This week on Ethical Voices, Tammy Gordon, the (past) public information department manager for the Coachella Valley Mosquito and Vector Control District. [Editor’s note: I sat on this interview for way too long and she is now Director of Public Affairs at the Citrus Heights Water District], discusses a number of important ethical issues, including:
- How to navigate ethical conflict when your job challenges your personal values
- How to intervene when colleagues prioritize quick fixes over responsible practices
- How to address unethical behavior without triggering defensiveness
- Why silence in the face of misinformation is an ethical failure
For those that don’t know you, why don’t you tell us more about yourself and your career?
I started my career in marketing. I was going to be a really big deal in marketing, and it was going to be awesome. I tried to graduate during a recession, which is not the best time to do it.
I fell into public service. I started working for a foundation in Idaho. I did that for a few years. Then I was in the PIO role for a city in Idaho for about six years. I loved doing that. I did a lot of emergency management work. Then the opportunity came up to be a department manager in Southern California.
So, I’ve been doing that for about the past five years or so. I study a lot in behavioral science. How do our messages affect actionable items for the public? What’s the best use of our language? Things like really dive deep into the human mind and how we actually are doing our jobs better for the public.
What does the Mosquito and Vector Control District do?
That’s a great question. Here in California, we’re actually a special district, so we take a chunk of your tax. We are funded by property taxes and our job in vector control is in public health. So, anything that could cause humans sickness.
Whether that be mosquitoes, which are the deadliest animal in the world, red imported fire ants, which are an invasive species, ticks that spread Lyme disease, or other things like that. All the icky things. I always say everything I never wanted to know about bugs I now share with all of you.
What is the most difficult ethical challenge you ever confronted?
When I initially accepted a position in vector control, I had some uncertainty from the beginning. I fancy myself being into environmental justice. I’m a beekeeper, I’m an avid gardener.
I hike and I admit I tend to stigmatize pesticides. It was a real dilemma when I first decided to take the job. But when I started thinking about the public health aspect of it. You understand that there is a responsibility for us to take action against things that can make a lot of people sick.
Take malaria for instance. A billion people a year get sick with malaria and a million of those die. There is a place for vector control and that includes pesticides. I decided to take on a job that with the mission being the responsible, financially- and environmentally-sound use of pesticides.
What I found is that not everybody shares that very thick line of responsible use of pesticides. I had to have some conversations with some of the technicians or supervisors in operations who, when they got complaints from the public about mosquitoes biting, their immediate response was, let’s go spray the entire property!
That is the last thing I ever wanted to hear. There are steps to take in responsible use. The first thing you want to do is dump out the water. Mosquitoes grow in water. It’s cheap, it’s environmentally sound. Just dump out the water and that kills all the larvae.
The next thing is to reduce their habitat. If you’re overusing water, if your landscape has a lot of sprinkler systems and you’re not paying attention you’re probably helping the problem.
The last step would be, we’ve done everything we possibly can, now it’s time for pesticide use.
He didn’t necessarily share that thought process with me. We had to have some really tough conversations about what is the best process for protecting public health. There was a lot of frustration on both our parts.
He thought he was doing the right thing, which for me is when it becomes an ethical dilemma when both people think they are right. So, we had to come to terms with what process are we actually going to do?
That’s something that we still struggle with today, but I think that by having some of those open conversations we now have a better process for using pesticides.
How do you productively broach the issue? Saying “you’re being unethical” or “I can’t believe you’re just going to spray harmful chemicals on everybody” usually doesn’t work.
The first thing that I had to do when I was mulling through how to approach it is I needed to get some advice from people that had been in the industry for a long time. I approached my boss and said the way that we’re doing this, it hurts my heart. I don’t want to work for an organization that I have to come to work with my heart hurting.
And he was like, wow, there isn’t a better way to visualize what you just said. He was like, I get it. And I appreciate it because as public information officers, part of our job is to be the conscience of the organization. So, we discussed it and the responsibilities that we have, and we really came out with how we can approach the operations team.
At the end of the day, the reason the operations person was approaching it this way is because he thought he was doing the best customer service that he could. If you get a call from the public that says, I’m getting bitten alive, I might get sick, what are you going to do?
He immediately thought I should treat everything. So, when we started talking about the best ways to approach those, that turned into smaller chunks of a bigger conversation. Instead of starting with spraying everything immediately, why don’t we start doing inspections and then create the steps from there?
