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A LIVE OAK TREE DRAPED WITH SPANISH MOSS AT LAKE LOUISA STATE PARK | PHOTO BY KRISTIN RADESCA
CHARLIE FOXTROT Hey, Governor: The Florida DEP’s handling of wetland permits has become a colossal mess. You need to fix this — before the EPA fixes it for you BY CR AI G P ITTMAN
Dear Gov. DeSantis, Hi there! I keep writing you these letters and you keep ignoring them, but I feel I need to be persistent — for your sake. You claim to care about Florida’s environment, but when you talk about it, all you ever say is some version of, “I am throwing a lot of money at some of the problems.” As any child of divorced parents can tell you, “throwing money” is not the same thing as “showing care.” Look, I know you’re busy dodging questions about whether you got a booster shot, waging your crusade to protect sensitive white people from feeling bad about racism, and pretending to ignore Roger Stone’s jibes about you being nothing but “an obscure congressman with a bad haircut and an ill-fitting suit” before his citrus-complexioned friend gave your career a boost. But this is really
important, and not just because it could make a difference in your re-election campaign. You need to do something about the Florida Department of Environmental Protection and how it’s handling wetlands permits. And I mean right now. Remember when the DEP took over federal wetlands permitting in the waning days of the Trump administration, and a lot of environmental groups predicted it would be a disaster? Turns out — surprise! — they were right. By “disaster,” I mean it’s become what you yourself would call a colossal Charlie Foxtrot — the military euphemism for a civilian word that starts with “cluster.” Here’s the problem: When the DEP first took over handling federal wetlands permits from the U.S. Army Corps of
Engineers and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the agencies were all using a very restrictive definition of wetlands. That definition had been written by the Trump administration, revising one from the Obama years. The Trumpian definition removed protections for more than half the nation’s wetlands and hundreds of thousands of miles of upland streams. It did this by changing the definition of what constitutes a “water of the United States” and thus deserving of federal protection. In Florida, that worked out to about 6 million acres of wetlands that suddenly had no federal protection at all. The narrow definition was designed to give developers, miners, loggers, and other wetland destroyers a lot more leeway in what they could obliterate before they ever needed a federal permit. Meanwhile, places where a permit was still required ended up covering far less acreage. That definition was “business friendly,” in the same way that I tend to be “icecream friendly” — feeding a big appetite, but not a healthy habit. In August, though, a federal judge kicked that narrow definition to the curb. She ruled that it suffered from “fundamental, substantive flaws” and warned that it could cause “serious environmental harm.”
orlandoweekly.com
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FEB. 2-8, 2022 ● ORLANDO WEEKLY
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