Steve Orr

@SOrr1

Nearly 2.3 million pounds of products containing pesticides were applied in Monroe County in 2010.

More pesticides were laid down in Webster, Pittsford and Perinton than almost anywhere else in NY.

Community activists remain convinced that pesticides pose a health threat.

For years, Monroe County was awash in pesticides and became a battleground over their use.

Activists went toe to toe with proponents in the gallery at the Monroe County Legislature, one side citing fears of health and environmental impacts and the other arguing pesticides are well-regulated and safe.

Over time, a series of new laws were enacted both locally and in Albany — including a controversial measure put in place 10 years ago that requires lawn-care companies to notify Monroe County residents before they spray neighboring properties with herbicides, insecticides or other pest-control agents.

That law was driven in part by advocates who raised persistent though unproven concerns that pesticides could be linked to breast cancer.

Today, the arguments have ended and the battleground emptied. And pesticide use doesn’t seem to have lessened at all.

Nearly 2.3 million pounds of granular products containing pesticides were applied in Monroe County in 2010, the most recent year for which data were available.

That figure placed Monroe second among New York’s 62 counties for solid pesticide use, trailing only Suffolk on Long Island. Our eastern suburbs were the hot spots: More granular weed- and bug-killers were laid down in Webster, Pittsford and Perinton in 2010 than almost anywhere else in New York.

Most of that material was applied to suburban residential lawns to kill crabgrass, dandelions, grubs or other pests, an examination of state data suggests.

“Rochester is definitely a more wealthy area where people hold a lot of pride in their properties and want them to look really good,” said Laurie Broccolo, owner of Broccolo Tree and Lawn, who says she’s often rebuffed when she tries to persuade customers to scale back the size of their greensward.

“There are some people that are really focused on that perfect lawn,” she said.

Local farms and orchards, too, soak up more than their share of pesticides. It turns out that Monroe and surrounding counties are state leaders in pesticides sold for use in agriculture.

Monroe County has maintained its place near the top of the state’s pesticide-use lists since they were first published in 1997. The troubled reporting program hasn’t released data for the years since 2010, but local lawn-care experts and others say they know of no downward trend in demand for herbicides, insecticides and other pest-control chemicals.

“On my own street, only four to five homes don’t use them. There’s about 50 homes total. All the others use herbicides,” said Judy Braiman, a prominent consumer and environmental activist who co-founded a group known as Rochesterians Against the Misuse of Pesticides.

“Any neighborhood that’s upscale, you rarely find where they don’t have those pesticide signs,” said Braiman, who lives in Pittsford.

Braiman, who has opposed rampant pesticide use for decades — she fondly remembers being roundly booed when she attended her first public meeting on neighbor notification in 1987 — remains convinced of their threat.

She has publicized pesticide use by local government agencies, hospitals, museums, retailers and even cemeteries, and helped lobby successfully for a 2010 state law that bars the use of pesticides on the grounds of schools and day-care centers. She has joined battle with state regulators over the use of pesticides by pet groomers.

How dangerous are all those pesticides?

Pesticide use on pets prompts DEC action

But Braiman acknowledges the fervor has died back, at least for the moment. Her group changed its name to Empire State Consumer Project several years ago, and has broadened its mission.



“It’s too bad, but it’s true,” Braiman said. “People are focusing on other things, and we have to move on, too. I don’t get that many calls about it anymore. I just don’t.”

Lawns and orchards

New York's pesticide-use reporting regimen is disjointed.

Private citizens, who can buy basic weed and insect killers at the garden store for use on their own lawns, are outside the reporting system. There is no record kept of what they use.

Farmers, many of whom hold private state applicators' licenses that allow them to use a wider array of pesticides on their own land, also do not report. But companies that sell pesticides to private applicators do have to report those sales to the state Department of Environmental Conservation.

Commercial applicators, a category that includes specialists who treat residential and institutional lawns and golf courses, also must keep careful records of their pesticide use and file reports with the DEC. But between seven and eight percent haven't been, undermining the value of records gathered by the DEC and kept by a database group at Cornell University.

