Minutes from ALRC Friday 13 July meeting.

In attendance were: May Gerstle (chairing for Jim English) Nan Hammett, Steve Macdonald, Rita Schenck, Shaheeda Laura Pierce (a new ALRC member) Frank Peryea (WSU) and Bonnie Meyer (King County).

The June minutes were approved. Rita to send to Jake for posting. May has already sent copy to library.

Much of the meeting was taken up with a follow-up of the public hearing 11 June. There is a "Baseline Risk Assessment" for Ruston that contains a fair amount of information about metal uptake in vegetables. It is available in the Library.

At the meeting, there was a request to have another blood lead screening to be held in the early Fall, so as to better represent a high exposure scenario (children will have been playing outside all summer).

Arsenic urine tests at the same time were also requested. Bonnie will ask whether King County can do this. The Kissel (UW) study, which is focusing on arsenic in urine of farm families on Vashon, is underway. It may be a good idea to wait for these worst case exposures results before committing to an island-wide urine testing. If the Kissel results are very low, we can be comfortable that the rest of the island tests would be low

King County will be testing the Village Green when they retest four child use areas on the Island.

Rita will identify at least one lab that we can support as a good one for soil metals analyses. She will (slowly) work on auditing others for this purpose.

Those attending the hearing had many questions about the interim action levels. ALRC will be requesting complete worksheets on these calculations, so that we can reproduce the calculations ourselves. Rita will draft a letter for Jim's signature.

There were also some questions about effects on pets. Since arsenic is not carcinogenic to dogs and cats (or indeed to anything but primates) it is unlikely that this will be a problem. The cadmium in the soils and plants could be a problem, especially to herbivores. Testing the cadmium in plants is one of the objectives of the WSU proposal. Bonnie will check with the EPA veterinarian to see if we can identify expert opinion on the topic of pets and lead and arsenic.

We need to be more visible so that Islanders know that they can turn to us for information/support. Rita is meeting soon with Allison Arthur. We will try to set up regular information topics for the paper to publish.

At the public hearing, John Gardner (immediate past president of Rotary) expressed concern for the prostate cancer issue on the Island. Steve Macdonald will talk with him answering any questions.

We have a tentative meeting with Ecology set up for the 27th of July in Bellevue. Jim Rita and possibly Nan are on tap for this meeting, which should include Alexander, Nord and Pendowski.

May and Rita have been working with our legislators. All seem sympathetic with our research requests, and at least one of them has already taken action with Ecology to encourage funding of the WSU proposal.

Our next meeting is on August 3, at 11:30 in the Library.

Respectfully submitted,

Rita Schenck