Friday, August 15, 2008

New Leadership at BUCRA

Butte County Rice Growers Association has appointed Randy Meeker as the cooperative’s new President and CEO. Randy replaces Carl Hoff who held the position for the past ten years. Prior to taking over the helm at BUCRA, he was Assistant Superintendent overseeing operations, facilities, construction, technology and financial services of several Northern California School Districts. Randy comes from a family background in cattle and hay production and currently has family in the rice industry.

Central Valley Salt Degradation

On Monday Mona Shulman of Pacific Coast Producers and Rob Neenan of the California League of Food Processors joined me for a meeting with:

• Tam Doduc, chair of the State Water Resources Control Board (SWRCB)
• Karl Longley, chair of the Central Valley Regional Board (CVRB)
• Pamela Creedon, Executive Officer for the CVRB
• Charlie Hoppin, SWRCB member

Our purpose was to discuss ideas for implementing a long-term strategy to control and reduce salt loadings and concentrations in surface and ground waters throughout the Central Valley. From our industry perspective, farmers and food processors obviously have a major stake in the issue, but we don’t want to be stuck with the regulatory and cost burden for solving the problem. Since the issue of salt degradation will take years of analysis and huge amounts of capital investment to solve, we decided to explore the possibility of forming a public/private partnership or consortium that could attract state, federal and private grant funds. After discussing this with UC administrators, we hope to have a proposal for consideration by the SWRCB in the fall.

Legislative Update

Pesticide Regulation - AB 977 (Ma)
Repeals existing state law that pre-empts local government from regulating in any matter relating to the registration, sale, transportation, or use of pesticides. Fortunately, it looks as if the bill has been stopped in the Senate Committee on Environmental Quality, which means it’s essentially dead for this year. If the bill was enacted more than 500 local jurisdictions would have the authority to adopt separate pesticide related regulations. The resulting patchwork of local regulations would have created chaos for production agriculture.

Toxin Free Food Containers - SB 1713 (Migden)
When last reported the bill prohibited the manufacture, sale, or distribution in commerce of any liquid, food, or beverage in a can, jar, or other container containing bisphenol A, at a level above 0.1 ppb. The prohibition applied to any liquid, food, or beverage that was designed or intended primarily for consumption by infants and children 3 years of age or younger. But, because of the way it was written, the prohibition would have covered just about any canned fruit and vegetable product. After a lot of effort by our industry coalition, the bill was amended to increase the prohibition level to anything above 0.5 ppb. More importantly we got clarifying language inserted to specifically say that the prohibitions in the do not apply to food and beverage containers designed or intended primarily to contain liquid, food, or beverages for consumption by the general population. We’ll still oppose because these public health decisions should be determined through a science-based, administrative process. But, if it’s signed into law, we’ve got our bases covered.

Farm Labor Elections - AB 2386 (Nunez)
Adds a mediated election process to the Agricultural Labor Relations Act that will provide an additional and alternative means for the selection by agricultural employees of a representative for collective bargaining purposes. The mediated election is a new, completely unsupervised process that allows union agents to:

• Give employees ballots
• Tell employees to mark their ballots
• Tell employees to put their marked ballots in envelopes and sign those envelopes
• Collect and deliver the envelopes to the Agricultural Labor Relations Board

AB 2386 is essentially a different form of the “Card Check” legislation that was vetoed by Governor Schwarzenegger last year. The bill will undoubtedly land on the Governor’s desk and agricultural groups are now organizing another major campaign to seek a veto AB 2386.

Red Flag For Co-ops

I received the following email “heads-up” from a colleague at the Nebraska Cooperative Council…

I recently learned from our attorneys about a new Federal provision referred to as the “Red Flags Rule.” Per the Federal Trade Commission, this became effective Jan 1, 2008. The intent of the new Rule is to address identity theft and address discrepancies under the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act. The Rule requires “creditors” to establish an identity theft prevention program. Our legal counsel advises that it is their opinion that the statute includes cooperatives that extend credit to their patrons as a creditor as defined in the act.

In a nutshell the program is designed to, and I quote, (to) “detect, prevent and mitigate” identity theft. October 1, 2008, is the mandatory compliance date. This is a brief outline of the Rule but suffice it to say, it creates another compliance factor upon businesses. As I understand, if a cooperative in doing a credit check should detect “something,” it is the responsibility of the cooperative to notify the customer of same. Failure to do so, could expose the cooperative to liability in a customer were to suffer from identity theft in the future. The act will require “training” of staff, along with having a policy in place for same. The new law may be form over substance, but in any event, cooperatives and all other covered entities will need to meet this deadline.

This is the first time I’ve heard about this “Red Flag Rule” so any cooperative that extends credit to its members may want to check with legal counsel regarding compliance.