Gavin Newsom Will Decide Fate Of Strong Anti-Poison Bill
Written by 991KBU on September 2, 2020
We are getting more information from Sacramento this morning … details on the anticoagulant pesticide ban that made it thru the California Legislature at the very last possible moment.
Assembly Bill 1788 would pretty much ban “second generation anticoagulant rodenticides” in California … until state pesticide regulators develop plans to ensure they’re not harmful to wildlife.
Assemblyman Richard Bloom and Senator Ben Allen … both of the Malibu area … carried the bills.
Poison Free Malibu was a major backer of the bill as well.
They argued the toxins are being found in often lethal levels in birds of prey and predatory mammals, especially bobcats and mountain lions.
Pest control companies, the California Chamber of Commerce, apartment management associations and other business groups opposed the bill. They say the poisons are critical to controlling a rat and mouse population that has exploded in some California major cities, often in low-income areas and around homeless camps that have poor sanitation and piles of trash.
Downtown Los Angeles has seen skyrocketing cases of a rodent-borne disease called typhus.
The legislature’s vote Monday comes just a few days after the National Park Service announced that biologists in the Santa Monica Mountains had found a dead mountain lion and a dead bobcat that had been killed by the poisons.
The cougar was the sixth mountain lion wearing a GPS-tracking collar to die from the poisons in a years-long study in the region.
The bill provides some exceptions for the continued use of the poisons on farms, food storage and processing facilities, medical centers.
A public health official also can order the poison set out to prevent or address a public health crisis.
The fate of the bill is up to California Governor Gavin Newsom.
He has been an ardent supporter of the state’s big cat population over the years.
And his father, Judge William Newsom, was a founding board member of the Mountain Lion Foundation.
This story is baed on reporting by the Sacramento Bee newspaper.
Read more here: https://www.sacbee.com/news/local/environment/article245421910.html#storylink=cpy
