaints to make sure that they're within our role and jurisdiction and so we make good use of our resources. We also make a lot of efforts for education and technical assistance which also helps quite a bit.

He says they do about 200 routine inspections every year and this year they've done 123 investigations with half of those in agriculture.

KANGISER: Out of those 123 investigations, 54 of those cases were no action indicated so that would be something where we do not find evidence of a violation. So out of those 123 we wrote 41 notices of correction. Those would be like warning letters, 6 advisory letters and 2 verbal warnings. And then we issued 7 notices of intent, so those would be where we're going to fine or suspend a license.

He says there are currently 15 cases that are open and under review. The message here being that if you have questions about the application of pesticides a phone call may save you from some headaches.

And that's Washington Ag Today. I'm Greg Martin, thanks for listening on the Ag Information Network of the West.