(The Center Square) - The Washington State Department of Health has confirmed that it failed to ensure an activist group was not misusing the agency’s official logo after it received nearly $500,000 in a Climate Commitment Act grant to produce videos and other promotional materials critical of Yakima farmers.
“DOH takes the integrity of our official branding, contractual compliance, and the appropriate use of public funds seriously. We acknowledge that a gap occurred resulting in an incomplete removal of the logo from videos across all social media platforms, and we are actively working to correct that gap,” wrote DOH Director of Risk Communications & Media Relations in the Office of Communications & Health Education Shelby Anderson via email to The Center Square.
The issue began when a farming advocacy group called Save Family Farming filed a complaint about use of the DOH logo on We Are ELLA promotional materials last summer, but received no response from the agency for months.
Save Family Farming Executive Director Ben Tindall told The Center Square the messaging from We Are ELLA videos “made false and defamatory claims blaming dairy farms in the area for harming public health.”
“Not only are they putting out false, misleading information to the general public, they're also very willing, apparently, to directly lie to a state agency and mislead them regarding what action has been taken,” said Tindall.
In one video, Maria Fernandez, the director of ELLA, speaks about her father who was a farmworker who passed away from cancer at 45. She believes exposure to pesticides was to blame.
"If you care about the water you drink, the air you breathe, you should be concerned," Fernandez said in a documentary produced by the group, as reported by the Yakima Herald.
The documentary interviews farmworkers and residents about the health effects of pesticide exposure, nitrate pollution in groundwater, and air pollution from industrial-scale agriculture.
The money for the documentary came from a $500,000 grant from the Healthy Environment for All Act.
The HEAL Act was passed in 2021 and requires several Washington agencies "to identify and address environmental health disparities in overburdened communities and for vulnerable populations."
The complaint stemmed from We Are ELLA using a DOH logo over some of the materials it pushed on social media platforms, which gave the appearance the state was endorsing their messaging.
The group did not have permission to use the logo.
We are ELLA did not respond to a request for comment from The Center Square.
Earlier this year, Save Family Farming received a response to its complaint from DOH indicating the agency had ensured ELLA was no longer using their logo.
“Erika Baker, Deputy Director of the department’s Office of Environmental Public Health Sciences, claimed the department had 'confirmed the logo was removed from the impacted videos,' yet a simple check by Save Family Farming showed the videos remained online with the DOH logo included,” read a release from SFF.
Pressing further this month and asking state lawmakers to apply some pressure for answers, SFF finally received a response from DOH which said the agency took the word of We Are ELLA that the organization had removed the DOH logo, without ever ensuring that was the case.
As of Thursday, videos produced by the group are still online, with the DOH logo included.
The agency said the issue was now being further addressed.
“Previously, verification relied on verbal and/or email confirmation from the grantee and visual verification of the videos in question. Moving forward, contract managers will audit a grantee’s social media channel(s) to verify compliance before a branding issue is logged as resolved,” Anderson for DOH wrote to The Center Square.
Tindall says taxpayers should be outraged that Climate Commitment Act dollars are being used to produce anti-farming propaganda, without any accountability from state agencies doling out the grant money.
“The idea that the Department of Health can step back and say we didn't know it was happening, but we knew that some of the things that we were paying for would be used in that? I don't think the Department of Health is as squeaky clean as they're trying to claim on this one,” said Tindall.
