A Pet Store With a Pesticide Secret: What the Law Required and What They Did Instead

United Supplies for Aquariums and Pets operates out of a facility at 2138 W 17th St, Long Beach, CA 90813. Whatever their retail-facing identity, this company is also a registered pesticide-producing establishment under federal law. That registration comes with one clear, recurring obligation: every year, by March 1, they must file an annual pesticide production report with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

This is not a complicated ask. The requirement under Section 7(c)(1) of the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act — known as FIFRA — is a disclosure mandate. The company must report the types and amounts of pesticides they are producing, the pesticides they produced in the prior year, and the pesticides they sold or distributed in the prior year. The regulation exists because pesticides are not candy. They are biologically active chemical agents. The public and the government have a right to know what is being manufactured, in what quantities, and where it is going.

The rule, codified at 40 C.F.R. § 167.85(d), states that an annual report must be filed on or before March 1 of each year — and it explicitly notes this requirement applies even if the producer has made zero pesticidal product that year. The bar is as low as it could possibly be. File the form. That is it.

United Supplies failed to file for the 2023 reporting year. The EPA did not immediately penalize them. On May 30, 2024, the agency issued a Notice of Warning. A warning. A gentle nudge from the federal government saying: you missed this deadline; do not miss it again.

They missed it again. The 2024 annual report, due March 1, 2025, was also never submitted. The EPA then opened a formal enforcement action under Docket No. FIFRA-09-2025-0088. That action closed on June 4, 2025, with an Expedited Settlement Agreement signed by Regional Judicial Officer Beatrice Wong — and a total penalty of five hundred dollars.

Two years. One warning that was completely ignored. And the federal government’s final answer was a fine that costs less than a month of Netflix subscriptions for a family. The enforcement machinery of the most powerful government on earth ground down to a $500 invoice.

Two Years of Silence: The Violation Timeline

What $500 Does Not Cover: The Human and Community Cost of Two Years of Darkness

The settlement agreement handed down on June 4, 2025 reduces two years of federal non-compliance at a pesticide-producing facility to a single line item: $500. That number represents what the EPA, the enforcement arm of the United States government, officially decided a Long Beach community’s right to know about the chemicals being manufactured in their neighborhood was worth. Five hundred dollars. A price tag so small it communicates something loud and specific — that the people living, working, and raising children near 2138 W 17th St, Long Beach, CA 90813 simply do not count enough to warrant a serious penalty.

Long Beach is not an abstraction. It is a real city, a real port community, a place where industrial facilities sit alongside dense residential neighborhoods. The zip code 90813, where United Supplies operates, is one of the more economically burdened areas in a city that already carries a heavy industrial pollution load. Residents there are not insulated from chemical exposure by distance, by wealth, or by political power. They breathe the air that moves through and around those facilities. They drink from the same regional water infrastructure. Their kids play outside. Their elderly family members live in those same blocks. When a pesticide manufacturer goes two full years without telling the EPA what it is making, those are the people left in the dark.

FIFRA’s reporting requirement exists precisely because pesticide production is not a neutral activity. The chemicals being manufactured at facilities like this one are designed to kill living organisms. They are biocides. The quantities produced, the active ingredients used, and the distribution channels through which they are sold are information the public is entitled to — and information that federal regulators need in order to respond if something goes wrong. When United Supplies went silent for 2023 and then ignored a direct warning and went silent again for 2024, they did not merely miss a paperwork deadline. They removed the community’s ability to know what was being made in their name, on their streets, in their air.

There is a specific kind of institutional betrayal embedded in this story that gets lost in the legal language of “failing to comply with Section 7(c)(1).” That language is tidy and bureaucratic. The reality underneath it is messier and more personal. Someone at United Supplies — someone who knew the rules, who had been explicitly warned, who understood what March 1 meant and why — chose to do nothing a second time. That choice was not an accident of complexity or confusion. The rule is not complex. It does not require expensive consultants or sophisticated compliance infrastructure. It requires filing an annual report. The decision to not do that, after a formal federal warning, is a decision to treat the law as something that applies to other people.

For the residents and workers in Long Beach’s industrial corridor, that attitude is familiar. It is the same logic that has allowed heavy-emitting facilities to cluster in lower-income, majority-minority communities for decades. When corporations decide that regulatory compliance is optional — when the consequence of being caught is a fine they can pay with the cash from a slow Tuesday — the message delivered to the surrounding community is clear. Your oversight protections are decorative. The rules are for show. The people who are supposed to enforce them will let it go for the price of a grocery run.