The databases compiled from those reports, which distinguish between dry and liquid products, are out-of-date and fraught with problems attributed to 'gross errors that affected the data' for 2006-2010 according to the agency's website. More than 1,100 pesticide applicators failed to file legally required reports in 2010, and many more contain errors and omissions.

DEC and Cornell University say they are working through the backlog and expect to release another three years of data later this year. “The NYSDEC works with the pesticide businesses to fix as many of these errors as is feasible,” agency spokesman Kevin Frazier said.

Despite the gaps, the data still tells a story.

For starters, the 2.3 million pounds of dry or granular pesticide products applied in Monroe County consisted mostly of fertilizer to promote the growth of grass. The products contained a small amount of weedkiller, insecticide or fungicide — typically less than one percent by weight.

The data show the most common active ingredients in the products used here were prodiamine and dithiopyr, both herbicides and imidicloprid, an insecticide.

In Monroe County, about 44,000 gallons of liquid pesticide products, which tend to be more concentrated, were used in 2010. Monroe ranked 17th among New York counties in liquid pesticides. More than a third of the liquid products used here were herbicides, led by the well-known weedkiller 2,4-D.

Where commercial applicators apply those products is a subject of some debate. Golf courses often are heavy users of turf treatments, and they sometimes get the blame for a community like Monroe being near the top of the DEC list.

"One thing is we have more golf courses. We’re pretty well known for that," Braiman said. "I don’t know of any golf course in our area that doesn’t use pesticides."

But the DEC data, which break the numbers down to ZIP code level, point the finger elsewhere. Three of the Rochester-area ZIP codes with sky-high pesticide use — the ZIPs assigned to Webster and Perinton and to portions of Gates, Chili and Ogden — have only one golf course each.

For every acre of land in those towns devoted to recreational uses such as golf, there are 15 acres or more in residential use, according to 2014 land use data published by the Monroe County Department of Planning and Development.

Even in the Pittsford and Brighton ZIP codes, where there are five carefully groomed private golf clubs, residential acreage outnumbers recreational eight to one.

"My thought is that the acreage of golf courses is much less in the county versus farms, home lawns, and other turf areas, said Rick Holfoth, the golf course superintendent at Country Club of Rochester.

Monroe County is ninth among the counties in sales of liquid pesticides to farmers, and 17th in sale of dry pesticides.

Neighboring counties that are primarily agricultural are ranked high. Wayne was first statewide in solid sales and second in liquid. Orleans was third in solids and sixth in liquid. Ontario was sixth in solids and third in liquids.

Among the most common products sold in those counties were fungicides used on fruit trees, the database showed. Wayne, Orleans, Monroe and Ontario are sizable fruit-growing counties.

Overall, 36 percent of all liquid pesticides conveyed to farmers in New York state, and 37 percent of the dry pesticides, were sold in the six-county Rochester region.

Pesticide rules spring from cancer concern

In the early 1980s, residents of Long Island learned of an unusually high rate of breast cancer there. They began to cast about for an explanation, and some wondered if the heavy use of lawn-care chemicals in Suffolk and Nassau counties could be a factor. Concern spread to other parts of the state, including Monroe — one of the few counties in New York that had a breast-cancer rate even higher than Long Island's.

A bevy of studies eventually found no link between pesticides and breast cancer on Long Island, but the concern endured and triggered a statewide push for new regulation of the use of pesticides on residential lawns.

In the ensuing years, the state Legislature approved laws requiring that warning flags be posted on lawns treated with pesticides and mandating the preparation of detailed annual reports on pesticides sales and use.

In 1997, they began debating an expansion of the notification law that would require commercial applicators to give neighbors written notice of their plans to spray liquid pesticides, which are subject to drift onto neighboring properties. Three years later, state legislators approved the concept — but only in counties that opted in.

That moved the debate to places like Rochester, where arguments over the need for written notification raged for years.

"The lawn-care companies fought this legislation tooth and nail. It's a miracle that it passed," said Holly Anderson, executive director of the Breast Cancer Coalition of Rochester, which lobbied hard for neighbor notification.

