Transcript portion from League of Women Voters' VCR Tape on their Symposium:
"Groundwater & Golf Courses"
Tape # 1
February 1997
LOFARO: [gives introduction] Our panelist is Dr. Michael Surgan the chief scientist of the New York State Attorney General Environmental Protection Bureau.
"In the last ten years Dr. Surgan has been the lead scientist under the Attorney General's Pesticide Litigation Initiative including New York's false advertising cases against lawn care companies and pesticide manufacturers.
Having served under three attorney generals, he has dealt with, over the years: toxic air pollutants, toxic and hazardous wastes, and groundwater contamination. "
MODERATOR: … According to a study by the Attorney General's office golf courses on Long Island use seven pounds of pesticides per acre annually. This compares nationally with 1 ˝ pounds in agricultural applications…Is this a threat to our groundwater? Can pesticide use be eliminated?
DR. SURGAN: We made that comparison report in 1991. The purpose of that comparison was to illustrate what was being used essentially for recreational and esthetic purposes on golf courses as opposed to what's being used in agriculture. It was not to set agriculture, for instance, as a standard which is an acceptable impact on groundwater.
As we know, across the country and in Suffolk County there are problems with groundwater contamination that arise from agricultural use of pesticides. The critical thing that we all have to remember, is that we can't set an absolute amount. The potential pesticide impact on groundwater is determined by a number of factors including the soils, the properties of the pesticides, um, the breakdown products of pesticides and their properties. For instance, in this particular part of Suffolk County, right here, on this site, we're underlain by Plymouth Carver soils which are among the most susceptable soils to the migration of pesticides on Long Island. Um, when we think that what we know about pesticides, we have to remember that pesticides break down in the environment and present a whole new sweep of chemicals. And again, right here on Long Island, based on past agricultural and turf use of the pesticide Dachtal we now have groundwater contamination problems.
Not with Dachtal, but with a breakdown product-a degradent called: TCPA. Dachtal-it does not migrate through the ground, and it breaks down rather quickly. Unfortunately, it breaks down into TCPA which persists for long periods of time and migrates freely to groundwater.
And we now have in parts of Suffolk County groundwater contamination problems resulting in the past use of pesticide, which judged on its own merits at the time, seemed to be appropriate for use here. Um, we have every time when we think of pesticide use here, not only to think about what we know, but what we don't know about pesticides.
I know you've heard the phrase 'Look before you leap.' In fact, that comes from Charlotte Bronte who approximately 140 years ago said 'Look twice before you leap.' And I think we lost one of them. We have to look at not at what we know about the situation-but we have to take a long, hard look at what we don't know about the situation. And with pesticides, we may measure the leaching potential and the persistence of active ingredients, um, but often we don't consider the breakdown products of both the actives and inert ingredients. So, there's a lot we don't know.
Given what we don't know about pesticides, many people believe that the-the best choice is to minimize their use, um, and therefore minimize the potential threats you're gonna have to deal with. As far as-'Can they be eliminated?'-Of course they can. And, at the Sag Harbor Golf Course when we did our report in 1991, they reported not using any pesticides. Sag Harbor is not alone in this country, there are other golf courses across the country that use no pesticides, or very little pesticides. So, setting 'an absolute use level," may not be appropriate. The idea is to take a good hard look at what we know, and what we don't know and what we can do to minimize those risks, and again, the risks that we know about and the risks that we can appreciate and the risks we are going to discover.
…[Panel Discussion]…
DR. SURGAN: 'MECAPROP' is used on turf and on a variety of non-agricultural applications.
Because MECAPROP has no agricultural uses the EPA did not, and still does not, require any chronic toxicity tests. EPA in its procedures deems that that chronic toxicity tests are only necessary for pesticides that only have food uses. So MECAPROP is only one example of a pesticide used on golf courses for which there has been no government mandated toxicity testing. There has been no chronic toxic testing done.
Again, to frame the question of 'What we don't know'-In 1993 the national Academy of Sciences issued a report on the effects of pesticides to infants and children. An perhaps their most fundamental and important conclusions was that the current testing regime used by the EPA and relied upon by the chemical companies was that it relies on [the?] its toxic testing potentials on adult animals. And, this panel of experts drawn from industry and public health concluded that the current testing regime does not adequately measure the potential for toxic effects in infants and children, that we know very little about that.
There are current concerns about endocrine disruption by pesticides. We have reason to be concerned about that but know very little about which pesticides may be causing those effects. We know very little about the cumulative effects of exposures to different pesticides which have the same mode of action; the interactions of pesticides and drugs. And, in fact, in 1996 the Congress passed a new law the 'Food Quality Protection Act' which mandated that the EPA should come up with new tests to evaluate the toxicity of pesticides to infants and children. It will take the EPA years to do that, and years more, for those tests to come into common use.
Similarly, the EPA was directed to come up with tests that would monitor the endocrine disrupting potential of pesticides. And again, they have years to come up with those protocols and years more after that before they are implemented into a regulatory process. So, there's a tremendous amount that we do know about pesticides and what their toxic effects are, but there's a lot that we don't know and this is well-documented and recognized in current legislation…
 South Fork Groundwater Task Force
PO BOX 2360 Sag Harbor, NY 11963
Phone/Fax: 631 - 725 - 6200
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