NEWS PRESS
April 25, 2007

Bills hurt local clean water efforts

http://www.news-press.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070425/OPINION/70424073/1015

We need the Legislature to help fight pollution, not handcuff local governments trying to wage that war for their citizens. The issue has sharp impact in Lee County, where the addition of excess nutrients from fertilized lawns and farm fields has triggered devastating algae blooms.

Two bills pending in the Legislature, HB 1197 and SB 1952, contain an especially pernicious amendment that just might pre-empt local government efforts to regulate the use of fertilizers on lawns and other landscapes. Critics, including Lee County commissioners, Sanibel council members and a posse of environmentalists, say it’s being done on behalf of a fertilizer industry wary of locals just a bit too eager to clean up their water. That’s us.

This is crucial to efforts to reduce nutrients in the Caloosahatchee and its estuary. Huge releases of polluted fresh water from Lake Okeechobee in recent years caused algae blooms that smothered sea grasses, soaked up oxygen and otherwise devastated the coastal environment. But fertilizer washing from farms, golf courses and lawns downstream from the lake also hurt.

The amendment in question sets up a “Consumer Fertilizer Task Force” within the Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, weighted to agriculture and fertilizer industry representatives. In the name of “sound horticultural science,” the amendment would subordinate local regulatory efforts to the state.

Nothing in Florida law should make progressive local governments desperate to protect water quality pull back to conform to less aggressive state regulations. This is especially true as local governments struggle to conform to impending new water quality standards.

Let our leaders in Tallahassee know you want this monster strangled in its crib.