Lawmakers may give cities throughout Minnesota the authority to ban some widely used pesticides as native bumblebee and pollinator populations continue to collapse.
A measure introduced last week by state Rep. Jean Wagenius, DFL-Minneapolis, would essentially give cities their first chance in more than 30 years to have some form of local control over what pesticides can be used within their boundaries. It would grant each city the choice to issue a blanket ban on a group of pesticides that the Minnesota Department of Agriculture has labeled as lethal to pollinators. That list includes neonicotinoids, which are among the most prevalent insecticides used on Minnesota farms and have proved to be particularly harmful to pollinators.
"Minnesotans should be able to protect pollinators if they want to," Wagenius said. "We value local control in this state, and we always have."
A similar proposal that would have given the state's four largest cities broader authority to regulate pesticides failed last year. Concerns were raised at the time that each of the four cities would write their own rules, creating a patchwork of regulations that would make it difficult for homeowners and businesses such as landscapers, nurseries and pest control experts to know what products were legal from one city to the next.
This proposal, however, would grant cities a much narrower exception, Wagenius said. They would pretty much be making a single choice — whether or not to ban a list of "pollinator lethal" insecticides kept by the state.
"This is designed to keep everything consistent," she said.
But the ban would still be enacted from city to city and create the same hard-to-navigate patchwork of rules, said Scott Frampton, past president of the Minnesota Nursery and Landscape Association.
"Local governments lack the expertise and resources needed to assess and restrict these products," Frampton said.
