New Agriculture Safety Rules Pt 1
I’m Bob Larson. Tossing aside regulations issued in April by the Department of Labor and Industries, Governor Jay Inslee unveiled his own set of safety rules for agriculture last week.Washington Farm Bureau’s Bre Elsey says it was a little bit ‘out of the blue’ …
ELSEY … “The governor issued rules on workplace safety and transportation and, you probably already know that, a couple of weeks prior to that he had issued rules on housing. So, we were expecting these rules to come down, but the frustrating part was that it bypassed your traditional rule-making process.”
That rule-making process, Elsey says apparently didn’t apply here …
ELSEY … “So, he was able to call this an emergency rule and bypass public comment and bypass public notice. And, what was interesting is he did not do that for the housing rules. He actually allowed for public comment and they received over 500 comments on just the housing rules, mostly from growers.”
It would have been easy, Elsey says to get that kind of response for these other rules…
ELSEY … “And, it just leads me to suspect if there was a reason why he didn’t want a similar reaction to come for the workplace safety and the transportation rules.”
And, Elsey says these were just the initial frustrations with the governor’s move.
Tune in tomorrow for more on the new safety and transportation rules for Washington agriculture.