A bill allowing local governments to regulate pesticides is headed for the House floor amid concerns from the agricultural community that it will affect the ability of farmers, ranchers and others to reduce pests that destroy crops.

House Bill 1178 is the culmination of several years of efforts by urban Democrats to give local governments the authority to regulate pests – which don’t respect city or county boundaries – and which they claim have hurt pollinators and damaged waterways.

Debate over the proposed legislation is expected to resume on the House floor Tuesday.

Currently, pesticides are regulated by the state through the Colorado Department of Agriculture, which oversees pesticide applicators.

Last year, two state senators tried to sneak an amendment onto a bill on appliances that would put pesticides under local control. The Senate committee hearing on HB 23-1161 happened to be taking place at the same time as a pesticide applicators’ renewal bill was in the House Agriculture, Water, and Natural Resources Committee, where those representing the agriculture and pesticide applicators industry were intently watching.

The sleight-of-hand amendment by Democratic Sens. Lisa Cutter of Littleton and Faith Winter of Westminster generated such outrage among ag interests that the lawmakers pulled the amendment from the bill when it was reviewed by the Senate Appropriations Committee.

Cutter is among the sponsors of this year’s HB 1178, which won approval from the House Appropriations Committee last week, a month after a contentious hearing on the measure in the House Energy & Environment Committee.

In the past, pesticide issues have been tackled by the House Agriculture, Water and Natural Resources Committee, but the bill would have faced inevitable defeat had it been assigned there.

The bill’s House sponsor, Rep. Cathy Kipp, D-Fort Collins, chairs the energy committee.

While sponsors claimed the bill would exempt agriculture, farmers and agricultural organizations lined up to testify against it, believing the measure would hurt agriculture, especially farms that cross county boundaries.

Witnesses pointed out that the Department of Agriculture, which backs the measure, can regulate pesticides and that local governments do not have that same level of expertise.

Kipp told the committee that local control is a “charged term” and that “everybody is local control when it supports their issues.” Statewide control of pesticides is “heavy-handed,” she added.

HB 1178 would provide a “limited and narrow ability to craft and adopt more specific ordinances around pesticides that fit community’s needs,” Kipp claimed.

With claims that chemicals have damaged Gore Creek, the Town of Vail wants more ability to limit pesticides. The watershed health specialist with Vail told the committee the council supports HB 1178 because the town wants to be better stewards of Gore Creek, the town’s main waterway.

According to Pete Wadden, Gore Creek is an impaired waterway due to low aquatic insect life. He said that bug numbers began to decline when people applied pesticides to their trees to contain the mountain pine beetle infestation.

But that’s disputed by the Colorado Department of Public Health & Environment, which, in a Feb. 1 email, said Gore Creek’s problem was arsenic, not pesticides, a determination made by the state’s Water Quality Control Commission.

“The commission determined that Gore Creek did not meet the standards for arsenic in 2022,” said Tayler Ward, a legislative liaison from the state health department. “Looking further back, in 2012 the commission determined that the creek did not meet the macroinvertebrate (a.k.a. aquatic insect) standards and reconfirmed that determination in 2016 and 2020.”

The commission could not determine the source of the arsenic, Ward said.

To that claim, Wadden replied that they had preliminary data from a Department of Agriculture study that detected four landscaping chemicals in “admittedly trace amounts in Gore Creek in 2001.”

Despite its responsibility for pesticide applicators, the Department of Agriculture supports the bill. A department representative said the agency believes allowing limited local regulation is appropriate and that local governments should be involved in deciding how pesticides are applied, along with buffer zones around “sensitive” environmental areas and notification requirements.

The department added: “Local governments are well suited to determine the needs of their communities and assess local environmental conditions.”

Those in the lawncare and crop-growing business dispute that.

Erik Frank of the Colorado Sugar Beet Growers told the committee he wouldn’t trust local governments, which, he said, lack experience, training, and knowledge of pesticides to decide what should be used. Local government employees are not qualified to say what’s safe and what isn’t, he said.

“I would rather rely on the state experts who have college degrees and doctorates and that have a lot of resources to support them,” Frank said.

Former Boulder County Commissioner Cindy Domenico told the committee the state’s current standards are science-based best practices.

“If this bill were to move forward, local governments across the state would find themselves under immense pressure from activists to enact anti-science policies in their cities and counties,” she said.

She knows that situation firsthand. In 2016, in Boulder County, activist groups pressured the commission to enact pesticide regulations that discounted EPA recommendations and input from scientists and farmers, Domenico said.

“I’ve witnessed firsthand how impactful a few loud voices can be in a relatively small arena of local government and how destructive the results can be to the citizens who are impacted by those decisions in our case, especially our ag community,” Domenico said.

Paul Schlegel, a farmer in Boulder County, recounted what happened next. The county spent five years and $1 million in consulting fees and staff time implementing a pesticide ban and trying to prove it was workable for farmers. However, the county was unable to show that the ban would allow farmers to grow food sustainably, and in 2021, a new board of commissioners reversed the decision.

Other farmers pointed out they would have to use more pesticides or mechanical tillage to control weeds if local communities-imposed bans.

That would release carbon into the environment and burn more fossil fuels, Frank said, adding, “That would be a huge step backward from the sustainable ways that we currently raise crops.”

Rep. Gabe Evans, R-Fort Lupton, noted that Japanese beetles have recently threatened the Palisade peach crop. He suggested Grand Junction could pass an ordinance proposed by the bill that would ban certain pesticides used to combat the beetles, and as a result, those pests could wind up in Palisade and threaten the crop again.

Kipp scoffed at the idea, stating Grand Junction would likely never pass such an ordinance.