Grass Growers Won’t Get Quick Court Action
A judge in the heart of Kentucky bluegrass country has postponed a growers’ challenge to a state emergency rule cutting field burning 33 percent this year.
Whitman County Superior Court Judge Wallis Friel will hear arguments Aug. 27 on the growers’ request for a restraining order against the rule.
Friel first must decide whether the growers should have filed their challenge in Thurston County (Olympia) instead of Whitman County.
In a memorandum filed Wednesday, an attorney for three rural farm families said the state Department of Ecology acted arbitrarily when it adopted the emergency rule and has no good scientific evidence to back it up.
Attorney Ted Rasmussen of Tekoa, Wash., called Spokane doctors’ claims that thick clouds of smoke from field burning harm their patients “junk science.”
Ecology Director Mary Riveland based her March 1996 emergency edict on a petition from more than 300 Spokane doctors and on position papers from the Washington Thoracic Society, the Spokane County Medical Society and the American Lung Association.
Rasmussen also said the state’s no-burn rule will force growers to use mechanical dethatching equipment on steep slopes - exposing them to “extremely hazardous, potentially deadly, risks to their health and safety.”
Assistant Attorney General Mary Sue Wilson said she had less than 24 hours to review the growers’ 11th-hour effort to block the rule.
By telephone from Olympia, she told Friel the growers “created their own emergency” by waiting to file their motions more than four months after Riveland had announced the burning cutback and nearly two weeks after the start of this year’s field-burning season.
“Petitioners have no excuse for not presenting the issues of this rule challenge to the court earlier” and should not be granted a stay because of the public health risks, she said in her written response.
Three farm families asked for the emergency restraining order: Stewart and Patricia Pfaff of Garfield, Brian and Conny Crow of Whitman County and Paul and Mary Jane Dashiell of Fairfield.
, DataTimes