Clean Up City of St. Augustine, Florida

In secret, behind locked gates, our Nation's Oldest City dumped a landfill in a lake (Old City Reservoir), while emitting sewage in our rivers and salt marsh. Organized citizens exposed and defeated pollution, racism and cronyism. We elected a new Mayor. We're transforming our City -- advanced citizenship. Ask questions. Make disclosures. Demand answers. Be involved. Expect democracy. Report and expose corruption. Smile! Help enact a St. Augustine National Park and Seashore. We shall overcome!

Sunday, April 20, 2025

Manatee corpses — the price of the ‘freedom’ to pollute in Florida (Scott Maxwell column, Orlando Sentinel, April 18, 2025)

We must regulate polluters better on Incidental Take Permits (ITPs), as a U.S. District Court Judge -- none other than former St. Augustine Assistant City Attorney Carlos Edwardo Mendoza -- recently ruled in finding the Florida Department of Environmental Protection violated the Endangered Species Act.. From Orlando Sentinel:

Maxwell: Manatee corpses — the price of the ‘freedom’ to pollute in Florid

Scott Maxwell column, Orlando Sentinel, April 18, 2025.

A manatee and her calf laze in seagrass that was replanted in Florida's Crystal River as part of an ongoing restoration project. Hundreds other sea cows have died from starvation and pollution that a federal judge says the state never should’ve allowed. (Jason Gulley/Wildpath)

By SCOTT MAXWELL | smaxwell@orlandosentinel.com | Orlando Sentinel

PUBLISHED: April 18, 2025 at 2:46 PM EDT

It’s hard to think of a more defenseless creature than the manatee. The curious marine mammal has no natural enemies — other than man.

Unfortunately, men (and women) in Florida are killing these unique creatures in disturbing numbers via pollution.

A year-long investigation by the Tampa Bay Times on the heels of one by the Orlando Sentinela few years earlier detailed the cruel fates — of manatees rotting from the inside due to starvation, thanks to polluted waters that suffocated their seagrass food source.

In one case, biologists discovered a calf still trying to nuzzle its mother’s malnourished and misshapen corpse. “When researchers cut into the mother’s remains, they discovered much of her fat had wasted away,” the Times reported. “Her gut was watery, as if she’d dissolved from within.”

Hundreds of manatees have suffered similar slow and painful deaths in Florida waters. These docile creatures can often survive parts of their bodies being ripped apart by boat propellers. But they can’t survive starvation.

The Sentinel’s earlier investigation found sea cows so starved, their bones pierced thinned skin. Some had lost so much buoyancy, they could no longer lift their heads above water to take in air.

An unidentified individual stands in a dumpster filled with dead manatees in this update photo from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. (Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission via Tampa Bay Times) — Dead manatees pile up inside a large trash bin near the Indian River Lagoon. Researchers performed examinations on the ground as they hurried to handle an overwhelming number of carcasses. (Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission via Tampa Bay Times)

Florida is a place where the Florida manatee should be able to thrive. Unfortunately, when Florida is entrusted to protect God’s creatures, we often fail to do so.

Instead of preventing pollution, we allow our natural resources to be fouled — often in the name of disdain for regulations and a fondness for “freedom.” We then spend billions of dollars trying to clean up the mess. It is an incredibly backwards way to do things.

Imagine spending $5,000 to lay down new carpet in a living room. Would you:

A) Try not to spill things on the carpet? Or

B) Let everyone spill as much as they want, spend another $5,000 every two years replacing the carpet and then congratulate yourself each time on the duplicative spending?

This state has embraced Plan B over and over. With the Everglades. With the St. Johns River. And with the warm, shallow waters that should provide sanctuary to the state’s official marine mammal.

Lawmakers refuse to put regulations and safeguards in place — and then stage press conferences to pat themselves on the back for awarding billion-dollar contracts to companies trying to clean up messes that never should’ve been allowed in the first place.

This practice may be good for the business community that profits on both sides of the equation — by developing on the cheap and then scoring the clean-up contracts. Not so much for taxpayers. Especially when the costly cleanups, now estimated at more than $20 billion for the Everglades alone, hardly ever result in natural resources as pristine as if the pollution had never been allowed.

Florida’s environmental stewardship has rarely been ideal under leaders from either party. But an all-out assault commenced when Rick Scott took over as governor. Under Scott, the state shut down water-quality monitoring stations, slashed staff at the agencies that check for pollution, curbed enforcement and abolished Florida’s growth-planning agency — all in the name of making Florida more “business friendly.”

Then came Ron DeSantis, whose Environmental Regulation Commission didn’t even meet a single time during his first term, giving you a pretty good idea of just how much regulatingthey did at the time.

If anyone tries to tell you current lawmakers are doing enough, consider that, just this past week, a federal judge ruled Florida had violated the federal Endangered Species Act in its regulation of wastewater discharges. As if the hundreds of manatee corpses weren’t proof enough.

The pollution that’s killing seagrass in places like the Indian River Lagoon isn’t the stereotypical “gluppity-glup and schloppity-schlopp” Dr. Seuss described from factory drains. Instead, it’s often fertilizer and storm water runoff from agricultural operations and residential neighborhoods and discharges from septic tanks and sewer systems.

To stop that pollution, lawmakers would have to stand up to development interests, agribusiness and influential utility companies, something they rarely do. As a result, the Times found that development around the Lagoon alone has led to 3 million pounds of nitrogen and 400,000 pounds of phosphorus.

“For nearly a half-century, lawmakers and environmental regulators in Tallahassee have known that rampant nitrogen and phosphorus contamination wreak havoc on precious Florida waters,” the Times concluded. “But they’ve failed to control runoff …”

Some Republicans have urged state leaders to do more. One is Brian Mast, the Republican congressman from Fort Pierce who also blasted the DeSantis administration’s plans last year to build hotels and golf courses in state parks. “Florida’s legislature needs to act immediately to stop the pollution of our waterways,” Mast told the Times. “Clean water is essential to our way of life; manatees are the canary in the coal mine to larger health problems.”

He’s right. Seagrass, after all, isn’t just food for sea cows. It’s also critical to protecting shorelines from erosion and provides habitats for other sea life.

Mast’s call for action was echoed by his Democratic colleague from Tampa Bay, U.S. Rep. Kathy Castor, who said: “Pollution, overdevelopment, a heating climate and lackluster enforcement of environmental laws pose huge risks to everything that makes Florida special.”

So you have federal officials from both sides of the aisle — along with journalists, a judge, biologists and wildlife protectors — all saying the state needs to stop the pollution in the first place.

Yet we have state lawmakers in Florida allowing the pollution to happen and then staging photo ops every time they spend more of your money to clean it up. It’s wasteful for taxpayers — and deadly for the vulnerable creatures who merely want to survive.

smaxwell@orlandosentinel.com

The pace of manatee deaths picked up in the Indian River of Brevard County in 2022 despite efforts to feed the animals during winter temperatures. (Kevin Spear/Orlando Sentinel file)

1 comment:

Linda said...: Human beings are a cancer to the planet. The biosphere will take millions of years to recover once homosapiens have finally ceased to exist... which is inevitable due to the reckless and warlike nature... and the dodo bird quality.; 5:43 AM

Clean Up City of St. Augustine, Florida

Sunday, April 20, 2025

Manatee corpses — the price of the ‘freedom’ to pollute in Florida (Scott Maxwell column, Orlando Sentinel, April 18, 2025)

Maxwell: Manatee corpses — the price of the ‘freedom’ to pollute in Florid

1 comment:

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