DeSantis Signs Bad Water Bill

Name: JOIN US! OSFR Monthly Board Meeting – PUBLIC WELCOME!
Start: 2024-07-24
End: 2024-07-24
Location: Rum 138

July 2, 2020 Environmental Threats, State Government Threats, Water Quality Threats, Miscellaneous, Water Quantity (Threats) by Friends & Other Advocates Leave a Comment

tallycleanwtrmike In: DeSantis Signs Bad Water Bill | Our Santa Fe River, Inc. (OSFR) | Protecting the Santa Fe River

OSFR President Mike Roth addresses the legislative committee and urges them to vote down SB 712. Photo by Jim Tatum.

In spite of the glowing words of Florida’s Governor and the Secretary of the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP,) the best description of this bill is the word FAILURE. Failure to protect and a continuation of unmet environmental needs in Florida.

Agriculture is not “singled out” as expressed below, rather it gets a free ride since it is a major pollution source which is not addressed with a plan for a solution nor any enforceable regulations. The Basin Management Action Practices (BMAPs) are ineffective in protecting our waters, as admitted by the DEP and proven by the fact that in the Lower Santa Fe River nitrates have actually increased in the six years that the current BMAP has been in effect.

This article emphasizes with two paragraphs the inspections required in the bill, but Ryan Smart of Florida Springs Council points out that the bill requires farmers to employ practices “…that the DEP already knows don’t work — a waste of time and resources our waters and taxpayers cannot afford.” (See Ryan Smart’s article here.)

Kudos to Marlowe Starling for mentioning that 50 environmental groups urged DeSantis to veto this bad legislation, for mentioning OSFR and quoting President Mike Roth, and for writing about the devastating rider that prohibits local governments from ruling on environmental legal rights to nature.

In our opinion, taking this freedom from us is the single worst aspect of the bills and is an unfortunate continuation of the trend in Tallahassee of taking power away from local governments and making us subject to the whims and dictates of the corporations which run our state.

The heavy influence of industry is the reason our state “protective” agencies are allowing our water resources to slowly decline and die even as these same agencies tout their achievements as we see in these newspaper articles.

A comparison of the water quality and the flow of our springs and rivers now and and a few years back shows that this slow demise is constant and real.

In contrast to Starling, other reporters emphasized far fewer aspects. Renzo Downey of Florida Politics, Tania Rogers with Scott Sutton of News Region N Palm Beach County and Richard Teribou of the Orlando Sentinel had only praise for DeSantis and SB 712 with no mention of opposition from any of the 50 environmental groups. Only one side of the story was available to readers.

However, the News Service of Florida (which we took from My Panhandle) devoted a good portion of their report to the strong opposition to the exaggerated claims by the State, citing the Florida Springs council, David Cullen of Sierra Club, St. Johns Riverkeeper, Jen Lomberk of Waterkeepers Florida, and Florida Conservation Voters.

DeSantis Signs Sweeping New Environmental Law For Cleaner Water

By Marlowe Starling

June 30, 2020 Environment, Fresh Take Florida

MIAMI – Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law Tuesday a proposal expected to improve water quality across the state.

The Republican governor called the measure “one of the most significant pieces of substantive legislation in quite some time,” but environmentalists said it falls short of efforts necessary to protect Florida’s waters.

The new law, known as the Clean Waterways Act, takes effect July 1 and aims to remedy some of the state’s most egregious water pollution.

It will transfer the state’s septic system oversight from Florida’s Department of Health to its Department of Environmental Protection by 2021. It also creates a wastewater grant program to help the environmental agency fund projects known as Basin Management Action Plans in areas especially vulnerable to nutrient pollution.

“All these changes are a really strong step forward for Florida’s environment,” DeSantis said Tuesday at a press conference in Juno Beach.

The bill also prohibits local governments from granting the environment legal rights, including to plants, wildlife and bodies of water. The move preempts the so-called Rights of Nature movement that in the U.S. and elsewhere has sought or used the maneuver to improve environmental protections for rivers, mountains, forests, glaciers and more.

Another provision, which won’t go into effect until July 2025, prohibits wastewater treatment facilities from dumping untreated sewage into Indian River Lagoon, south of Cocoa Beach, along the Atlantic coast, one of Florida’s hotspots for brown tide.

“We have a full-fledged environmental movement going on here in Florida that I think the nation is paying attention to,” said Noah Valenstein, the state’s secretary for environmental protection.

Environmentalists said the new law isn’t tough enough on agriculture, a politically powerful influence in Florida and one that is responsible for the vast majority of nutrient pollution in Florida’s waterways, a leading cause of harmful algal blooms. The budget the governor approved this week allocates $25 million for the upcoming fiscal year to combat the blooms and red tide.

