Election 2018: Did Florida's environment win or lose on November 6?

Did Florida’s environment win or lose in the 2018 midterms?

Many advocates and stakeholders are watching and waiting to see if newly elected (or re-elected) officeholders keep their campaign promises to help heal the state's stressed natural systems.

Certainly, their fragility and importance headlined the lead-up to the recent midterm vote, as red tide and toxic blue-green algae (cyanobacteria) fouled  the Gulf of Mexico and freshwater throughout the region, slaughtering sea creatures, sickening residents and snuffing hospitality jobs.   

Candidates quickly organized town-hall meetings. Nonprofits marched. State agencies stayed on the sidelines, to the dismay of activists.

Yet once it was time to vote, “the algae and the red tide issues sort of dissipated,” said FGCU political science professor Peter Bergerson. “I think the appearance of the president at the very end dominated the turnout.”

It’s not that the environment didn’t matter to voters, Bergerson said; it just mattered less than other issues.

 “If you look at the exit polls, it wasn’t top-of-mind,” he said. “Jobs, the economy and immigration were. I think that (conservative voters’) attachment to traditional party loyalties overcame their commitment to the environment.”

For many water champions, gloom was the order of the day after.

“I’d say almost all water advocates are dismayed at the election results,” said Calusa Waterkeeper John Cassani. “(We’re) not feeling good about Florida’s future with those elected.”

More:John Cassani named Caloosahatchee Waterkeeper

Not unexpectedly, Southwest Florida Republican legislative incumbents U.S. Rep. Francis Rooney of Naples and Florida House members Dane Eagle of Cape Coral, Ray Rodrigues of Estero and Heather Fitzenhagen of Fort Myers breezed back into office. 

Fitzenhagen's opponent, political newcomer and physician Parisma Taeb, who made water her central campaign issue, said her loss points to an entrenched system.

“As long as corporate money and dark money polluters are funding campaigns and politicians, there is very little chance that things will change for the better,” she said. “And if politicians refuse to believe in climate change or refuse to believe in science-based evidence, things will not get better.”

Fitzenhagen's office did not respond to requests for comment.

Others urged advocates not to lose sight of what progress has been made.

“We can't just hand off our democracy. You can't just trust that once somebody is elected, they're going to do the right thing because they got elected. It's up to you and me, it's up to all of us."

— Rae Ann Wessel, Sanibel-Captiva Conservation Foundation

“We have to remember we are living now in a time when there are a whole series of Everglades ecosystem restoration projects coming to fruition and ready to be finishing up,” said Rae Ann Wessel, natural resources policy director for the Sanibel-Captiva Conservation Foundation. “It seems like molasses for those of us who have been living it, but you have to celebrate that those things are coming together.”

Another positive to come from the water crisis is “all these concerned people coming out of the woodwork, groups forming like Captains for Clean Water,” Wessel said. “I’ve said, ‘Don't let a good disaster go to waste.’ We need to be pulling together a set of expectations for the new administration.”

And ultimately, Wessel said, as long as residents stay engaged, there will be progress.

“We can't just hand off our democracy. You can't just trust that once somebody is elected, they're going to do the right thing because they got elected,” she said. “It's up to you and me, it's up to all of us. We will get the government that we allow … So now, we keep the pressure up, we become partners, we become educators, we praise them when they do something that serves the public interest and we call them out when they do something that is against the public interest.”

More:Researchers in town testing residents for exposure to algae toxins

Relying on politicians to accomplish environmental goals may be overrated anyway, Bergerson suggests. Rather than electing people to be agents of change, he contends a more effective approach is creating specific initiatives or referendums, as Lee County voters did with the Conservation 20/20 program.

The environmental community isn’t particularly well-organized, Bergerson said, which works against it at the polls. Consider the tangle of groups working on parallel or intersecting tracks for similar ends. “They’re so disparate, even though there’s a common interest, and politically they’re not engaged.” He compares that to the National Rifle Association, a laser-focused juggernaut that’s singularly effective in advocating for its cause. “They’re a model of organization.”

Both gubernatorial candidates, the unsuccessful Andrew Gillum and the winning Ron DeSantis, kept water front and center of their campaigns, with Republican DeSantis garnering an endorsement from the Everglades Trust.

