Like a country free of toxins in food, water, pet foods and children's toys.
Lawmaker hopes to revive stalled food safety bills (click at title)
Three measures would regulate state's lettuce and spinach industry
By Steve Lawrence
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Article Launched: 11/18/2007 03:09:09 AM PST
SACRAMENTO -- State Sen. Dean Florez is hoping a little legislative detour will help build momentum for his stalled bills seeking to regulate the lettuce and spinach industry.
The three measures were introduced in February after officials linked leafy green vegetables from the Salinas Valley to E. coli outbreaks last year that killed at least three people and sickened about 300 across the nation.
The bills would have prohibited growers from using certain practices that could result in contaminated produce, such as placing portable toilets in the fields or using uncomposted or untreated manure as fertilizer.
They also would set up a field inspection program, establish a code system to trace and recall potentially contaminated produce, and give the California Department of Public Health a primary role in implementing the legislation.
Supporters of the bills see the Department of Public Health as a tougher enforcer than the state Department of Food and Agriculture.
The bills passed the Senate but stalled in the Assembly in June after an acrimonious hearing in the Assembly Agriculture Committee. The committee rejected one of the measures, 5-2, and didn't vote on the other two.
Florez is planning to bring the bills back next year and ask Assembly leaders to send them first to the Health Committee, a more liberal panel that also had been scheduled to consider the legislation....