It was really helpful to have a sounding board, I also am very blunt and bold. I have a tendency to start saying stuff before I probably should. It’s very good to have that sounding board and actually get my thoughts down that were going to be well received rather than just saying my piece and speaking at them rather than with them.
I call it taking the ten-pound sledgehammer, which is what I’d often do as well. It works. But it’s not always the best tool.
Showing my ignorance here, you also talk about water mitigation. I understand California is also having a lot of drought issues. Is there anything that you have to balance there in terms of people not wanting to get rid of their water because of the drought?
We work a lot with our water districts as well, because we actually have a lot of the same messages. We don’t want to completely get rid of all the water usage.
We want responsible water usage. We work with cities to change some of their ordinances. We call it urban drool, when you have sprinkler systems that go into the streets. Those tend to go down through the gutters and that causes mosquito problems in the catch basins, but it’s out of sight, out of mind.
If we’re working with our cities and their ordinances to say urban drool is actually a bad thing, then we get that multi-layered approach of it’s bad for mosquito production, bad for water conservation, and makes our city a worse place to live.
When it comes to the state laws, I can’t remember the exact percentage but our water districts are saying that the homeowners associations have to decrease their water usage by such a high percentage that they’re suggesting brown outs, where you basically just choose a water system line to not water anymore.
Either they can do that, so they get to choose what areas get less water, or once that law comes into place, the water district’s just going to come in and start shutting off your water. You don’t get to choose. For us, we also want that to be a partnership, we don’t want to have to come in and say, here’s the law, it’s against the law for you to have urban drool.
Here’s your ticket, here’s your fine. That’s not a good way to build a community. No. We tell them, here’s what the law is. We hope that you’re going to follow this law. We’re going to be keeping an eye on you, right? Make that into a what can we help you with – rebates and things like that.
Help people to get where we want them to be, rather than just being that enforcement or, giant sledgehammer that just comes in and says, do what we say all the time.
That’s a key point in terms of just making sure you’re understanding where folks are coming from and really building empathy and two-way connection.
Beyond mosquitoes, which I’m sure we could talk about for probably a lot longer, what are you seeing as some of the key ethics challenges for today and tomorrow?
The polarization of politics has just been crazy {This interview was conducted in 2024]. When I got my master’s degree in communications and public administration it was during a presidential campaign. It was fascinating to be a student during such a polarized situation.
It’s exhausting though, to be honest. It was so exhausting that it ruined me for wanting to pay attention to politics from then on, which is also harmful because as a responsible voter, I need to be paying attention to that type of stuff.
What I found when I got into mosquito control was that both sides that are so far polarized are using the exact same argument against the other. It is verbatim the same thing. It’s this side doing it to us. Oh, it’s this side, doing it to us, the same thing, and they’re pointing the finger in the other direction.
It’s fascinating to me. I don’t understand how mosquito control is political, but all that’s just the world that we live in. And that’s been really tough. Pretty much anything we come across is that there has to be some sort of conspiracy theory behind it that somebody has to bring up.
I like to tease my dad who loves to bring up conspiracy theories to me. I tell him, dad, I’ve been in government service for over a decade. We’re not that smart. We don’t get together and work together the way that you think that we do. It’s more, what’s the right hand doing, what’s the left hand doing?
I think it’s really harmful for the rest of us going forward. That polarization of what’s happening with our systems today.
What are you doing to try to fight polarization?
That’s a great question. What I find when it comes to behavioral science is not saying anything is saying “Yes.” So, I immediately have to shut it down in the politest way possible. Depending on where the conversation is going, it is really important to make sure that they understand where our work comes in and how that shouldn’t be part of the political conversation. It’s public health. It’s to protect people.
The biggest thing that I try to get my team to not say “Oh, really? That’s interesting.” Don’t feed into that fire because they’ll think that you are agreeing with them. Then trying to convince them that you don’t agree with them is much more difficult than it would be just from the beginning to say, I might have heard that, but here’s what’s actually happening. That bridging back to the most important things that you want to talk about that day, that’s not exactly true or not entirely true. Let me point you in the direction of something that is really sound.
A compliment to polarization is misinformation, correct?
