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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Grass Growers In Court To Block Burning Rules

Several Eastern Washington bluegrass growers go to court today to try to block a state edict cutting field burning 33 percent this year.

Their latest legal maneuver comes as grass-burning season is already under way.

Growers opened the burn season Aug. 1, but no Kentucky bluegrass fields have been burned so far in Spokane County or on the Rathdrum Prairie.

About 200 acres were burned last Thursday on the Coeur d’Alene Reservation, according to the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality.

A hearing on a temporary restraining order against the Washington state emergency rule is scheduled at 4 p.m. today in Whitman County Superior Court in Colfax.

Attorneys Ted Rasmussen of Tekoa and William Symmes Sr. of Spokane are representing the growers. They did not return telephone calls Wednesday.

Last month, Rasmussen called on farmers to fight the emergency rule.

“This is a 15-round fight,” Rasmussen told the Capital Press, a farm newspaper. “If we can land one punch, we can get this back to where it ought to be.”

Rasmussen is a grass grower and a member of the Intermountain Grass Growers Association board of directors.

“They are exercising every route possible” to challenge the new rules, said Grant Pfeifer, the state Department of Ecology’s top air quality official in Eastern Washington.

Growers challenging the rule include Stewart and Patricia Pfaff of Garfield, Whitman County farmers Brian and Connie Crow, and Paul and Mary Jane Dashiell of Fairfield.

Dashiell had permits to burn 1,123 acres of bluegrass in Spokane County last year and is also an officer of Seeds Inc. of Tekoa, a seed processing company, records show.

The move caught Spokane clean-air activists off-guard.

“We hadn’t known about this. I’m saddened, but not surprised,” said Patricia Hoffman of Save Our Summers.

“It’s one more indication that profits are more important than the health of their neighbors,” said Hoffman, a Spokane Valley veterinarian.

Last month, Pfaff appealed the emergency rule to a hearing board in Olympia. The Pollution Control Hearings Board upheld the rule, imposed in March by Ecology Director Mary Riveland.

Riveland used her authority to impose the temporary rule after receiving a petition from more than 300 Spokane doctors who said the annual field burning harms their patients.

It covers nearly 60,000 acres of bluegrass grown statewide, most of it in Eastern Washington.

Ecology will hold hearings next month to make the emergency rule permanent.

The new regulation would cut field burning another 33 percent next year and phase it out by 1998 if no-burn alternatives are commercially available to enough farmers.

, DataTimes