Posted Sep 19, 2018 at 2:01 AMUpdated Sep 19, 2018 at 8:48 AM
  
It’s understandable that Gov. Rick Scott would want to run away from his environmental record. Voters shouldn’t let him.
With a horrific red tide killing marine life and tourism on Florida’s southwest coast, and with toxic green algae bringing misery to the state’s southeast coast on a now-annual basis, it’s understandable that Gov. Rick Scott would want to run away from his environmental record.
Voters shouldn’t let him.
From the moment the health-care multimillionaire swept into office on 2010′s Tea Party anti-tax, anti-regulation wave, he began slashing the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) and the five water management districts, cutting budgets, skilled staff and inspections.
Scott’s administration cut $700 million out of all the state’s water management districts after his first year and crippled their ability to levy taxes. His justification — giving average property owners tax relief — is a joke; the state’s 15 biggest industries, like Florida Power & Light and the Walt Disney Co., got to pocket a combined $1.2 million annually, but homeowners save less than $3 per $100,000.
What got slashed? The state’s network for water monitoring shrank from 350 monitoring sites to 115, according to Florida International University’s Southeast Environmental Research Center. Enforcement of anti-pollution regulations slowed to a crawl, declining by more than 80 percent. The DEP pursued almost 1,600 enforcement cases in 2010, but a mere 220 in 2017, according to Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.
In 2012, Scott repealed a law requiring septic-tank inspections. Now, only 1 percent of Florida’s 2.6 million septic tanks get inspected, and scientists say that pollution from leaking septic tanks adds fuel to toxic algae blooms.
Yet Scott is trying to fool voters into thinking that Sen. Bill Nelson, the Democrat whom Scott is trying to unseat on Nov. 6, is to blame for the algae blooms. A Scott ad contends Nelson has done “nothing” for Lake Okeechobee. It’s supposedly Nelson’s fault that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers hasn’t limited water discharges or fixed the Herbert Hoover Dike.
This is nonsensical double-talk. The dike’s condition and the rate of discharges have nothing to do with the pollutants in the water in Lake Okeechobee. Letting all that phosphorus and nitrogen into the water to begin with — that’s the problem. And that’s on Scott.
The same Scott, by the way, who didn’t buy an available 153,200 acres of U.S. Sugar land, which would have given that water someplace else to go. Backing off that deal, in 2015, was a blow to Everglades restoration.
The list goes on. In 2011, Scott abolished the Department of Community Affairs, which protected the state from bad development and gave the environment a vote in land-use decisions. He slashed funding for land conservation under the Forever Florida program, and later joined enthusiastically in the Florida Legislature’s nickel-and-diming of Amendment 1, the wildly popular ballot measure that is supposed to be generating hundreds of millions of dollars each year for environmental protection.
Most egregiously, the governor of the state most endangered by sea-level rise allegedly barred the very mention of climate change.
This governor should not escape judgment for these past eight years. And any Floridian who cares about the environment should demand answers for such a putrid environmental record.