I just returned from Washington DC, where as a member of National Pest Management Association, I had the opportunity to participate in NPMA Legislative Days as a representative of the Arizona Pest Professional Organization and of course my company Invader Pest Management. While there is always the excitement from going to our nation’s capital and enjoying the history of our nation and the camaraderie of friends from all over the nation who are also involved in NPMA, there is the intimidation of going to the hill and meeting with our Senators and Representatives (OK – their staff anyway – we actually saw John Kyle dart out of the office, and Rep. Mitchell walking down the halls.) Halls, that’s a sidebar topic all by its self!
We looked at a number of issues and there were Three issues that we took with us to our Senators and Representatives. The first issue I will talk about in this blog and I will talk about the other two issues in separate blogs.
Our first issue was – A bill that has to do with Integrated Pest Management for Schools, we are opposed to the federalization of IMP in schools because the bill is overreaching and cannot be funded on a local basis. We can’t even afford teachers and Federal Government wants to force an additional stringent IPM in schools programs at a greater cost to schools, than allowing the States to move their school districts to IPM at an acceptable pace. Fortunately Arizona has put into law basic IPM In School standards and most schools have adopted IPM in schools as the accepted standard, without massive expenses to comply. We support the 4 page IPM laws already in place and feel we don’t need the 44 additional pages that redoing this law would bring!