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Water, Water
By Nancy Klingener
“Water, water everywhere
Nor any drop to drink.”
-- Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Ever heard of the Council of 100? It’s not
something out of Star Wars or Lord of the Rings. It’s a group of some of
Florida’s most influential business folks, handpicked by the Governor to
advise him on how to “promote the economic growth of Florida and improve
the economic well-being and quality of life of its citizenry.”
It’s normally low profile, especially considering
the influence and wealth of its members (who include Chairman Al Hoffman
of WCI, Florida’s largest master-planned developer; Disney President Al
Weiss; and Alberto Ibarguen, publisher of the Miami Herald). Hoffman
also happens to be national finance chairman for the Republican National
Committee and was the chief fundraiser in both of Gov. Bush’s successful
election campaigns.
But the Council has been in the headlines on the
mainland recently, after the St. Pete Times revealed last month that the
group has developed a plan to “reallocate” the state’s water supply,
which is abundant but not in the right place to facilitate what the
Council considers to be Florida’s development potential.
As reported in the Times, according to the
Council’s Water Management Task Force chairman Lee Arnold (a prominent
Clearwater developer), the crux of the problem is that 80 percent of the
state’s water consumption is south of Orlando while 80 percent of the
available supply is north of Orlando.
Their proposed solution: adopt the model of the
wild west and just move water from north Florida’s rivers around to
where you want it. Of course they’d pay for it – and why should a
water-rich, income-poor area like Suwannee County object, with 37,000
residents, per capita income of $14,000 and the Suwannee River just
wasting all that water by flowing into the Gulf of Mexico?
Another problem, according to Arnold: those Water
Management Districts are just too darned focused on the environment.
A report from an expert panel that reported to the
Council’s water task force – an expert panel that included
representatives of developers, utilities and sugar growers – found that
“the evolution of environmentalism has seriously detracted from our
focus and responsibility to ensure adequate water supply,” according to
the Times.
The task force, after hearing from this panel,
“recommended a statewide board to ‘put water supply on an equal footing
with environmental protection and restoration,’” the Times reported.
This unelected task force, hand picked by an
invitation-only Council, has spent the summer hatching this scheme
behind closed doors and out of the sunshine. There will be problems on
the way toward implementing this plan. For one, Florida law does not
currently regard water as a commodity, as it is out west (which has led
to political water wars and environmental disasters, while the desert is
turned green for golf courses and industrial farms and the mighty
Colorado, overcommitted, no longer reaches the sea). Here in Florida, we
actually regard water as a public resource.
There have been earlier runs at attempting to
privatize our water. Even the now-disgraced Enron tried to get into the
act, through its subsidiary Azurix, which a few years back offered to
take over the $8 billion Everglades restoration, if it would gain the
rights to sell the water recovered through the plan. Florida dodged that
particular bullet but apparently has not yet learned its lesson about
the dangers or privatizing public resources.
We in the Keys have a unique perspective on this
matter, because we have been importing our water for more than 50 years.
The pipeline under the Overseas Highway has been a major contributor to
the tremendous development the Keys have seen in the last 50 years.
Along the way, we left behind our thrifty island
ways, when we used cisterns and conservation to live within our means.
Now we depend on a pipeline and wellfields more than 100 miles away, and
we pay hundreds of dollars a year for a resource that falls free from
the sky.
One would think that after all the ecological
disasters that Florida has experienced from developer’s attempts to
replumb Florida’s wetlands and watersheds, that we would have learned
that there’s a limit to what you can squeeze out of nature without
suffering from unintended consequences. The Suwannee and Florida’s other
mighty rivers are nurturing wetlands, estuaries, and myriad species of
fish and wildlife that have evolved within their watersheds. Just as we
are now spending billions to restore a small part of the damage we’ve
done to South Florida, from the Kissimmee River to the Keys reef, why on
earth would we embark on another giant public works program to mess with
the way nature works?
Florida’s history is one of refusing to accept
things as they are, of preferring fantasy to reality – of installing
farmlands in a marsh and fairy-tale castles in the humid fields, of
selling people on the notion of “paradise” whether it’s for a weekend or
a retirement. That’s a tragic shame because Florida on its own terms is
a gorgeous, fascinating, unique, amazing place. If people can can simply
learn to live within our bounteous natural means, we might avoid
environmental catastrophe instead of pushing toward it as hard as we
can.
This water-moving proposal could come to the Florida Legislature as
early as this fall, if it is deemed worthy of a special session. To make
your views on it known, email the Governor at
jeb.bush@myflorida.com. You could also contact our State
Representative, Ken Sorensen, at
Sorensen.ken@myfloridahouse.com or our State Senator, Larcenia
Bullard, at
bullard.larcenia.web@flsenate.gov |
