Ladera Ranch residents and public officials who gathered for an emotional community meeting this week sent a clear message: Regardless of whether pesticides are contributing to cancer cases in the area, they want the spraying to stop.
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More than 300 people attended the Tuesday meeting at Ladera Ranch Middle School to discuss the recent cases of rare Ewing sarcoma and other cancers that have emerged from the small Orange County community. Since 2007, as many as nine kids have been diagnosed with Ewing sarcoma, including 17-year-old Brody Matteson, who died in March.
Pesticide spraying has been temporarily paused in the affluent bedroom community, and many who spoke at the meeting requested environmental testing and called for the ban to be made permanent.
Though studies have linked childhood cancer to environmental contaminants, so far no definitive evidence connects these cases to pesticide use in Ladera Ranch. Nonetheless, residents and politicians alike who attended the Civic Council meeting demanded immediate action.
“Whether or not we discovered that the pesticides are specifically causing this, it’s irrelevant because it’s unhealthy to have this kind of pesticide use in our community,” said Orange County Supervisor Katrina Foley.
Foley’s comments were met with raucous applause. Others echoed Foley’s sentiment, including John Gresko, a Ladera Ranch civic councilmember who clarified he was speaking as a resident and father. “We don’t need to prove anything to change to a safer pesticide program,” he said.
“It’s not even a question,” agreed Christina Shea, a former Irvine mayor who spearheaded implementation of the city’s “organics first” policy that limited pesticide use in 2016. “You don’t have to wait to get studies back. … Pesticides are so dangerous to our animals, to our children.”
On Friday, after a Change.org petition calling for the suspension of pesticides garnered thousands of signatures, the Ladera Ranch Maintenance Corp., or LARMAC, said in a statement that its Board of Directors had instituted a 60-day pause on the routine use of “certain landscape maintenance products” targeting weeds and other plants.
The spraying of herbicides also has been paused across all of Orange County’s flood control channels since May, according to Alyssa Napuri, Foley’s deputy chief of staff.
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In its statement, LARMAC said its Board of Directors had established an ad hoc advisory committee that will review the current pest management program and develop recommendations.
The OC Health Care Agency confirmed last week that it had called for a review of the cancer data, and the California Cancer Registry, the UC Irvine cancer center and the Orange County Agricultural Commissioner’s Office are conducting an analysis. Findings are expected to be shared in upcoming weeks.
A decade of advocacy
A group of Ladera Ranch moms said they’ve been trying to get the community to reevaluate its pesticide use strategy for a decade, but, until now, their concerns have been ignored.
Kara Bell said she became involved in Ladera Ranch’s nontoxic movement in 2018 after she repeatedly saw workers spraying pesticides in her community while wearing PPE. “They have full hazmat suits sometimes,” she said.
She also began documenting cases of cancer in dogs — so far, she said she’s aware of 35 dogs that developed the disease in Ladera Ranch. Dogs are a good “boots on the ground” indicator because they’re “sniffing, eating, rolling in the grass,” she said.
But in 2019, when she asked relevant authorities for more details about what was being sprayed, she said their response was “hostile.” Eventually, she and her family decided to leave the area.
“I kind of saw the writing on the wall,” she said. “We moved out of the area because of the spraying.”
At the Tuesday meeting, advocate and mother Jackie French said she had submitted public records requests to find out how much pesticide was being sprayed, but hasn’t received a response. She called out LARMAC for its “lack of transparency.”
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LARMAC did not respond to a request for comment.