Absolutely. Misinformation is difficult because people don’t understand that they’re spreading the lies.
It’s the disinformation that is really tricky as well. People that are purposely hurting the message. And we found that a lot with Covid too. The messages just went crazy and then they started latching on to different things in our work as well. Trying to make people understand that sharing things that you don’t know are true is really the worst thing that you can do.
But what we also love is that now we’re a good, strong partner with our community. It’s a lot of self-policing. A lot of times I’ll be posting things on social media, let’s take Nextdoor, who is the rumor mill of the social media world.
I can post something there and immediately you’ll get negative comments. I no longer have to respond to anything because everybody else comes in and says, no, that’s not true. Here’s what you should be looking at. Here’s the real information. So that’s been really helpful to be part of that community that has that support from the rest of the community.
So, you know that you can put information out and those negative people will get reprimanded by the people that understand what’s actually happening.
It goes build trust, build connections that’re going to benefit you, so you have it. It’s fundamentals there. And I understand my agency, we did most of the covid comms for the State of Washington, so I’m very familiar with a lot of the things that you’re talking about. It’s the best work I’ve ever done in my career, but it’s definitely been some challenges as well.
What is the best piece of ethics advice you ever received?
It really is to ask for advice. As much as I want to think that I’m right all the time, and as my husband will tell you, I usually am. But I might not always have the perfect answer to things. I might not always be in the right mindset to react to something properly. So, getting advice from somebody else, particularly people that have either gone through it before or have a little bit of stability in whatever industry you’re in is really helpful.
We do a lot of work we’re highly regulated. We have a whole lot of regulations and reports that have to go out that I don’t always understand. So, when somebody comes to me and says, we need to make sure that we are reporting this out the way that it should be.
It opens up the conversation of, oh, so we need to change the way that we’re thinking about the work that we do so we can stay in compliance with certain regulations. It’s really a fascinating thing when it comes to ethics in my world, being that pesticide and being that environmental steward into who else can give you that advice on what’s the best approach to go and doing the work that we need to do.
Beyond the advice and the perspective, it uncovers the biases. We’re human, we all have ’em, and we’re not going to be aware of what they are. Until somebody else helps us check.
100%. That’s so difficult. But again, like being a beekeeper, right? That was probably one of the trickiest things is like being like, okay, so I know that pesticides kill bees.
So, what are you going to do about it? Having that open conversation with people helps me understand. Why we do the things we do and how to mitigate any of those issues that might come with beneficial insects and things like that. But without interrupting the work that we do.
As we were talking, I had a random thought pop into my mind, and that is in terms of transparency and authenticity and truth and communications, and thinking back to the commercials where the person is in the tent with all the mosquitoes that say this bug spray works perfectly, and you find out later they had only male mosquitoes in the tent because only female mosquitoes bite. Do you consider that to be ethical or not?
That is such, oh my gosh, how funny. So, what that is probably one of our main messages these days is that only female mosquitoes bite.
So, whether or not you’re in a tent with only male mosquitoes, honestly, I’d probably have to see what the ingredient is, right? Again, all the things that I never wanted to know about bugs. I now know all of the active ingredients that make repellents work properly. Any of those natural essential oils that we are all like, yay essential oils, they actually don’t work, even if you want to say that they do. You put yourself in a tent full of all male mosquitoes. That’s probably a little bit more on the unethical side. I would 100% agree actually. Really funny. I like that.
Is there anything else I didn’t ask you wanted to highlight?
When it comes to ethics there are two sides to everything. So, you have to learn how to align your views into something that will not only make your heart happy, but will also help you go forward as a human. As an environmental steward, I want to go home every day and know that my kids are going to have a good time outside because of the things that we do, not because we’re poisoning people. That shouldn’t even come across your mind. It should be -I did a good job today. I saved lives today by doing the work that we’re doing.
I feel quite honestly that by having some of these more open conversations with people, it is helping us to fulfill that mission.
Listen to the full interview, with bonus content, here:
- Fighting Mosquitoes and Misinformation: Ethics in the Public Health Trenches - July 7, 2025
- How to Effectively Address Management Decisions that Conflict with Your Values – Carolyn Smith Casertano - May 27, 2025
- How to Counsel Effectively When Your Client Has a Culturally Insensitive Idea – Fabiana Meléndez Ruiz - March 10, 2025
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