The dignity cost here is specific and measurable in its own way, even if the settlement document never acknowledges it. Two consecutive years of unreported pesticide production means two consecutive years during which the people closest to this facility had no government-level visibility into what was being manufactured and sold from that address. Whatever safety net FIFRA was designed to provide — the ability to track production trends, identify spikes, catch unreported active ingredients before they reach communities through distribution — was entirely absent for the neighbors of United Supplies for the entirety of 2023 and 2024. No dollar figure in a settlement agreement makes that right.

Straight From the Document: Every Damning Passage

These are the verbatim words from EPA Region IX Docket No. FIFRA-09-2025-0088, filed June 4, 2025. Nothing paraphrased. Nothing softened.

The Ripple Effects: Environmental, Public Health, and Economic Inequality

Environmental Degradation

FIFRA’s annual reporting system is one of the foundational mechanisms by which the federal government monitors what pesticide chemicals are entering the American market and environment. When a registered producing establishment fails to report — as United Supplies did for two consecutive years — the resulting information gap is not a minor administrative inconvenience. It is a hole in the environmental surveillance network that regulators rely on to understand cumulative pesticide loads, track trends in active ingredient use, and identify facilities that may be producing compounds at volumes that require closer scrutiny.

The Long Beach area, situated in the Port of Los Angeles region, is already one of the most environmentally burdened industrial corridors in California. Pesticide manufacturing facilities add to a chemical exposure baseline that already includes diesel particulate matter, port-related industrial emissions, and other toxic co-pollutants. The requirement that facilities report production data is the bare minimum by which environmental regulators can map what is being added to that baseline year over year. Two years of silence from United Supplies means two years of missing data in that map.

The types of pesticides produced at this facility, the active ingredients involved, the quantities distributed — none of this appears in the record because the company chose not to file it. Without that data, the EPA cannot perform meaningful analysis of whether the facility’s production activity is contributing to environmental accumulation in local soil, water, or air. This is precisely what FIFRA’s reporting mandate was designed to prevent. The environmental harm from unreported production is not hypothetical; it is the direct consequence of removing the data that makes detection possible.

Public Health

Pesticides are specifically engineered to interfere with biological processes. Many classes of pesticide active ingredients are acutely toxic at certain exposure levels and have documented chronic health effects at lower concentrations — including endocrine disruption, neurological impacts, and carcinogenicity, depending on the compound class. This is established scientific and regulatory consensus, which is why FIFRA exists in the first place. The entire architecture of pesticide law in the United States is built on the recognition that these substances require monitoring.

When the EPA does not know what a registered facility is producing, public health surveillance cannot function properly. Emergency responders would have gaps in their knowledge of what chemicals are stored or processed at the facility. Community health advocates tracking illness patterns near industrial sites would have no production data to correlate with exposure reports. Parents in the surrounding neighborhoods of zip code 90813 — an area that, by all available demographic and environmental justice mapping, bears disproportionate industrial burdens — have no independent right of access to production data they do not know is missing.

The settlement document confirms the facility is a registered pesticide-producing establishment. That designation exists because federal law recognized that pesticide production carries enough inherent public health risk to require registration and oversight. United Supplies accepted that designation, accepted the regulatory framework it entails, and then chose to withhold the basic disclosures that make the entire framework functional. For two years, anyone whose health might be affected by that facility’s operations was denied the data that would have told them what they were potentially being exposed to.

Economic Inequality

The geography of this case is not coincidental. Pesticide-producing facilities in California do not cluster in Beverly Hills or Marin County. They are concentrated in industrial zones surrounded by working-class communities, communities of color, and communities with limited access to the political and legal resources needed to hold polluters accountable. The 90813 zip code in Long Beach fits this pattern precisely. The residents who live closest to 2138 W 17th St are, statistically, the people with the least power to demand transparency and the most exposure to the consequences of its absence.

