Trial Opens Today For Clean-Air Activists Pair Could Face Jail If Convicted For Alleged Trespassing While Filming Field Burning

A Spokane veterinarian and the mother of an asthmatic daughter may be miscast as “Thelma and Louise,” but they go on trial today in Pasco.

Patricia Hoffman and Janet Tenold didn’t undertake an unlikely crime spree like the movie characters, but they did end up being charged with criminal trespass while documenting burning fields last summer in the Columbia Basin for the clean air group Save Our Summers.

The environmental activists could be fined up to $2,000 each and go to jail for up to 180 days.

The women were filming wheat stubble burning last Aug. 7 for an educational video. They say they were filming on an unposted road and later stumbled across what they thought was an illegally burned bluegrass field during their trip to the fields north of Pasco.

A group of Columbia Basin farmers confronted the women and chased them down a county road. The farmers have put heavy pressure on the local prosecutor to pursue the trespass charge, Franklin County sources say.

Tom Bailie, a Mesa farmer who was driving the women around that day after they asked him to point out the difference between wheat and bluegrass fields, is also charged with trespass and faces trial later this spring.

Spokane attorney Jim Sheehan, who represents Hoffman, said he’s surprised the case hasn’t been dropped.

“I’ve never seen or heard of a case like this going to trial in my 24 years as an attorney,” Sheehan said.

The case is going to a jury because attorneys for Hoffman and Tenold “don’t think they committed a crime,” said Franklin County Prosecutor Steve Lowe. He denied his office was pressured into the charges.

Three days after the confrontation with Hoffman and Tenold, some of the same farmers surrounded and detained two Washington Department of Ecology inspectors looking for evidence of illegal burning in fields near Basin City.

They locked the state inspectors behind a gate until a sheriff’s deputy arrived and ordered the farmers to let them go, according to notes of the incident in Ecology files.

The group included Kevin Heinen, currently under investigation by Ecology for illegal burning, and his brother Patrick, who was fined $30,000 by Ecology in 1997 for illegally burning 580 acres of bluegrass.

In an interview last year, Patrick Heinen said the farmers were upset with Ecology for “trying to take our livelihood from us” by outlawing field burning.

No charges were filed against the farmers for detaining the inspectors.

Meanwhile, Ecology continues to investigate allegations of illegal burning in the Basin last year and will issue fines to approximately one dozen growers within a month, said Grant Pfeifer, the agency’s top air quality official in Spokane’s Eastern regional office.

Ecology isn’t happy that Hoffman and Tenold were charged with trespass, Pfeifer said.

“It’s really unfortunate they are pursuing it this way. There are two property rights involved here whether someone is standing on your ground or polluting your air. Smoke pollution is also a property violation, and people some distance away are those who are affected,” Pfeifer said.

“I’m not aware of any criminal law that’s been violated by air pollution,” Lowe said. “I do, however, have a violation of a property right here.”

Clean-air activists in Spokane are also unhappy about the trial.

“I think it’s outrageous that you’d be arrested for taking pictures, especially in light of the fact that some of those pictures turned out to be an illegal burn. Who should be going to court here?” said Bonnie Mager of the Washington Environmental Council.