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Arizona Department of Agriculture - Pesticide Compliance and Worker Safety Program

Report

This report addresses the Department’s efforts to ensure compliance with the State’s agricultural pesticide laws. The State’s system for enforcing pesticide laws is greatly limited in its ability to assess adequate civil penalties against violators. Although state law gives the Department authority to issue fines of up to $10,000 for serious violations, the Department’s rules define serious too narrowly, resulting in virtually all violations being categorized as nonserious, with a maximum civil penalty of only $500. In fact, under the system the Department uses to determine the exact amount of fines, most fines are less than $150. The report recommends that the Legislature consider increasing the maximum civil penalty for nonserious violations from $500 to $1,000, and the Department should revise its rules to provide it with the ability to impose fines that better reflect the violations committed.

In addition, the report found that the Department monitors few pesticide applications, even though doing so could help it enforce pesticide law compliance efforts.  During fiscal year 1999, the Department monitored only 77 of the more than 26,800 applications performed by the custom applicators on record. These applications did not include the many more thousands of applications performed by private applicators who are not required to report on their application activities. Factors such as other inspection responsibilities, the timing of applications, and the lack of sufficient information on when and where applications will take place limit the Department’s ability to monitor more applications. Therefore, because it can  monitor only a small percentage of the thousands of applications taking place each year, the Department should focus its efforts on pesticide law violators by requiring them to prenotify the Department when making an application.

Follow-Up Report