Something new: three DEP employees have been placed in the job of Executive Director at the Suwannee River, Northwest Florida, and South Florida Water Management Districts. This is unprecedented. Until the administration of Governor Rick Scott, the district Governing Boards were very leery of hiring someone from the Governor’s Office or the Florida Department of Environmental Protection.
The districts always have wanted to select an Executive Director with the same focus they have. They stayed away (except in one case) from selecting an E.D. whose loyalties were divided between the district and the state. It made sense to have at the district someone as committed to that side of water issues as DEP would be to its side. Disagreements between the regional and state level of water management sometimes became very public, as they should be. With these new appointments and a host of other top-down policies, we will see only one side of issues–the state side.
Florida effectively now has a unified state Department of Water Management rather than a state water agency that works in partnership with regional water agencies. If you want to know who is making decisions on important water permits, it isn’t the local water management district in public meetings. Tallahassee uses private meetings and phone calls to direct all of the critical choices.
There goes a resource that belongs to all the people, the animals and the environment, sold to the highest contributors. The Council of 100 tried to do this for years with Jeb Bush, now Scott and crooked legislators have done it.
Thanks to all the people who voted for a man that was head of a company that robbed Medicare.
So the balance tips again to a strictly one-sided view of critical resource management issues in a political setting that absolutely demands open discourse. Why are we surprised?
As so often happens, the more dire the environmental circumstances, the more tightly the powers of money and exploitation firm up their grip on maintaining status quo. Just when it seems that Florida residents are beginning to recognize the death of many of Florida’s iconic springs, so the Governor tightens the noose around sensible and innovative water use planning. The time for a moratorium on the MFL process and a recovery-based water use system to be implemented. But as usual, it must come from us – from the community of citizens, friends and organizations committed to Florida’s water future.
It is all a “conspiracy theory”: http://www.thefloridacurrent.com/article.cfm?id=27935043