OUR VIEW: Florida’s watered-down bill for water quality

For environmentalists in Florida, it was a force of nature, exacerbated by humans, almost too well-timed to be true: a wretched summer of harmful algal blooms that galvanized voters just ahead of the 2018 election.

This election gave us a Republican governor and other representatives in Tallahassee who demonstrated a newfound interest in preserving and restoring the state’s supply of uncontaminated water. The widespread economic devastations stemming from those noxious blooms brought the cause of environmental stewardship as close as it may ever come in Florida to status as a bipartisan priority.

Scientists, blessedly, were consulted and research projects were funded and launched. All over the state, local governments paid more attention to their own roles in water quality degradation. Among the reckonings: an acknowledgment that many municipalities and counties had deliberately dawdled on sewage infrastructure investments as a way of discouraging growth — resulting in a patchwork of failing systems and septic tanks.

And finally, folks in Florida began to have serious discussions about the part that fertilizers — both agricultural and residential — play in polluting our waterways and coastlines.

The most likely upshot of all this refreshing willingness to face reality is now headed to the Senate floor. The Clean Waterways Act — SB 712 — is a bulging portmanteau of a bill that aimed high but landed somewhere below sea level, to the dejection but not surprise of Florida’s dedicated water watchers.

After all the flash and dazzle about making a serious commitment to water quality, and a thorough airing of the complex relationships between our use of natural resources and their capacity to withstand such use, this proposed fix is disappointingly modest in scope.

As Herald-Tribune Political Editor Zac Anderson reported Thursday, environmental advocates have not given up trying to insinuate more real-world solutions into the bill, including language that would make the agricultural industry more responsible for its share of the clean-up effort. But the consensus seems to be that 712 will be better than the nothing that got us into our red and blue-green predicament.

“It’s the water quality bill most likely to become law,” said 1000 Friends of Florida President Paul Owens this week. “In the current political environment, we may not get a stronger bill.”

And the current political environment — like our increasingly vulnerable natural environment — is a given that calls on us to make whatever progress looks feasible. Owens, who pointed out that Florida “loses 10 acres of open land every hour to development,” added that the 2019 Legislature’s failure to address water quality wasted a year we could not afford to squander.

We are on the clock here, running well behind, and forward motion is our only hope.

There are components of this legislation worth celebrating, without excessively congratulating ourselves: a much better process for regulating septic systems. More money for local governments to upgrade their wastewater treatment facilities. And, perhaps the best part, more reporting requirements and useful information about a nasty fact of life in Florida that we have averted our attention from for far too long.

The Herald-Tribune Editorial Board