Disregard the insensitivity Gov. Scott displayed in booking his traveling tax-cut stage show into the headquarters of the South Florida Water Management District where state employees are sweating layoffs. This is a pol who has pined for a month that nobody noticed when he first signed the bill that cedes control of Florida's five water management districts to the Legislature and undermines the districts' capacities to operate by imposing new limits on taxing authority. For this,the man wants cheers.
Just do the math in this drought to understand public skepticism. Spread across 16 South Florida counties, the West Palm Beach-based South Florida Water Management District admittedly has a big tax base. It raised $399 million this year levying 0.624 mills (62.4 cents per $1,000 taxable value) in the "Okeechobee Basin" and 0.4814 (48.14 cents per $1,000) in the two counties of the "Big Cypress Basin." On a house with a taxable value (after exemptions) of $200,000 that's $124.80 per year in Palm Beach County or $10.40 per month. With that I can buy a pizza, but I might not get a free glass of water to go with it in West Palm Beach because that city's water reservoir is nearly dry.
In Naples, Gov. Scott's alleged Florida "hometown," taxpayers aren't asked to freight the cost of operating and maintaining Southeast Florida's drainage system, so the tax burden on the same house would be $96.28 or $8 a month. That's not enough to buy a pizza, but maybe the governor can buy a glass of cheap Scotch at his club.
Of course by next year, it might rain - hard and several times a day for, say, five or six months. If so, we'll all be asking why the South Florida Water Management District hasn't refurbished the drainage system and found more and better places to store water than in our driveways, patios and kitchens.
In fact, before the Legislature convened to face this freshman governor, the district had a plan and a mandate to do just that and more. The plan was adopted unanimously by the 2000 Legislature, with the support of then-Gov. Jeb Bush. It calls for reconstructing Southeast Florida's aging, inadequate drainage system that dumps 1.7 billion gallons of fresh water a day to sea - even when it's desperately needed. It proposes reservoirs and vast water-storing marshes that can filter agriculture and urban runoff so it can be returned to the historical Everglades, revitalizing an ecosystem in sharp decline and recharging the Biscayne Aquifer. The plan is named the "Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan."
Not everyone believes it to be a perfect plan, but it lays out a vision big enough to capture the public imagination. It's worth pursuing- in good economic times and bad - because it provides water for people, agriculture, commerce and the environment.
Just as floods follow droughts, Florida's is, and always has been, a boom-bust economy. It's imperative to maintain the capacity to respond quickly and timely to both challenges. Politically, there's really no defense for an elected official in Florida to be so ignorant of water, the state's defining and most vital natural resource, as to take dead aim on the response capacity of agencies charged with allocating, conserving and protecting water, or - for lack of experience having blundered into the swamp - to be so guileless as to expect to be cheered.
Martha Musgrove is a retired journalist, member of the science advisory committee of the Arthur R. Marshall Foundation and a director of the Florida Wildlife Federation.
Find the article here
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment