Lawsuit To Stop Santa Cruz Checkmate Spraying in San Jose Court 10AM Nov 20

The federal judge dismissed the case in the San Jose Federal Court because of the 11th amendment, which has been interpreted by the Supreme Court to say that citizens may not sue their own state in Federal Court. The judge was very polite and it did not seem that he would dismiss the case until the last few moments.

People are still active in opposing the spraying. The govt is still busy minimizing the claims of health effects and otherwise squirming to get out of responsibilty. See the Saturday 12-8-07 Sentinel for the latest govt "conclusions" about health effects of the spray. They try to compare two different communities with different levels of outreach about the spraying and then they say that there are 40+ official reports of health problems due to the spray in Monterey and only 7 in Santa Cruz. There is still the fundamental problem of either proving there is a problem by showing immediate health consequences due to the spray, or trying to say there is no problem because the health effects are not immediately obvious.

What is an "obvious" or "immediate" phenomenon is about as debatable or variable as Bill Clinton's definition of sex. The state won't officially record a pesticide illness complaint unless a doctor fills out a form. Or is it unless the citizen provides their contact info when calling the comment line (see Sat Sentinel article simultaneously claiming 100+ anonymous health complaints on the CDFA comment line and saying that these could not be officially recorded only because the callers would not provide their contact info).

I have not personally seen 200 people in Santa Cruz who are complaining of health effects from the spray. I simply don't have time to find them all. However, in less than 10 hours of petition circulating and other outreach, I did find 40+ people who recorded specific symptoms on my petition and another 11 people who reported symptoms verbally before I had a petition. Because some of this information gathering was a close to random survey of the 3000 people walking by Bookshop Santa Cruz during the first sample of 11 people that I noticed (plus another 1500 people going by on the next weekend produced 4 people with "affected by checkmate" checked mild, medium or severe on my petition), I have concluded that a minimum of 350 people would have answered affirmatively that they were affected by Checkmate if I had randomly sampled all of Santa Cruz in this way.

In addition, at the San Jose Courthouse I only managed to reach about less than 25% of the people who attended. In this case, 21 out of 26 people who signed my petition checked "yes" or "maybe" affected by Checkmate on the petition and most of those listed specific symptoms. That means that probably 80 people or more were at the courthouse who had problems with the spray. All but one of the people who signed my petition were from the Santa Cruz area.

If you can add and multiply, that means that I was in the presence of 11+40+60=111 people, almost all from the Santa Cruz area, who would claim they were or might have been affected by the spray, in a span of 10 hours of work. All of these same people were the ones who called the CDFA comment line? Maybe and maybe not.

Of couse it is possible that my estimate of 350 people is a severe underestimate. Four of 23 people signing my "random" petition in front of BookShop Santa Cruz on Nov 18 said they might have been affected by the spray. Plus, lots of people walked by without seeing the table or were tourists from out of town. If that were true, it would make sense to do a telephone survey of people who live close to the edges of the spray zone to try to determine if the spray is really affecting them. A little ANOVA analysis of information about symptoms, peoples' knowledge of the spray operation, CDFA data of where the spray landed and residential address location taken from people who live both inside and outside the spray zone could yield uselful results.

The next action is a meeting to discuss the Checkmate spraying at the Santa Cruz City Council Chambers 809 Center St on Sunday, Dec 9 from 6-8PM. Aparently this is not an official meeting of any govt agency. It will be used to present panelists discussing the spraying activity and to continue to organize.

The government might say its for moth control, when in the reality its more likley something to make the people sick intentionally. Slowly. The pilots themselves don't know.