Pest Control Operator Is Concerned About EPA Policies

March 26, 2002

The owner of a Toledo, OH, area pest control company appeared Monday before a congressional panel in Bowling Green, KY, to voice concern over practices used by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to enforce a 1996 pesticide law.

Bob Marquette, testifying as the President of the Ohio Pest Control Association and a member of the National Pest Management Association, claimed that hasty decisions made in the past by the EPA have cost pest control professionals numerous valuable pest control tools. He said he wanted to be sure that future decisions by the EPA were based on sound science, not rhetoric or politics.

"Despite not having reliable data upon which to base decisions about the future availability of valuable pest control products that my company and many others use to safeguard the health and property of Northern Ohioans, the EPA previously rushed to judgment anyway," Marquette told the committee. "Now the pest management industry and - more importantly - its customers may be more vulnerable to dangerous and destructive pest infestations."

Infestations of many pests are proven health hazards. For example, children's asthma has been linked to cockroach allergens; ticks carry Lyme disease; mosquitoes carry West Nile Virus, and; rodents are hosts for hantavirus.

Many products have been lost to the pest control industry over the past few years -- tools upon which the industry previously relied to control cockroaches, termites, stinging insects and numerous other harmful pests.

The panel, the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on the Environment and Hazardous Materials, heard testimony from Marquette, the EPA and U.S. Department of Agriculture officials, farmers and others at Wood County Courthouse in Bowling Green to evaluate the EPA's implementation of the Food Quality Protection Act of 1996. U.S. Representative Paul Gillmor (R-Old Fort) chairs the subcommittee.