The owner of a Kamloops lawn-care company said a new ban on cosmetic pesticides ignores the wishes of the public in favour of “backroom politics.”
City council voted 5-4 on Tuesday to prohibit homeowners from using pesticides on lawns, flowers and ornamental trees and shrubs.
The ban doesn’t apply to vegetable gardens, fruit trees or commercial and city properties.
Jacquie Doherty, owner of Grassroots Choice Lawn Care, called the decision “very upsetting” and said she expects to lay off some of her six staff members either this year or when the ban goes into effect on Jan. 1, 2016.
Doherty said about 80 per cent of her clients are residential homeowners within Kamloops (her commercial clients, and those in Sun Rivers and Rivershore, won’t be impacted by the ban).
“I don’t know how our customers are going to handle it, if they’re going to cancel the service completely and do their own thing or if they’re still going to want us to fertilize. I can’t say,” she said.
Terry Omrod of Nutri-Lawn also expects to downsize one full-time and one part-time employee next year as a result of the ban.
“We certainly do other things — turf management as far as aeration and all those other things you might to do make your lawn healthier, but the weed-control portion, it will certainly have an effect on that and probably drop the business by 30, 40 per cent,” he said.
Omrod said there are other products he could look at using instead of herbicides, but many aren’t cleared for use in B.C. as pesticides.
Landowners with bug problems will be in a tougher spot.
“It’s one thing to say that you should be able to live with a little bit of clover or dandelion in your grass, and I can see that,” Omrod said.
“But, when you have grubs or pinch bug or something eating your lawn and decimating it, then that’s another concern and there really isn’t a lot of options.”
Doherty said she’s looked into using an iron-based alternative, but the advice she’s been given by others in the industry is to avoid it, due to its high cost and mediocre weed-killing results.
Since the pesticides her company uses are still going to be available for sale on city shelves, she thinks making the switch would be a “tough sell” to customers.
Both expect many of their clients will simply apply pesticides on their own, when no one else is looking.
Doherty had prominently campaigned against the ban, speaking at previous council meetings and setting up an online site that allowed hundreds of residents to send councillors email objecting to the new rules.
Speaking to KTW yesterday, Doherty said she now feels her time was wasted.
“This was backroom politics right from the start,” she said.
“They were going to push this through in a week.
“It came forward on, what, the 26th of May and it was going to be voted on the following week.
“They had every intention of pushing it through and they didn’t expect any backlash because it was going to happen so fast.”
Coun. Tina Lange first proposed the pesticide ban at the end of May through a notice of motion.
Rather than vote on the ban soon after, council ended up tabling the motion until this week to let the community weigh in — though Doherty doesn’t think those at city hall listened to what they were told.
“The decision was made long ago and they only wasted our time because they had no intention of changing their position,” she said.
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