Demand Independent Testing for Publicly Funded Herbicide Projects
Lassen Fire Safe Council (LFSC) and Honey Lake Resource Conservation District (HLVRCD) receive millions of taxpayer dollars each year through state and federal grant programs, primarily from Cal Fire, under the banner of wildfire recovery and reforestation. In reality, these funds are being used to support industrial scale biomass extraction, commercial replanting of merchantable timber, and widespread herbicide spraying on private industrial timber lands.
These operations, while publicly funded, overwhelmingly benefit private timber interests. Yet not a single dollar of these grants is allocated to any soil or water testing. None at all. And the Lassen County Agricultural Commissioner’s office doesn’t test either.
Despite the use of toxic herbicides across tens of thousands of acres in remote, mountainous, and often residential-adjacent terrain, neither LFSC nor HLVRCD conduct or fund any form of environmental monitoring. These herbicides include:
- 2,4-D
- Hexazinone
- Glyphosate
- Triclopyr
- Oxyfluorfen
- Indaziflam
- Penoxsulam
- Methylated Seed Oils (MSO)
- and most likely others
There is no water testing near homes, wells, or creeks.
No soil testing for long-term contamination.
No cumulative tracking across overlapping project areas or multiple years.
No testing of runoff near grazing pastures or wildlife habitat.
With the scale of these operations, impacting thousands of acres each year in Lassen County, and the vast amount of public money being spent, it is unconscionable that no funding is directed toward even the most basic environmental safety measures.
If these agencies have enough money for helicopters, bulldozers, chipper contracts, and the replanting of profitable timber, they have enough money to allocate a fraction of those funds to third party, independent laboratories to test water and soil in project areas. After all, it is taxpayer money and public grant funding they are receiving in the first place.
We are calling on Cal Fire, Lassen County, HLVRCD and LFSC to:
- Allocate grant funds toward independent water and soil testing
- Publish all testing data in a publicly accessible format
- Suspend all herbicide applications until baseline environmental data is collected
Given the clear conflicts of interest and lack of oversight by public agencies, Protect Lassen will oversee coordination with independent, certified environmental testing laboratories. We are not asking these agencies to test themselves. We are demanding that they allocate public funding toward transparent, third-party testing — outside of their control.
If these agencies — and the timber companies like SPI and W.M. Beaty & Associates — cared at all about the land, water, and people of Lassen County, they would already be testing. The fact that they don’t is not just alarming — it reveals exactly where they stand when it comes to the health of the land, the water, and the people of Lassen County.
This is not a radical demand. It is the bare minimum standard of public accountability and environmental protection. These are your watersheds, your forests, and your future, and they deserve to be protected.
Why We Can’t Trust LFSC, Honey Lake RCD, or the Timber Industry
The public is being asked to trust a network of organizations that receive millions in taxpayer funds, operate with minimal oversight, and repeatedly prioritize the financial interests of the timber industry over public health and environmental protection.
Lassen Fire Safe Council (LFSC)
LFSC presents itself as a community nonprofit focused on fire safety. In reality, it functions as a contractor and project implementer for massive, landscape-scale operations that benefit private landowners and industrial timber companies. LFSC:
- Uses public grants to fund herbicide spraying and biomass extraction across private land
- Does not disclose the full list of chemicals being used before landowners sign agreements
- Shifts liability for environmental damage to landowners while avoiding public scrutiny
- Refuses to fund water or soil testing
Honey Lake Resource Conservation District (HLVRCD)
HLVRCD acts as the fiscal sponsor and CEQA lead agency for many of these projects. Instead of acting as a public safeguard, it has become a funnel for taxpayer money into private forestry operations. HLVRCD:
- Facilitates grant money to LFSC and timber companies with no meaningful environmental accountability
- Approves massive herbicide and logging projects under possibly fraudulent or misleading CEQA documents
- Claims “no significant impact” while funding helicopter spraying and clearcutting over thousands of acres
- Avoids public engagement or scientific review
Sierra Pacific Industries (SPI) and W.M. Beaty & Associates
These timber corporations own and manage hundreds of thousands of acres across Northern California. They are the primary financial beneficiaries of these grant-funded operations. SPI and Beaty:
- Push for herbicide use to control vegetation and speed up commercial tree growth
- Plant monocultures of fast-growing, merchantable trees for future logging
- Avoid environmental review by routing operations through public partners like LFSC and HLVRCD
- Externalize environmental risk while profiting from public funding
These are not fire safety programs. These are industrial forestry projects disguised as wildfire recovery, executed with your tax dollars and no environmental transparency.
That is why we are demanding that a portion of these public funds be redirected to independent, third-party laboratories for water and soil testing.
LFSC, HLVRCD, Cal Fire and the timber companies are not conducting testing, will not conduct testing, and even if they did, they cannot be trusted to monitor themselves.
There is no public health oversight, no accountability, and no credibility. The only way to ensure the safety of Lassen County’s water, land, and residents is through independent environmental testing funded by the same public money currently used to spray these toxins in our community.
