Secret Florida water summit lets polluters talk to government without press or public present

If I were the king of Florida, there’d be a statue of J. Emory “Red” Cross in front of every government building. Red Cross was a state senator from Gainesville who became the Father of the Sunshine Law.

Cross was a classic Florida character. He strolled the marble halls of Tallahassee clad in a white suit, often with a flower pinned to his lapel. He invented his own nickname to make sure the voters remembered him when it was time to cast their ballots.

He spent a decade pushing to pass the Sunshine Law. For nine years, he couldn’t even get the bill out of committee. He saw the need for a law requiring open government after he discovered that some of his colleagues had found out the route for a major highway, bought the land needed, and sold it to the state for a tidy profit.

“The people were getting ripped off by secret meetings, not knowing what public officials were doing behind closed doors,” Cross told the Gainesville Sun in 2004.

Which brings us to U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds’ top-secret water quality summit last week.

Donalds, R-Nincompoop, is all over TV these days boosting the candidacy of that smelly Palm Beach club owner who’s a convicted felon. The respect is mutual. The Republican presidential nominee recently referred to Donalds, who is Black, by announcing, “That one is smart!”

Yet Donalds did something last week that looks anything BUT smart.

He convened what he called “the First Annual Florida Water Quality Summit” in the Lee County Commission chambers in Fort Myers. He decreed that it would be “off-the-record and closed to the press.”

The public wasn’t allowed in either.

Instead, he invited local, state, and federal government officials to this secret session, as well as people to whom, in an op-ed in a Fort Lauderdale-based publication called The Floridian, he referred as “stakeholders from a handful of different industries.”

In case that term is unfamiliar to you, “stakeholder” is not a reference to Dracula’s nemesis, Van Helsing. “Stakeholder” is a common political euphemism that, in this case, means “polluter.”

A Lee County clean water activist named Marsha Ellis told me she didn’t even know about the planned summit until a Fort Myers News-Press reporter called to ask whether she agreed with Donalds’ keeping it secret. Her answer was, “No.”

In fact, she told me, “I’m totally freaked out about it.”

Red Cross would have freaked out, too.

No Captain Planet

Donalds, who makes his living as a Naples financial adviser, is that rare Florida politician who racked up an arrest record BEFORE he was elected to office, not after.

The charges — pot possession and bribery — did not result in jail time. The first led to a pretrial diversion program, so he avoided a criminal conviction. The second resulted in a conviction, but it’s been legally expunged. That allowed him to run for the Florida Legislature in 2016 and then Congress in 2020.

When he first sought a congressional seat four years ago, the News-Press asked him for his position on clean water and here’s what he said:

“We need to make sure that we fund the necessary projects in order to clean our waterways. Clean water is bipartisan. Actually, clean water is nonpartisan. Our economy and our environment both thrive when we have clean water in our area.”

Sounds good, doesn’t it?

Yet in office, Donalds hasn’t exactly been Captain Planet. The League of Conservation Voters has given his voting record a rating of just 3%. That’s a score so low, it reminds me of some of my college test results.

As a federal official, Donalds is not covered by Red Cross’ Sunshine Law. But you don’t have to possess a keen, green legal mind like She-Hulk, Attorney at Law to see how he enabled others to break it.

He put a bunch of state and local officials in a room with polluters and their paid representatives, where they could chat while hidden from prying eyes. But I’m sure no conversations occurred that would counter efforts for clean waterways, right?

“Water quality and clean drinking water are two issues of huge public concern, and to think public officials would attend a meeting of this importance and fail to include the press is absurd,” Barbara Petersen of the Florida Center for Government Accountability told the News-Press.

In his op-ed, Donalds wrote that without the press and public present, “The nature of this relaxed setting will assist with fostering an atmosphere for honest, open, and needed discussions without the crippling worry of misspeaking or being taken out of context, thereby preserving the integrity of the conversation.”

Yes, that’s MUCH more important than preserving public access to public officials who are supposed to be working on behalf of the public that pays their salaries.

I tried repeatedly to reach Donalds or his staff to ask them lots of questions about his secret summit, but they didn’t respond. Perhaps they were still busy playing hide and seek. The News-Press ran into the same cone of silence.

“Donalds’ communications director … did not respond to a request by The News-Press/Naples Daily News for a list of attendees, information on how the event was funded, whether Donalds and the speakers, many of whom are government officials at the state, local, or federal levels, donated their time, where the event took place, if Donalds’ staff worked to set up the event, and more,” the paper reported.

Sure sounds like everything was on the up and up, doesn’t it?

Twenty Minutes

There’s no recording or transcript of Donalds’ secret summit — that would hurt the secrecy, you see. But I tracked down and talked to several people who were permitted to be part of it, and they supplied me with some interesting insights about this little shindig.

When he opened the session — under a portrait of a rather disappointed-looking Robert E. Lee — Donalds “said a lot of good things,” Dave Tomasko, executive director of the Sarasota Bay Estuary Program, told me. “He kept saying that clean water is a bipartisan issue.”

