THE NEWS SERVICE OF FLORIDA – By KEITH LAING
THE CAPITAL, TALLAHASSEE, Feb. 15, 2010……….Panhandle residents got their chance Tuesday to let federal water officials know how they feel about proposed new standards for Florida water pollution that have angered the Florida Department of Environmental Protection and the state’s business community.
Following a lengthy legal fight between the state and Florida environmentalists, the federal Environmental Protection Agency has telegraphed that its standards for how much pollution will be allowed in fresh water will be toughened this fall. Florida State University hosted the first of three EPA Florida public hearings scheduled this week on the proposed changes, which would set limits on the amount of pollution containing the chemicals phosphorous and nitrogen, colloquially known as nutrients, in state bodies of water
Under the EPA plan, Florida waters would be grouped with different nutrient allotments depending on the characteristic of the water.
Although the new standards have not yet been finalized, state officials and business leaders have argued they would be too onerous to comply with. Such concerns have been countered by a group of environmental lawyers who brought on the EPA’s consideration of implementing new standards by suing the state for tougher rules, saying Florida had neglected to adequately address water problems itself.
Both sentiments were echoed Tuesday. Among those weighing in was Rep. Ralph Poppell, R-Vero Beach, chairman the House Natural Resources Appropriations Committee, who said that state leaders understand the needs of Florida water better than anyone in Washington, D.C.
“In Florida, we understand water,” Poppell, the hearing’s first speaker, told a panel of officials from EPA’s Office of Water and its Office of Wetlands, Oceans and Watersheds. “We understand soils and we understand our native plants better and certainly care more than anything else and it’s because it is our present and it is our future.”
Poppell said that state lawmakers had devoted resources to improving water quality in Florida for years, negating the need for the feds to step in quickly.
“We don’t print money,” he said. “We absolutely have to extract hard-earned tax dollars from our constituents…in order to do the jobs, so we look at the issue as something of extreme important or else we wouldn’t be working on it. But help us help ourselves…by maybe giving us a little more leeway and a little more time in studying the proposal here.”
“Right now is an absolute bad time to be enforcing something that’s going to cost our state anymore dollars than what we already have,” he continued. “We need to be working toward job creation in order to have a tax base to pay for not only clean water, but our total environment picture.”
There was also political opposition to the standards, voiced by Fort Walton Beach Tea Party member Henry Kelley, who said the party was opposed to the EPA dipping its toes into Florida waters, even though Kelley said the party supported some of the agency’s goals
“We support responsible means to protect our environment and our tax dollars going to build a brand new $60 million wastewater treatment center is tangible proof of our commitment to the environment,” he said. “The EPA was not needed to approve to this new facility, so we question how it can now inject itself into a state and local matter.”
Kelley said strengthening the Florida standards but not those in other states was a “violation of the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution” and said that there was “no clear science” behind the EPA’s proposals.
“In the Florida Panhandle, we’re actually being punished for doing a good job protecting our surface water by having extremely strict” containment levels in drinking water, Kelley said. “You will actually punish Northwest Florida for having the cleanest water in the state. We will have to improve on that because based on this flawed science, the EPA believes that other regions in Florida should be treated more leniently.”
Another critic, Gadsden County farmer Fountain May, said tougher water pollution standards would drive Florida farmers out of business.
“It looks to me like if this goes through, my sons, who would be (the May family’s) sixth generation farmers, would be the last generation,” May told the EPA panel.
May, who owns a nursery in Quincy, said that some water pollution was necessary to have a healthy farm industry in Florida.
“We try to be good stewards of the land and the water, (but) we have to fertilize some,” he said. “We can’t grow anything but kudzu in Florida if you don’t fertilize.”
A few supporters of the EPA’s proposed water pollution standards spoke Tuesday as well. One, St. Johns Riverkeeper Executive Director Jimmy Orth, said the state had time to set its own nutrient limits.
“Florida had 12 years to address this significant problem,” he said. “They have not gone far enough, they have not moved fast enough.”
Orth countered concerns that the economy was not in good enough shape to increase federal regulations by saying that there was also an economic impact to not improving the quality of Florida waters.
“We keep talking about economic impact, but we’re not talking about the economic impacts that are already occurring right now because our waterways are unhealthy,” he said. “This is an investment in the future of Florida.”
Another ardent supporter of the proposed EPA rules, Florida Clean Water Network director Linda Young, said that a lot of the opposition to the water rules on display Tuesday had been ginned up by state officials.
“A lot of what you are seeing here today is the result of many months of organizing that’s been done by the Department of Environmental Protection, the Department of Agriculture and our own state government,” which Young said was holding “meetings around the state with local governments, farmers and other…interests scaring the heebie-jeebies of them about this rule.”
“This is one of the reasons people are angry, because they’ve been misinformed and they have been scared by own taxpayer funded agencies,” Young said. “It’s unfortunate that our state government is working against the federal government for something that should be a lot more cooperative, but that’s what you’re seeing here.”
After holding hearings Tuesday morning and afternoon, the EPA planned an evening session and hearings Wednesday in Orlando and Thursday in West Palm Beach.
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2/16/10