Washington's "Ag Gag" Bill Gets a Hearing Next Tuesday

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Under Washington's proposed ag gag law, this photo could get you arrested.

Earlier this week, I mentioned House Bill 1104, an "ag-gag" law that would criminalize whistleblowing and filming on a farm, ranch, dairy, mine, without the landowner's "expressed written consent."

Which, one commenter on a Capital Press story noted, would basically turn eastern Washington into a "no-photography zone due to it being either wheat fields or orchards." Sound far-fetched? Under Utah's ag gag law, people have been arrested and charged for taking pictures of farms from public roads.

The bill is scheduled for a hearing on Tuesday morning before the House Committee on Public Safety. It has been sponsored by three Republicans and one naïve-seeming Democrat, Rep. June Robinson of Everett. We'll get to her in a minute.

Conservative lawmakers with ties to ALEC—the Koch-funded American Legislative Exchange Council—have been pushing similar legislation around the country. Rep. Joe Schmick (R-Colfax), who introduced the Washington bill "as a way to protect the farmer," has been listed as a member of ALEC and its national "energy, environment, and agricultural task force."

"Reputable businesses don't need this law," said Dan Paul of the Humane Society. "They don't need laws to silence whistleblowers. And unscrupulous businesses don't deserve the protection to violate rights."

Besides animal cruelty, Paul said, these laws also threaten worker rights and food safety. In 2008, the kind of undercover video that ag gag laws criminalize led to the largest recall of beef in American history, some of which was being sold off for school lunch programs. The USDA said it had been monitoring that slaughterhouse, the Westland/Hallmark Meat Packing Company, "continuously." But it took undercover video to trigger any action. And Indira Trejo of United Farm Workers said their work would be made exponentially more difficult if it becomes illegal for people to document their own working conditions.

The agricultural industry is pushing for ag gag laws at a moment when the USDA admits it's suffering serious inspector shortages. According to an internal audit from 2012: "Historically, FSIS [Food Safety and Inspection Service] has had difficulty maintaining sufficient inspection staff to accomplish its mission."

It's not just activists who oppose ag gag laws—industry insiders are also concerned. From the trade magazine Dairy Herd Management:

It’s easy to cheer on these ag gag laws, but the reality is that they need to be carefully written and even more judiciously enforced. For one thing, they represent a perceived affront to the public’s notion that if producers have nothing to hide, why would they oppose such laws? More importantly, there are issues of freedom of speech involved, not to mention the unintended problems such laws can create.

According to Dairy Herd Management, Rep. Schmick's bill is even tougher than the Utah's.

Currently, HB 1104 is being sponsored by three Republicans (Schmick, Larry Haler of Richland, and Vincent Buys of Lynden) and one Democrat: Rep. June Robinson.

Rep. Robinson said she signed onto the bill because she grew up on a family farm in Pennsylvania. "I have watched farmers and ranchers be vilified over the years," she said. "I just don’t think it’s right that people can go on their property, take photos, attach whatever story they want to those photos, and vilify them in ways that I think are very unfair."

When asked about the food-safety crunch—the USDA staff shortages combined with this crackdown on whistleblowing—she said, "well, then let's work with the FDA on that. I personally don't want vigilantes inspecting my food supply."

She said she was not aware of any environmentalist-vigilante unfairness in Washington State at the moment and has never known anyone personally—here or in Pennsylvania—who's suffered from it. Robinson was also unaware of any relationship between Rep. Schmick's bill and model legislation from ALEC. "I only learned that was the case after I signed onto it," she said. "I signed on innocently, I guess. You could say I should've done my research."

The bill is currently scheduled for a hearing on Tuesday morning before the House Committee on Public Safety. Rep. Roger Goodman, chair of that committee, says he's never seen an ag gag bill during his nine years in Olympia. "I'm concerned about the bill," he said, "but I want to have a public hearing... I want to put it on the record, in legislative history, what our concerns are on all sides—to air it out rather than making some executive decision." That is, killing the bill by refusing to give it a hearing.

If you have thoughts about the ag gag bill, consider contacting your representative.