Department of Environmental Destruction

Promoting Pollution, Concrete and Cronyism

It’s easy to see why there is foam and scum on Florida’s rivers and why the EPA has to step in to head slap the Department of Environmental Protection. The DEP supervises the water management districts. Of the 49 members of the board of the five water management districts, only two (2) have degrees in anything related to water or the environment. Just four have had careers in either forestry or some sort of conservation/enviro position. Only one out of the 49 had an involved background in nature and conservation, Richard Hamann. The others? Real estate brokers, real estate appraisers, real estate consulting, building contractors, sugar cane, etc.

Maryam Ghyabi is a board member of the St. John’s Water Management District. She is CEO and President of Ghyabi & Associates, a planning and engineering firm. Her home page launches into a slideshow giving us views of concrete and steel, malls and acres of parking lots, interstate exchanges, strip centers and condo developments. I would have preferred to see that she was a biologist with a slideshow of some beautiful wetlands, wildlife, and children playing in clean water.

Todd Pressman is Chairman of the Board of the Southwest Florida Water Management District. He is also President of Pressman and Associates and represented “the successful public bidder for what is expected to become the largest Commercial development in Pinellas County.” His firm lobbies for “international engineering firms, to Motorola, to the billboard industry, bio-hazard industrial users, the fireworks industry”. Does this make you feel warm and fuzzy that the people in charge of “environmental protection” are truly protecting the environment? Perhaps they are protecting the real estate developers instead.

Yesterday, U.S. District Judge Alan Gold gave the EPA greater control in protecting the Everglades saying, “the South Florida Water Management District and Florida “have not been true stewards of protecting the Everglades in recent years.”

DEP is proposing to allow Georgia Pacific to discharge waste directly into the St. John’s River. An AP article noted a “100-mile toxic algae outbreak, the worst in Florida's history, in the St. Johns River last year. The green slime halted boat traffic, kept people from swimming and piled dead fish on the river's banks.” Florida filed a lawsuit in December against the EPA in an attempt to halt new water pollution standards. NPR noted in Nov. 2009, “Florida has allowed polluters to voluntarily control their messes, in a weak regulatory program called ‘Best Management Practices.’ The green slime covering the St. Johns River shows, starkly, that they don’t work.”

Governors in Florida appoint the Secretary of the DEP and the board members of the water management districts. Looking at the board member makeup of the Water Management Districts, cronyism, payback, uncontrollable sprawl and neglect of the environment seem to be the mission statement of the governor and the DEP, not “environmental protection”. We should indeed change the name to the “Department of Environmental Destruction” so the results can match the name.