The $500 penalty at the center of this settlement underscores the economic dimension of the problem in a specific way. For a business operating a registered pesticide production facility, $500 is an operating cost. It is the kind of fine you absorb without a strategic discussion, without a board meeting, without a meaningful change in behavior. The entire point of civil penalties in environmental law is deterrence — the fine must be large enough that compliance is cheaper than violation. A $500 penalty for two years of violations, following a formal federal warning, does not meet that standard. It tells every other small pesticide producer registered with the EPA that the cost of ignoring FIFRA reporting requirements is, at worst, a few hundred dollars every couple of years.

The communities that bear the cost of that calculus are not the ones setting the penalty schedule. They are not the ones at the table when the “Expedited Settlement Agreement” is drafted and the word “public interest” is placed next to a $500 number. They are the ones living on streets near facilities where the government has already demonstrated it will settle systematic non-compliance for the price of a car registration fee. Economic inequality in environmental enforcement is not just about who gets fined. It is about who pays the real cost when enforcement fails — and that cost is always paid by people who had no say in the settlement.

The Number That Says Everything About Who This System Serves

The Federal Civil Penalties Inflation Adjustment Improvements Act requires that environmental penalties be periodically adjusted upward to maintain their deterrent effect. Yet the agreed settlement in this case landed at $500 for a second offense — a figure that communicates, in the clearest possible terms, that the enforcement system is operating at the floor of its own authority when dealing with small registered producers. Two years of withheld production data. One prior warning. A community left without visibility into what chemicals were being manufactured in their zip code. Five hundred dollars.

To be clear about what that money does: it goes to the Treasurer of the United States via the EPA’s Cincinnati Finance Center. The community in Long Beach gets nothing from it. No monitoring program. No remediation fund. No community health survey. The penalty is a check written to the federal government, and the slate is declared clean. Paragraph 11 of the settlement document makes this explicit: payment “shall only resolve Respondent’s liability for federal civil penalties for the violations and facts alleged herein.” The community’s exposure to two years of data darkness is not part of that ledger. It never was.

Names, Watchlists, and What You Can Do

The People on Record

These names appear in the official settlement document. They are part of the public record.

• Chris Yamaoka — Respondent contact, United Supplies for Aquariums and Pets. Email on record: Chris@wecaquatics.com
• Matt Salazar, P.E. — Manager, Toxics Section, Enforcement and Compliance Assurance Division, EPA Region 9 (signed for Complainant)
• Beatrice Wong — Regional Judicial Officer, U.S. EPA Region IX (signed the Final Order)
• Rieko Nishimura — Enforcement and Compliance Assurance Division (ENF-2-3), EPA Region IX
• Carol Bussey, Esq. — Assistant Regional Counsel, Air and Toxics Section II, U.S. EPA Region IX

Regulatory Watchlist: Who Has Ongoing Authority

• U.S. EPA Region IX, Enforcement and Compliance Assurance Division — Retains authority for future FIFRA violations by this facility. Paragraph 14 of the settlement explicitly preserves this right.
• U.S. EPA Office of Pesticide Programs (OPP) — National-level authority over registered pesticide producers and production data.
• California Department of Pesticide Regulation (CDPR) — State-level oversight; California has some of the strongest pesticide regulations in the country and independent enforcement authority.
• California Environmental Protection Agency (CalEPA) — Coordinates statewide environmental enforcement; relevant given this facility’s location in a CalEnviroScreen high-burden community.
• South Coast Air Quality Management District (SCAQMD) — Local air quality authority for the Long Beach area; relevant if pesticide manufacturing involves volatile compounds.
• U.S. Department of Justice, Environment and Natural Resources Division — The EPA may refer cases for federal prosecution if future violations are willful and significant.

What You Can Do Right Now

• Request the facility’s full FIFRA registration records from EPA Region IX under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Their contact is at 75 Hawthorne St, San Francisco, CA 94105.
• File a formal comment or complaint with the California Department of Pesticide Regulation (CDPR) regarding the facility’s compliance history — cdpr.ca.gov.
• Connect with Long Beach environmental justice organizations such as STAND-L.A. or communities affiliated with California Communities Against Toxics (CCAT) to share this reporting.
• Contact your local Long Beach City Council representative and ask them to request a facility compliance audit through CalEPA or CDPR.
• Support mutual aid networks in the 90813 zip code that are building community-based environmental health monitoring independent of federal enforcement.
• Share the source document linked at the bottom of this article. Primary sources are harder to dismiss than news coverage. Put the EPA’s own words in front of people.