Tomasko was one of the handful of scientists invited to sit on the summit’s panels. Tomasko told me he was on the last panel of the day, the only one where the discussion turned “feisty.” At one point, the discussion grew so contentious, he asked the moderator, who works for the sugar industry, if she was mad at him.

The disagreement resulted because, he said, “you can’t separate water quality from climate change anymore because of how climate change is affecting rainfall patterns.”

Yet state officials don’t want to talk about that, now that the governor and Legislature have deleted most mentions of climate change from state law, he said.

It would have been a good discussion for the crowd to hear, he told me, but by then roughly half had already left.

One of the conference attendees who’d departed early: Donalds.

One of my sources told me he saw the congressman skedaddle out of his own summit after just 20 minutes.

All wet

To me, the most intriguing panel for the secret summit was the one on federal wetlands permits.

You may recall that Gov. Ron “I Met with the CEO But Otherwise Had Nothing to Do with That Terrible Plan to Put Golf Courses in State Parks” DeSantis OK’d the state taking over the job of issuing federal wetlands permits.

When that request went to Washington, the former coal industry lobbyist who headed the Environmental Protection Agency under Trump said OK on his way out the door. Thus, for three years, state officials handed out those permits with all the care and consideration of the folks on the Gasparilla Parade floats tossing beads to the cheering crowds.

Then, a federal judge put a stop to this. He ruled that state officials were routinely doing an end-run around the Endangered Species Act. That way they could rubber-stamp developers’ permits just as fast as possible.

The judge’s decision stopped a couple of really bad developments, one in Lee County, the other in Collier, that could have doomed the Florida panther to extinction.

So, what sort of panel did Donalds put together to discuss this? The list I saw included two former secretaries of the Florida Department of Environmental Pffft — er, excuse me, “Protection”: Herschel Vinyard Jr. (who worked under former Gov. Rick Scott) and Noah Valenstein (who worked for DeSantis). You can probably guess their position on this issue.

Joining them were state Rep. Toby Oberdorf, R-PaveOverEverything, who works as vice president of an engineering and environmental consulting firm; a waterfront development consultant; two lawyers for developers, and Lee County’s county manager.

Not one person who might admit the judge’s decision was correct.

“Everybody was in total agreement that they all wanted the state to have control again,” said Capt. Daniel Andrews, executive director and co-founder of Captains for Clean Water, who was on the first panel of the day but stuck around to see some of the others.

In fact, one of the wetlands panel members even presented some … oh, let’s be kind and call it “misinformation.”

“The one thing that stood out was a statement from [a developers’ attorney] who quite emphatically stated wetlands are not related to water quality,” Michele Arquette-Palermo of the Conservancy of Southwest Florida told me.

This is, of course, such a colossal load of baloney it should come with an Oscar Mayer label.

Wetlands are crucial to filtering out pollution from stormwater runoff, not to mention soaking up floods and providing habitat for important species. Asphalt is surprisingly ineffective at any of those tasks.

That’s why wetlands are supposed to be protected from destruction by a rigorous permitting system set up under the (ahem) Clean Water Act.

But Donalds and his staff didn’t want anyone to hear the truth.

It belongs to us

Marsha Ellis, who’s with the League of Women Voters, confronted Donalds about his secret summit at his next public meeting.

“I know developers were included in the conversation,” she told him. The public should be included too, she said.

In responding, Donalds dodged the point of her complaint by talking about the environmental activists he’d invited, too. Without the press present, he said, everyone could “speak freely” and there could be a “robust and thorough conversation” about pollution problems.

“There are a lot of conversations that are not held on the record,” Donalds told her, which may be the scariest thing you’ll hear before Halloween.

The ironic thing about this, Ellis told me, is that the exact same thing happened with Donalds’ predecessor, former Rep. Francis Rooney.

Five years ago, Rooney convened a roundtable of federal, state, and local leaders to discuss harmful algal blooms at Florida Gulf Coast University — and blocked the press and public from attending.

“Nobody wants to keep the media and the people from the facts,” Rooney insisted when the secrecy became a source of controversy. Days later, he called another meeting at which citizens were welcomed. Then he chose not to run for re-election, leaving the seat open for Donalds.

I suppose nobody told Donalds that Rooney had made the same mistake he was making and learned from it. Or perhaps he knew and decided to make it anyway for the benefit of certain people, despite Red Cross’ warnings about the public “getting ripped off by secret meetings.”

Here’s the thing: Unlike the law out West, Florida law says the water doesn’t belong to just one or two people. It belongs to us all.

“Water constitutes a public resource benefiting the entire state,” is what the law says.

That’s why closed-door discussions about the future of our water — its cleanliness and supply — are wrong from the get-go.

I worry about the ethics of any elected official who says it’s more important to let the “stakeholders” feel comfortable about how they talk about abusing those public resources. Frankly, that’s one attitude that someone needs to drive a stake through.

Florida Phoenix is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Michael Moline for questions: info@floridaphoenix.com. Follow Florida Phoenix on Facebook and X.