Despite widespread support among legislators, 50 environmental groups within and outside the state urged DeSantis earlier this year to veto the bill. In a letter, the groups said that “far from fixing these problems,” the measure was a symptom of serious environmental failures.

“What this bill has done is give the status quo of another five, 10, 15 years of water pollution,” said Sierra Club Florida lobbyist David Cullen. “It’s not a success. Allowing it to go forward only gives cover to the fact that the state will not do what needs to be done.”

The legislation requires the Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services to conduct inspections of farmers and ranchers every two years, with a focus on vulnerable areas like Indian River Lagoon, the Caloosahatchee River and Estuary in South Florida, Silver Springs in north central Florida and Lake Okeechobee. The department is also required to report fertilization and nutrient records from agricultural producers to the Department of Environmental Protection and collaborate with research institutions to strengthen and fund nutrient reduction projects.

One of the bill’s biggest accomplishments involved employing more agriculture department experts to conduct inspections, said Samual J. Ard, a lobbyist for the Florida Cattlemen’s Association. He said he was glad to see the bill focus on multiple sources of pollution, saying it’s hard to compare the impact of one cow per six acres with one septic tank per acre sitting near a canal.

The director of the Office of Agricultural Water Policy, Chris Pettit, said in an interview the state will add eight employees as part of the effort. Negotiations started a year ago, he said.

“It does take time,” Pettit said.

Ard said rising costs of fertilizer and factors like weather, soil composition and location mean fertilizer isn’t dumped onto land in mass amounts, contrary to popular perception. Grazing cattle extracts phosphorus from the soil, he said, keeping the land in better shape than would a developed property.

Ard called the bill an “olive branch,” noting bipartisan support between the Republican Senate and Democratic Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried.

“It’s very, very hard to pass a bill of any kind, so when you get something this broad, it’s a feat to have it passed,” Ard said.

Water-quality problems are complex in Florida, with its burgeoning population growth, said Mary Hartney, president of the Florida Fertilizer and Agrichemical Association, which promotes responsible use of pesticides and fertilizers.

“You cannot have that many people love living in Florida and not have an environmental impact,” she said. “I hate to see agriculture get singled out for these water quality issues.”

In a letter to state Chief Science Officer Thomas Frazer, the Florida Springs Council, Sierra Club Florida and Waterkeepers Florida organizations criticized the bill’s provisions, saying they were unable to achieve state water quality goals.

“It is the policy equivalent of slapping a Band-Aid on a gunshot wound,” the letter said. “It may not hurt, but it won’t really help.”

Ryan Smart, executive director of the nonprofit Florida Springs Council Inc., complained that while the Clean Waterways Act addresses many of the state’s water quality problems, it prioritizes projects in South Florida, the state’s most-populous region.

Jen Lomberk, the Matanzas Riverkeeper executive director, said the bill was “watered down into something that really falls short of what’s needed,” adding that it shouldn’t be characterized as a solution to all of Florida’s water quality problems.

The bill was sponsored by Sen. Debbie Mayfield, R-Melbourne, who also sponsored other environmental bills this legislative session. Her assistant said Mayfield worked more than two years to develop the proposal with recommendations from the Blue-Green Algae Task Force and will continue to be an advocate for the environment….

Michael Roth, president of Our Santa Fe River Inc., an environmental group in north central Florida, has been passionate about granting legal rights to the environment and was disappointed to see the Legislature block those efforts.

“It cuts off the hands of anybody that might want to do something about the environment if the state decides not to do anything,” he said. “Time is running short.”

___

This story was produced by Fresh Take Florida, a news service of the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications. The reporter can be reached at mstarling@freshtakeflorida.com

ommunications. The reporter can be reached at mstarling@freshtakeflorida.com

Tags: over-pumping, excess fertilizer, AG, Tallahassee Leadership, Tallahassee Leadership

Friends & Other Advocates

View articles

Friends & Other Advocates - Part of Our mission here at Our Santa Fe River is to inform the public about issues pertaining to the water quality and quantity of the Santa Fe River. We do that in many ways including posting articles here on Our website. To that end, we use many articles from many different sources.

So we send out a huge THANK YOU to all of those friends and other advocates who give their time and energy by writing about what matters most to us, protecting Our Santa Fe River and letting us republish those items here on our website.

DeSantis Signs Bad Water Bill

Friends & Other Advocates

You might be interested in …

Same ol’ Sick Excuses to Help Beruff

Editorial: State leaders culpable in algae crisis

Another Farmer Success Story

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Make Our Voice Louder

Donate with PayPal

We Are Social

Get in on the Conversation

Upcoming Events

JOIN US! OSFR Monthly Board Meeting – PUBLIC WELCOME!

SRWMD Monthly Board Meeting

JOIN US! OSFR Monthly Board Meeting – PUBLIC WELCOME!