Funding Adds Ammunition to War on Fire Ants

After surmounting a number of obstacles, a bill that would provide $9.5 million to combat fire ants in Orange County and other areas cleared the state Legislature in the final hours of its session Friday.

The 39-0 vote in the state Senate belied the arduous struggle that led to approval of the measure, sponsored by state Sen. John Lewis (R-Orange) and Assemblyman Bill Campbell (R-Villa Park).

The bill to help local jurisdictions fight the aggressive, stinging pests now moves to Gov. Gray Davis.

“This measure is necessary for the immediate preservation of the peace, health and safety of all Californians,” Lewis said. “My hope is that the governor’s office will now come to the same conclusion and sign [the bill].”

The ants can build basketball-size mounds and, if disturbed, attack quickly in swarms, stinging their victims. For some, the stings can be deadly. The ants were first found in Orange County last fall.

Initially, the bill applied only to Orange County and did not specify a dollar amount. It went through several incarnations and came close to dying in the Assembly Appropriations Committee.

The bill cleared that committee Tuesday, but only after funding was cut from $9.5 million for Orange, Los Angeles and Riverside counties to $4.9 million for Orange County alone.

Minutes before a vote on the Assembly floor this week, the bill was pulled and sent back to the Appropriations Committee. The committee restored the $9.5 million in funding but put the money under the control of the state Department of Food and Agriculture.

It will be up to that state agency to determine how to allocate the funds. The ants have been found in 23 Orange County cities, and the agency already has set up an office at the county fairgrounds in Costa Mesa.

So far, two methods have been used to attack the ants. Local officials have used poison, and the state uses a method that wipes out a colony more slowly by sterilizing the queen.

Despite months of efforts to eradicate them, fire ants were found last month at O’Neill Regional Park in Trabuco Canyon.

State agriculture spokesman Oscar Hidalgo said inspectors from the fairgrounds office are looking for individual ant mounds, where they will spread ground corncobs soaked with insect growth inhibitors.

“This continues to be a massive, massive project, one we have really been working closely on with local leaders,” Hidalgo said. “We have been finding fire ants in the areas where we have found them previously, but we haven’t found them in other areas of Orange County.”

Fire ants are natives of South America and first appeared in the United States in the 1930s. Over six decades, they have spread from Alabama to the Southwest and now to the West Coast.