Archive for September, 2013

Plaintiffs Oppose Motion for Another Amended Complaint

The NGO Plaintiffs have a filed a brief opposing the Industry Motion for another amended complaint in pesticides litigation in San Francisco federal district court. The Plaintiffs summarize their opposition as follows:

“In their motion, CropLife repeatedly mischaracterizes the Amended Complaint, which identifies specific affirmative agency actions for every failure to consult claim, as well as specific triggers for every reinitiation claim. CropLife’s motion emphasizes legal issues, such as jurisdiction, that should instead be raised in a motion to dismiss or otherwise resolved on the merits, and their arguments demonstrate that they have notice of the claims against them and can prepare a response to the Amended Complaint. CropLife demands details that are not appropriately sought through a motion for more definite statement and are not required at the pleading stage, such as identification of specific documents backing the facts alleged. For all these reasons, as further discussed below, Plaintiffs ask the Court to deny the motion.”

Government and Industry Ask Court to Order NGOs to Amend Their Complaint Again

In San Francisco federal district court litigation, environmentalists have filed an amended complaint in response to a court ruling that their original complaint against EPA was too broad.  Their amended complaint challenges EPA’s approval of more than 50 active pesticide ingredients, a decrease from the almost 300 challenged by their original complaint.

The Government and Industry Intervenors have both filed motions asking the Court to order the Plaintiffs to amend their amended complaint in a manner that makes it comprehensible .  The Industry Intervenors’ motion argues:

SFIREG Meets on Bees and ESA

The Association of American Pesticide Control Officials (AAPCO)/State FIFRA Issues Research and Evaluation Group (SFIREG), Environmental Quality Issues Committee will hold a 2-day meeting, beginning on October 21, 2013, and ending October 22, 2013. The meeting will be held on Monday, October 21, 2013, from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., and on Tuesday, October 22, 2013, from 8:30 a.m. to 12 noon. The meeting will be held at EPA, One Potomac Yard (South Bldg.) 2777 Crystal Dr., Arlington, VA, 4th Floor, South Conference Room. Agenda items include status of pollinator protection efforts; bee incident updates;  and endangered and threatened species update.

 

We Apologize for the Inconvenience Resulting from the Outage of Our Website

         The CRE website was attacked with the result that had we not pulled down the website we would have risked loosing content.

         We appreciate your many emails and we are  working to continue to install state of the art  early warning systems.  We must , however, add that we have only had two major outages in more than a decade of operation.

        We are particularly concerned that some of you could not use the website for the preparation of regulatory filings.