Environmental groups say latest water bill bad for Florida

Environmental groups across the state are challenging the bill recently signed into law by Gov. Ron DeSantis that is supposed to help clean up Florida's ailing waterways. 

Proponents of Senate Bill 712, also called the Clean Waterways Act, say it will help the state better deal with blue-green algae blooms that have popped up across the Sunshine State in recent years. 

Critics, however, say the bill fails to advance Florida's water quality standards and regulations and is actually worse than having no new water laws at all. 

"It started out with good intentions, taking the Blue-Green Algae Task Force recommendations and trying to convert them into law," said Chuck O'Neal, with Speak Up Wekiva, one of several groups that have filed a legal challenge to the bill. "But as always happens it goes to Tallahassee and gets picked apart until what comes out is worse than the status quo." 

The Blue-Green Algae Task Force is a group of scientists and researchers appointed by DeSantis in the wake of a 2019 executive order. 

The group met several times over the past year and made recommendations on how to remedy some of Florida's water woes. 

"Though perhaps well-intentioned in its initial draft, the final version of this bill became so polluted with the influence of special interest lobbyists that many knowledgeable environmental organizations asked the governor to veto the final version passed by the Legislature" O'Neal said.

Groups like 1,000 Friends of Florida, Waterkeepers Florida, Calusa Waterkeeper, the Sierra Club and others agree with O'Neal, saying the new law may cause more damage to a state that's been ravaged by water quality pollution in recent years. 

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They say the bill doesn't do enough to stop pollution from flowing off local farms and urbanized landscapes, and that the recording of pollution from its sources is still mostly a voluntary program. 

But Gary Ritter, with the Florida Farm Bureau Federation, said the bill did a good job of taking input from the Blue-Green Algae Task Force and putting that information into useful legislation. 

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The federation advocates for farmers. 

"It asks agriculture to do more things, but we’re wrapping our arms around that and we’re ready for that challenge," Ritter said.

The environmental groups have written various letters and proposals to the governor's office, pointing out that the new water bill fails to consider Florida's growing population over the next 20 years. 

Without those updates and projected numbers, critics say, the science will be flawed from the beginning. 

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Florida is growing by nearly 1,000 people per day, according to various estimates, and is expected to reach 26 million by 2030. 

The increased residential and urban areas needed to serve those people will increase the amount of pollution running off local landscapes and add to water quality problems, critics say. 

Cris Costello, with the Sierra Club, said the title of the bill makes it sound as though state leaders have passed laws that will clean Florida's waters.

But really, Costello said, Senate Bill 712 will make conditions worse by failing to address issues like population growth prohibiting local governments from adopting water quality standards that are stricter than those of the state. 

"We fought this thing tooth and nail because we are not interested in just getting what the polluters want us to have," Costello said. "Senate Bill 712 falls so very short of what the state's water resources need that it's tragic. It's a cruel joke, a game being played on Floridians and the folks that are signing onto it know exactly what they're doing." 

O'Neal said the situation is so bad that he'd rather not even bring good ideas forward as bills at this time. 

It would be a waste, he said. 

"I would rather, right now, not even bring anything up  because it comes out worse than it did before they started messing with it," O'Neal said. 

Connect with this reporter: @ChadGillisNP on Twitter.