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Staying Current By Tom Delaney Stay Informed on Key Issues T Knowledge is power, and the developments with regard to pesticides, landscape water use, and attempts at turf limitations highlight the importance of being informed not only about industry developments in your immedi- ate communities, but also about those occurring around the country. Pesticide news On the pesticide front, the Office of Research Integrity, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services recently confirmed that faked data was used to link pesticides to Parkinson's disease. The journals that reported this flawed research — Environmental Health Perspectives and Journal of Biological Chemistry — have agreed to publish retractions, and the researcher has agreed not to seek federal funding or serve on advisory committees for seven years. Unfortunately, once false reports like this are issued, the retractions rarely get the same level of attention. However, knowing that this research was retracted provides a rebuttal to those who would try to use this argument against the use of pesticides. Water standards As the demand on water resources and the importance of water Image above ©istockphoto.com/Veni use efficiency grow, water agencies, regulators, land owners, land- scape managers, and others require a standardized process to de- termine landscape water supply and demands to address local, regional and national objectives. The American Society of Agri- cultural and Biological Engineers (ASABE) is working to de- velop S623, Standardized Procedure for Determining Available Water for Landscapes and Estimating Landscape Water Use, which will formalize the ways in which both the available water resources and the irrigation requirements are quantified for land- scape purposes. Conformance to ASABE standards is voluntary, except where required by state, provincial, or other governmental requirements, and the documents are developed by consensus in accordance with procedures approved by the American National Standards Institute. Once this standard is established, government agencies, as well as the industry will be required to follow it in many cases. Turfgrass limitations The industry successfully lobbied to get turfgrass limitations removed from the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA's) WaterSense guidelines. However, we must remain vigilant on this front. An Interagency Sustainability Working Group (ISWG), led by the General Services Administration, has been working on substantial revisions to the Guiding Principles for Federal Lead- ership in High Performance and Sustainable Buildings Guidance ("Guiding Principles") and is looking at other green building guidelines that include turf limitations. By 2015, these Guiding Principles will apply to all new and 15 percent of existing federal buildings, and agencies are required to work toward 100-percent compliance. (There are roughly 429,000 building assets that are owned or controlled by the fed- eral government, including many sites with significant landscape acreage; for example, military bases and preserves.) Efforts are under way by the landscape industry to influence the process to have the ISWG follow the new EPA WaterSense guidelines, which do not include turf reductions. On these and any other issues that may impact the industry, it's important not only to be informed, but also to participate in the upcoming election and support those candidates who sup- port our industry. Get to know who those legislators are so you know who to contact when necessary. Recent enhancements to the voter information section of PLANET's Legislative Action Center allow users to look up their legislators by state and ZIP code. This ZIP code lookup is based on the new district lines for the 2012 elections resulting from redistricting. To use the center to contact your legislators, go to the Government Affairs section of the PLANET website, LandcareNetwork.org. Tom Delaney is director of government affairs at the Professional Landcare Network (PLANET). For more information, visit www.landcarenetwork.org. 26 Landscape and Irrigation October 2012 www.landscapeirrigation.com LI