HomeMy WebLinkAboutCOM 0489.343 2018-2020 Baty ov
REBECCA VILLEGAS c..•'. '`'+, PHONE: (808)323-4267
Council Member �'�'�`° FAX: (808)323-4786
District 7, Central Kona EMAIL:Rebecca.villegas@hawaiicounty.gov
HAWAII COUNTY COUNCIL
West Hawai`i Civic Center, Bldg.A
74-5044 Ane Keohokalole Hwy.
Kailua-Kona, Hawai'i 96740
Date: November 19, 2019
To: Aaron. S.V. Chung, Council Chair
And Members of the Hawaii County Council
From: Rebecca Villegas, Council Member
District 7
Re: For Informational Purposes Related to Bill 101 Draft 2.
For informational purposes in regard to Bill 101 Draft 2, please see the attached West Hawaii
Today article. Please ensure this information is available for each Council Member during
deliberation on Bill 101 Draft 2 scheduled for November 20, 2019 Council meeting.
Mahalo.
RVllw
Att.
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Comm. N 4V q:
Hawai`i County is an Equal Opportunity Provider and Employer. Ref. To:
Ref. DMe NOV 2-020-19
West Hawal`1 Todav
My Turn: Monsanto jury member
weighs In on pesticide ban
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The Hawaii County Council is considering Bill No. 101 relating to herbicide
use. I would like to share my experience with this issue.
I have lived in Hilo since 2002 and also maintain residence in San Francisco.
My in-laws, wife and children are all graduates of Hilo High School. For
business reasons I remain a legal resident of San Francisco,
In June 2018, 1 was selected to serve on a San Francisco Superior Court jury
in a case called Johnson vs. Monsanto. It was the first-ever civil case against
Monsanto, brought by a groundskeeper linking a glyphosate-based herbicide
with his non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
After a six-week trial that involved hours of expert testimony about herbicides
and cancer, my jury decided unanimously that the herbicide presented
substantial danger to persons using the product, that Monsanto failed to
adequately warn of these risks and that it knew or reasonably should have
known of these dangers, and that this failure to warn was a substantial factor
in causing harm to the plaintiff (that harm being cancer with expected mortality
within a year).
Although in a civil trial in California only nine of 12 jurors need to agree for a
verdict, we unanimously agreed to award the plaintiff $39,253,209.32 in
compensatory damages. Because we further agreed that by "clear and
convincing evidence that Monsanto acted with malice or oppression in the
conduct" upon which we based our verdict, we further awarded the plaintiff
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$250 million in punitive damages. The trial court judge reduced our award of
punitive damages to match the compensatory damages, but this decision in
currently under appeal. Mr. Johnson is still alive at present, but has received
no damage payments while Monsanto is appealing.
My jury did not have to conclude that glyphosate definitively causes cancer in
humans. Our task was simply to find that it was more likely than not that the
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herbicide could have caused cancer and that Monsanto was derelict in its duty
to determine the product's safety and to product consumers and applicators.
We were influenced by the International Agency for Research on Cancer
(IARC, part of the World Heath Organization) classification of glyphosate in
2015 as a "probable carcinogen" and by Monsanto's internal emails displaying
a deliberate lack of interest in any product safety research on glyphosate-
based herbicides.
So my conclusion is that glyphosate-based herbicides are potentially
carcinogenic, probably more to county employees serving as applicators than
to the general public (although this may simply point to the need for much
more research into the general impact). Bill No. 101 is therefore important for
both worker and public safety.
Gary Kitahata is a resident of Hilo.