Guest Op/Ed: Socialized Pollution

How would you like your government to tell all of the major polluters in your community (sewage plants, paper mills, phosphate facilities, chemical plants, etc.) that they can dump their pollution in your local waters forever and never have to account for what comes out of their pipes?  It sounds kind of crazy, huh? What if the free-for-all was limited to just the most troubling chemicals for Florida waters?  Would that help?  What if the state and federal government agreed that this is a good idea and that the cost of dealing with the most polluting chemicals would be spread out for everyone to pay, so our biggest polluters would not be troubled with the problem?  Well, the owners of those big discharges into our streams and bays would certainly like that, but what about the rest of us?  Are we ready for socialized pollution? Is more corporate welfare one of your top priorities in these tough economic times?

This is not a theoretical scenario.  This is what is happening in Florida right now.  The federal government has already made it so.  The state has an opportunity to fix this very bad idea and take steps to protect us and our waters from even more pollution in the form of nitrogen and phosphorus (nutrients), which are already choking our waters with toxic algae.  You won’t need to go far in Florida to find a spring, lake, river, and bay that is suffering from too much nitrogen and/or phosphorus.  The result is fish kills, respiratory problems, and slimy, stinky waters.  Even so, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) is determined to protect politically powerful polluters in Florida and make the rest of us pay for their pollution.

On December 1st, the Florida DEP will ask the Environmental Regulation Commission to approve new rules that not only reinforce the new federal law for Florida, but take state waters even closer to destruction.  While the new state and federal pollution rules have numeric limits for the first time, the numbers actually mean very little.  No pollution pipes in the state will be required to meet these numeric limits.  Agriculture is exempt as well Each water body will be sampled throughout the year in various locations.  All the samples will be combined to find an annual geometric mean for each water body (lake, spring, river, etc.).  If the geometric mean is too high for a whole year, then . . . no problem.  If it’s too high for a 2nd year then the federal rule offers numerous ways to change or ignore the limits or simply delay doing anything at all.  The state and federal rules are clear that at no time will discharge pipes be required to meet the new pollution limits.  

In simple language, our rivers and estuaries will become automatic ”mixing zones“ (places in the water where pollution laws aren’t applied) for every polluting industry and sewage plant.  If our waters ever get cleaned up, it will be up to local governments and individual taxpayers to make it happen.  This is socialism at its worst and the exact reason that so many Americans are marching in the streets across our country right now.  If the state of Florida wants to protect its waters from excess nutrients, then it must make sure that every industrial and sewage pipe meets Advanced Wastewater Treatment (AWT) standards for nutrients, at a minimum.  

Now is the time to speak out for the waters that you love and rely on for drinking, fishing, swimming, etc.  Contact your elected officials and let them know how you feel about socialized pollution.  You can also follow this link for more details and a quick and easy way to take action: http://www.cleanwaternetwork-fl.org/actionalerts.php
 
Linda Young
The Clean Water Network of Florida

The Clean Water Network of Florida is 300 environmental, civic and recreational organizations working together to better protect Florida’s waters through implementation and enforcement of the Clean Water Act.  Its mission is to help citizens have an effective voice in decision-making that affects their communities.  Linda Young is the director and can be reached at llyoung2@earthlink.net or 850/322-7978.