At a House Education and the Workforce Committee hearing prior to the Congressional recess, Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-CA) questioned Ben Tresselt, President and Owner of Arborist Enterprises on behalf of the Tree Care Industry Association, about OSHA standards.
00:00Thank you. And our final questioner today is Mr. Kiley from California.
00:08Thank you, Mr. Chair. And Mr. Tressel, I also would just like to reiterate the Chairman Wahlberg's statements regarding a tree care standard.
00:17We did a bipartisan letter on this last year. It's been a long time coming, and I would hope that OSHA would move expeditiously to finally make this happen.
00:29And, you know, one of the things we saw in the Biden administration was that OSHA was focusing a lot on a lot of things that did not really relate to safety.
00:39They were doing COVID rules well after the pandemic was over. They, of course, were coming up with regulations to help out political allies.
00:50They even, of course, tried to do an illegal vaccine mandate that would have affected tens of millions of employees across the country.
00:58That was struck down by the Supreme Court. And actually, in one of the most stunning moments of the 118th Congress, the OSHA director, Douglas Parker,
01:09who, by the way, had come up from California's OSHA and had actually instituted a lot of the crazy COVID rules in California,
01:18he came and testified before this very subcommittee and actually tried to deny that any vaccine mandate had ever been issued.
01:26It was like something out of Orwell. It was down the memory hole. Never happened, was never initiated, was never promulgated when the Supreme Court actually took up the case and struck it down.
01:38It was truly a remarkable moment.
01:40But getting back to the tree care standard, you, I think, gave a very compelling explanation, Mr. Tressel, of why this is needed and sort of the mystifying delay that we've all experienced.
01:54I wanted to just give you a chance to maybe cast a little more light on your participation in the 2020 panel,
02:00because I understand there was a broad array of stakeholders. You had a lot of input.
02:03There was a consensus standard for how we could protect workers in an industry where the chances of a fatal accident or incident are 30 times greater than any other industries
02:14and where the work of the industry is so important towards the safety of communities when it comes to fire mitigation and other purposes.
02:20So if you wanted to share your experience.
02:21Well, the Sabrifa panel was a very broad base of industries and all have a stake in what we were doing.
02:33But it was very clear at the end when the conclusion was the ANSI Z-133 should be the framework that we need to work with to build a standard for OSHA.
02:44And having that in place would help us tremendously, you know, protect our workers.
02:50We're here to, I know, I know I am for myself and my team and my company, my small company.
02:56I want people to go home at night.
02:57I want them to enjoy their lives and, you know, to go home to their kids and their families and their dogs and their cats and, you know, their friends and have the barbecue on the weekend.
03:06And all of this means that we have to work diligently as employers to keep them safe.
03:11And the hazards that we face in tree care are tremendous.
03:15We work in public spaces.
03:16We work aloft.
03:17We work with a lot of machinery.
03:19So all of this being said, the Sabrifa panel said, you're right, we should do this.
03:25This should be happening.
03:26And as the other congressman said, we've been fighting for this for 20 years.
03:30And we're not looking to be regulated.
03:32We're looking to be helped because we want to keep our people safe.
03:36We don't want to have fatalities.
03:38We want to reduce the amount of injuries.
03:39We want to do the things that are right for our people, and we need OSHA's help.
03:43And we're not asking OSHA to reinvent the tree care wheel.
03:47We're asking them to paint it their color, make it something that we can all use to keep people safe.
03:54Right now, you're sort of left to your own devices.
03:56And I'd imagine that you have inspectors who come in and are sort of trying to apply standards, regulations that are not specific to your industry.
04:04And that kind of leaves you guessing as to what exactly you're supposed to do or maybe trying to tailor your practices to a standard that doesn't really fit.
04:16Is that what you've experienced?
04:17Absolutely.
04:18So we don't have, there is no standards directly for tree care.
04:22So that's a patchwork of standards that they pick from and pick and choose.
04:26And sometimes that's problematic.
04:28Take, for example, the use of a crane when you take down a tree.
04:33We have trees that are very compromised.
04:35They're very dangerous to climb.
04:36We can't climb those.
04:37Or we can't get aerial lifts to them or things like that.
04:39So we use a crane to access a climber who will actually go into the tree and then safely dismantle and remove it.
04:46But the general duty clause says, no, you can't do that.
04:49You're not allowed to do that.
04:50That you can't use the crane to put a man or a person into the tree to do that.
04:55Which then makes it almost impossible to remove the tree safely because now we're at a crossroads where we can't do it safely or we have to jeopardize worker safety.
05:04And when it comes to my business, we don't jeopardize worker safety.
05:08We would either refuse to do the tree or find something else.
05:12There really is a lot.
05:13We have our hands tied at times.
05:16And we want to make sure that we're doing the right thing.
05:18Z-133 supports it.
05:20It's been approved.
05:20It's an industry consensus standard.
05:22We can do it safely.
05:24We've done it safely.
05:25Crane use has been used in our industry for over 50 years.
05:28Thanks very much.
05:29We will keep advocating for it and yield back.
