Health panel OKs field burning ban.

Byline: Diane Dietz The Register-Guard

Field burning does hurt the health of Willamette Valley residents, or so said the House Health Care Committee as it advanced a bill Friday to abolish the practice in Oregon.

With sponsor Rep. Paul Holvey, D-Eugene, looking on, the committee OK'd House Bill 3000 with a "do-pass" recommendation on a 5-3 party-line vote.

The promising news for supporters is that Portland Democrats, whose urban constituents generally don't breathe the agricultural smoke, still concluded that the health effects were serious enough to advance the proposed ban.

The promising news for opponents is that the bill now moves to the House Agriculture and Natural Resources Committee - where grass seed farmers figure they've got a better chance to kill the ban.

The bill may never reach the House or Senate floors for a vote by the assembly.

About 150 Willamette Valley farmers burn about 50,000 acres of straw from spent grass seed fields each summer - sending columns of smoke high into the air and spurring hundreds of complaints from residents.

Portland-area Democrats Mitch Greenlick, Suzanne Bonamici, Ben Cannon and Tina Kotek said they were convinced by the doctors, nurses and research that supporters presented last week that field smoke is damaging to breathe.

"I was skeptical about the health issue - to be very honest," Kotek said before the vote on Friday. "I went through all the information, and I've really had an about-face on this."

The Oregon Medical Association, the Lane County Medical Society, the American Lung Association of Oregon, the Lane Regional Air Protection Agency and Lane County-based medical group Oregon Lung Specialists all support the bill to ban field burning. The Eugene City Council and the Lane County Board of Commissioners also favor the bill.

Rep. Sara Gelser, D-Corvallis, voted yes despite being lobbied by the Oregon State University College of Agricultural Sciences on behalf of the farmers.

She said a grower last summer blanketed residential areas of Corvallis with smoke, sending people to the emergency room.

"(Field burning) has been a high-volume issue for me in my office from people who have firsthand experience with the poor health effects of this," she said.

Republican Reps. Linda Flores, R-Clackamas, Ron Maurer, R-Grants Pass, and Scott Bruun, R-West Linn, voted against advancing the bill - saying they weren't convinced that breathing the smoke was that bad when weighed against the potential harm to farmers.

"It's difficult to make a causal relationship between field burning and long-term health effects. It's clear you can have some short-term consequences," Maurer said. "If the small-particulate matter is an issue, field burning is the least of our concerns. We have auto emissions and we have tons of other things that are more significant long-term issues."

Flores said she respected the arguments that Holvey brought forth, but she pointed to health trends advanced by the grass seed industry: Field burning contributes a small slice of the total pollutants, and asthma hospitalizations are lower in the summercompared with the winter when viruses trigger respiratory distress.

"I will be a no (vote) looking at a lot of information as well," she said.

The Oregon Grass Seed Council and the Oregon Farm Bureau oppose the bill.

Coos Bay Rep. Arnie Roblan, who chairs the Agriculture and Natural Resources Committee, now holds the fate of the bill in his hands. The deadline to pass it out of committee is the end of April.