Subject: Bulletin Board on EPA Agricultural Worker Protection Standard ------------------------------------------------------------------------ INVITATION TO JOIN NETWORK ON MAJOR AG PESTICIDE REGULATION WPS-Forum is a new electronic bulletin board for announcements and discussions about the Worker Protection Standard for Agricultural Pesticides (WPS). Everyone who is concerned with the WPS and has access to the Internet, Bitnet, or a compatible electronic mail system is welcome to join the network of participants. To subscribe, send the following email message to ListProc@are.berkeley.edu: "SUBSCRIBE WPS-FORUM yourfirstname yourlastname". The WPS was designed to protect some 4 million people who work in U.S. fields, forests, nurseries, and greenhouses. Although it was published by the Environmental Protection Agency in August 1992, after years of consultation with representatives of groups affected, awareness and understanding of the WPS remain very uneven. Partly because of widespread confusion about the regulation and how to comply with it, Congress enacted a bill in March pushing back the effective date of several provisions from April 15, 1994, to January 1, 1995. Many agricultural employers, employees, and advisors still have basic questions about the WPS, and all face difficulty in keeping abreast of rule interpretations, proposed modifications, and practical tools and references for living within the law. The purpose of WPS-Forum is, in short, to help people who deal with the WPS to get on and stay on the same page. Forum participants can pool their knowledge, identify common problems, share solutions, distribute timely advice, and have all manner of other useful interchange. An electronic archive for reference documents and compliance tools that can be easily downloaded through an email command is part of the forum system. Individuals who wish to make resource material available through WPS-Forum archive are urged to contact the system manager, dana@are.berkeley.edu. As items are added to the archive, announcements about them show up in the flow of messages, along with regular participant postings of questions, answers, ideas, complaints, meeting notices, late rule developments, litigation summaries, and various other entries. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Region 9, is using the forum as an integral part of its ongoing public outreach effort. EPA staff will continue to post news as well as respond to questions. The agency plans to publish and obtain comments on proposed changes in certain requirements that are scheduled for reconsideration this summer. The Cal-EPA Department of Pesticide Regulation, which is responsible for enforcement of the WPS in California, will also be participating in the forum. Postings from this state agency will particularly explain how the standards to be enforced in California differ from the U.S. EPA rules that are generally applicable nationwide. WPS-Forum is a public service of the University of California Agricultural Personnel Management Program and the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at Berkeley. It was developed by Howard Rosenberg, Gary Casterline, and Dana Keil. Again, individuals may join this network by sending to ListProc@are.berkeley.edu, the message: "SUBSCRIBE WPS-FORUM yourfirstname yourlastname" (for example: subscribe wps-forum Pete Wilson). The system will return a message confirming the subscription and providing more information about features of the bulletin board. --------------------------------------------------------------- "One small step for reinventing government and saving trees." ---------------------------------------------------------------