Presented by Tim Creger for the States/Industry Forum at the summer AAPCO Meeting, Charleston, WV, August 8, 2000.

My presentation focused on showing the audience a demonstration of the pesticide related data housed on an Internet web site hosted by Kelly Registration Systems. This site, which Kelly provides to our state free of charge, has been designed to appear exactly like our home page, even though the site does not reside on our department’s server.

The site contains nearly all of the available data for our pesticide program’s three main databases: Pesticide registrations, pesticide dealer licenses, and pesticide applicator certifications. Each database is accessible by a mouse-click on the highlighted title line, upon which the user is taken to a second page that provides the available options for the database.

Each database is searchable by the fields that are on the site. For the pesticide registration database, the user can search by EPA registration Number, product name, active ingredient, or manufacturer/registrant name, site of use, pest to be controlled, Restricted Use Pesticide status, assigned company number, formulation type, pesticide type, or multiple criteria.

For the pesticide dealer database, users can search on the dealer name, the dealer license number, or the city or zip code, if known. For the pesticide applicator certification database, users can search on the applicator last name, certification number, or city, county, or zip code, if known. Additionally, the database is searchable by category and by commercial versus private certification.

A natural, and quite important question that comes up, is how we avoid someone accessing the site to obtain information that would then be used to purchase RUP’s illegally. The answer is that there is no safeguard to prevent this, although a four digit PIN number could be issued by our agency to the applicator or dealer with instructions that if they want to use their license or certification to purchase or sell RUP’ over the Internet, they would need that PIN number to verify their authenticity to the e-commerce site. This PIN number would then be provided to the Kelly site, or sites such as the HSIS site, where e-commerce companies would be able to use it to verify the buyer’s or seller’s information.

My concluding comments for the presentation were that I didn’t really see how state regulatory agencies would be able to do business off of the Internet in the future, and I chose to involve my program as much as possible. There are inherent risks associated with this strategy, but the time savings and increased availability of the information for our established customers has the promise of benefitting the program more.

Minutes Document