SOME SUBURBANITES regard lush green yards as their birthright; little wonder that local legislation in Montgomery County to ban the use of certain lawn-care chemicals has them up in arms. Far better if their arguments turned not on the luxuriance of their lawns but on the legal, medical and scientific rationale for the proposal. By those measures, the case for prohibiting the chemicals is shaky.
correction
An earlier version of this editorial incorrectly stated that Montgomery County-owned property would be exempt from a proposed ban on certain lawn-care chemicals. The bill would exempt only certain portions of county-owned property. This version has been corrected.
The issue has triggered an impassioned debate, pitting environmentalists and parents concerned that cosmetic lawn treatments may cause cancer and other terrible health effects against homeowners, soccer leagues, lawn maintenance firms and chemical companies that make widely used pest- and weed-killing products such as Roundup and Miracle-Gro.
Sponsored by County Council President George Leventhal (D), the bill to ban the use of such products is largely symbolic; that alone makes it unconvincing. It would exempt farmland, some county-owned property and, possibly, other tracts, meaning much of Montgomery's acreage would get a pass. Moreover, there'd be little real enforcement beyond neighbors tattling on each other. Sale of the products would still be allowed; no county inspectors would fan out to survey tens of thousands of yards; and fines would top out at $75. Not exactly a muscular deterrence regime.
The main reason to look askance at Mr. Leventhal’s bill is its weak legal and scientific basis. A letter from Maryland’s Attorney General’s office warns that state courts would likely toss the ban if it became law on grounds that it encroached on Annapolis’s regulatory role and its goal of applying consistent rules statewide.
Then there’s the science. While some studies have suggested that select lawn-care chemicals pose a health risk under some conditions, nothing approaching a broad scientific consensus exists.
As an example of a product whose use he'd ban — the list would actually be drawn up by a consultant based on necessarily fuzzy criteria — Mr. Leventhal singles out the herbicide Roundup, made by Monsanto, whose active ingredient, the chemical glyphosate, is widely used by U.S. farmers. But the scientific jury on glyphosate is out. Studies on its supposedly carcinogenic effects are contradicted by other studies, and it's been approved (and reviewed) for a quarter century by the Environmental Protection Agency. Moreover, a number of top public-health officials, including at the National Cancer Institute, say the evidence is patchy that such lawn chemicals pose a serious risk to humans.
On the County Council, four of the five members backing the bill, including Mr. Leventhal, are from Takoma Park, a liberal bastion that, along with a tiny hamlet in Maine, is the only locality in the United States to have already banned cosmetic lawn chemicals. Applying Takoma Park’s leftist politics to a sprawling jurisdiction like Montgomery, population 1 million, is poor judgment.
As an alternative, council member Roger Berliner (D) has proposed a bill that drops the ban on using cosmetic lawn-care products (except on county-owned tracts) while requiring homeowners associations, condo owners and other residents to consent to their use before they can be applied by lawn-care companies. The goal would be to reduce use of the products over the next five years — a sensible compromise that would raise public awareness without imposing a ban whose justification remains dubious.
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