As notification advocates argued then, the concern was that some pesticides may mimic the hormone estrogen in women's bodies, or stimulate the production of it — and most breast-cancer tumors are fueled by estrogen.

"We showed up at meetings, every single month, and spoke about the issue. It wasn’t breast cancer survivors beating their lop-sided chests saying 'This caused my cancer.' Nobody was insinuating that. We’re all about minimizing risk."

Lawn-care companies countered that no connection had ever been proven and that the law would drive up prices and force smaller companies out of business.

In 2005, County Executive Maggie Brooks announced support for the idea, and county legislators followed along. The law became effective here in 2006. It covers professional applications to residential and institutional lawns but specifically exempts agricultural settings, golf courses and lawns treated by the homeowner.

Ten years into notification

Ten years later, two lawn-care company operators say they've learned to live with the notification law. But that doesn't mean they like it.

"It is a problem. It forces us to be very inefficient when it comes to service delivery," said Greg Adams, president of One Step Tree and Lawn Care in Chili.

Applications are scheduled well in advance to allow time to mail notices to neighbors, he said. But if the schedule changes due to weather or other factors, another batch of notices has to be sent out, adding to the cost.

Broccolo said her company spent $30,000 to create a system of tracking and sending notifications, and spends about $1 on each postcard it sends to neighbors. "It was cumbersome to put it together. But we’ve gotten a good system. We just roll with it now," she said.

Smaller companies that couldn't afford the notifications did indeed drop out of the business, Broccolo said. Both she and Adams believe some companies may have avoided the notification requirement by switching to granular products, though they said they continue to use liquid pesticides, which they consider more effective.

Broccolo thinks the notifications provide little value. "Most of the neighbors who get them, they don’t care. They throw them away," Broccolo said. "If we have a neighbor who is especially concerned … we still pick up the phone and call them and have a conversation with them. That’s the only way that’s effective."

Braiman and Anderson question whether notifications are always done properly and question the degree of enforcement. They also said people may disregard notices because they don't understand the law.

Anderson said the county government does little to publicize it. "We have this law. We fought so hard to get it. It's disappointing that Monroe County doesn't do more (to promote it)," she said.

John Ricci, a spokesman for the county Department of Public Health, acknowledged it has been "some time" since the last promotional effort, though he said the notification postcards should make clear what the law is all about.

He also said the county actively enforces the statute and looks into every complaint it receives. At least five applicators have been fined for non-compliance, though none in the last several years.

Operator Greg Adams said he's approached county legislators about amending the law, but found no takers. "Some promises were made to some very vocal groups at the time, which is what led to that whole thing being passed," he said. "I don’t think anybody wants to go revisit that."

SORR@Gannett.com

Includes reporting by David Robinson, D.Robinson@lohud.com

For more on pesticides use in other parts of the state, visit this additional reporting at LoHud.com

Key findings

More granular turf pesticides are applied in Monroe County than almost anywhere else in New York state.

More agricultural pesticides are sold in the counties near Rochester than anywhere else in the state.

Pressure from activists led to new laws in New York, including on requiring notification of neighbors before spraying.

Locally, the notification receives little promotion by the health department and activism has slackened in recent years.

How pesticides are reported

Beginning in 1997, New York state law has required the reporting of pesticide sales and use to the state Department of Environmental Conservation. The law requires DEC to compile public reports of sales and use.

Individuals or companies that are certified as commercial applicators must report which pesticide products they used, and the address where they were applied.

Companies or individuals that sell pesticides for agricultural use must report the products sold and the address of their intended use.

DEC has been unable to issue annual reports in a timely fashion, with the most recent now available being for 2010.

The agency said it must contend with reports that contain errors and omissions. As well, about 7 percent of all commercial applicators and 8 percent of sellers failed to submit reports of pesticide use for 2010.

Want more maps on pesticide use?

1. Solid agricultural sale by county.

2. Liquid agricultural sale by county.

3. Solid use byzip code.

4. Solid use by county.