Santa Cruz County (the county in which I live) is a fairly diverse county. There are a lot of relatively-abundantly populated areas, and plenty of out-in-the-boonies areas, plenty of farm land. Note: withing SC County, there is SC City.
The spraying has stirred up some controversy. Santa Cruz is known for its hippies, so there are, of course, some people rising up in arms without knowing why. Case in point: A record of illnesses has been kept for monitoring correlation with sprayings of the "pesticide;" on one of the spraying days (which was widely publicized) there was a spike in complains from respiratory, to headaches, to everything between.
However, the spraying had not taken place that night due to weather conditions.
One of the things that has people peeved was the initial reluctance of the company which produces the product to release a list of its ingredients. A court mandate made the ingredients list made public, albeit with some of the ingredients being listed along the lines of "proprietary hydrocarbon" (IE, utterly useless.)
Another point of contention is the presence of toluene in one of the compounds in the "pesticide." However, it's been shown that the toluene itself isn't really one of the variables in affecting health (it's effectively occupied.)
Here's how I see it:
The burden of proof is on the government, not the people. If there's health risks, or even the potential for health risks, then they need to investigate it before spraying.
There are a lot of whack-jobs out here, they often can out-shout the people who are on their same side but taking a more realistic approach to the matter.
The term "pesticide" CAN be applied to the substances being sprayed because they are intended to actively disrupt the mating cycle of the moths. However, it's not like we're out here with crop-dusters flying over our houses or anything. The substance being sprayed is an analogue to a chemical the moths produce to attract mates, it doesn't kill on contact or anything. Moths are well-known for being quite good at picking up trace amounts of pheromones; as such, the concentration of the pesticide being sprayed are pretty minimal and are actually at a relatively high altitude.
