§ 39750

The Legislature hereby finds and declares that the Connelly-Areias-Chandler Rice Straw Burning Reduction Act was enacted in 1991 to phase down rice straw burning and improve the air quality for the citizens of the state. This creates an additional significant cost to rice growers, with potential adverse impacts on the farming communities, including lost farm production; lost state, local, and federal tax revenues; lost jobs; and reduction of wildlife habitat in the rice fields. The commercial technologies that could utilize straw, making it a commodity rather than a waste disposal problem, have not developed in the rice growing areas because of the lack of marketplace risk capital to take technologies from the laboratory stage to demonstration projects. To retain the public benefits from having a viable rice growing industry in California and to improve air quality, there is a need to provide cost-sharing grants for the development of demonstration projects for new rice straw technologies in the marketplace.

(Added by Stats. 1997, Ch. 745, Sec. 1. Effective January 1, 1998.)