Both candidates were also in accord at their opposition to fracking, a top legislative priority for the Conservancy of Southwest Florida, which intends to hold DeSantis to his promises.

“We’ll be working with (him) to make sure the commitments made on the campaign trail are not forgotten,” said Nicole Johnson the conservancy’s director of environmental policy. “Having a governor who supports that is certainly going to be helpful in convincing both the House and the Senate to really pursue that.”

Jonathan Webber, deputy director of the nonpartisan Florida Conservation Voters, thinks the Legislature’s support might not even be needed. “I think you can do that by rule, so I would expect him to do that right away.”

Rooney is eager to partner with DeSantis on his environmental priority: the River of Grass, and increasing the southerly flow of freshwater.

“Now that we have all the money we need to complete the Herbert Hoover Dike repairs, I think we need to shift the focus 100 percent towards funding Everglades restoration,” Rooney said, “starting with the EAA Reservoir being the top priority.”

He’s referring to the $1.3 billion Everglades Agricultural Area (EAA) Storage Reservoir, a long-awaited project funded by state and federal agencies that’s now under construction. The 10,500-acre, 23-foot deep reservoir, will hold 240,000 acre-feet of water and include a 6,500-acre stormwater treatment area.

“We need water in (Everglades National) Park, in addition to avoiding discharges into the Caloosahatchee by having storage and transfer south. We need to move the water in the park to hydrate the Everglades (and) the mangroves are receding in Florida Bay, because of sea level rise and salinity changes. So that's another reason to push freshwater south, to combat that. So, we've got a lot of reasons to move all the water we can south."

Rooney said he and DeSantis have always been simpatico, so he expects continued forward motion.

“You know, Ron Desantis has been with me on everything I've tried to accomplish – willingly – in the environmental area. He's on my offshore drilling moratorium bill, trying to make it permanent. He was there with me arguing for the Everglades and leveraging his relationship with the administration and the policy of Rick Scott.

"He was one of three Florida congressmen – me, him and Brian Mast – who voted against the sugar subsidies. We were the only three from Florida who didn't. I just think (the sugar industry) has kind of had a bit of a free ride.”

(In May 2017, Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., offered an amendment to the powerful farm bill that would have backed off the industry’s subsidies and federal protection against foreign competitors. The other 24 members of Florida’s delegation voted to preserve the program.)

In spite of Rooney’s confidence in DeSantis, the national League of Conservation Voters (Webber's group is its Florida affiliate) gave him a failing score of 3 percent for his 2017 voting record in Congress and a lifetime 2 percent score: In 26 votes during 2017, he voted against legislation supporting the environment, including water, 25 times, records show.

And talk of the sugar industry’s special treatment popped up again earlier this month when officials of the South Florida Water Management District approved, with no input from the public or elected officials, extending a lease to a subsidiary of Florida Crystals on public lands south of Lake Okeechobee slated to become a storage reservoir.

Though the current lease was not set to expire until March, the district reupped the deal until March, 2027. Critics say the district should have waited until election results were solidified and a new administration settled before sealing the deal. But former water management district governing board member Mitch Hutchcraft told The News-Press that leasing the land preconstruction was nothing out of the ordinary and a benefit to taxpayers, because it makes money for restoration projects and keeps the land free of exotic plants, which are expensive to remove.

Still, the move drew fierce, immediate criticism from politicians including Fitzenhagen, who called it “an outrage," and environmental groups like the Everglades Foundation, whose CEO Eric Eikenberg called it in a letter to Gov. Rick Scott "illegal, shameful and undemocratic ... a breathtaking effort to thwart the public will, less than 48 hours after a statewide election during which you repeatedly and personally assured the people of Florida of your commitment to protecting Florida’s environment."

Rooney, meanwhile, has a trio of issues in his crosshairs.

“I think we have three existential threats: water quality and pollution of the waters and estuaries, sea-level rise, and too much population,” he said.

Sea-level rise, especially, “is a big deal (and) people don't really understand it. They get mixed up, they think it's a tree-hugger, climate change argument and it is in one way, but it's also very dangerous for low-lying areas. It's not deniable.”

But you can’t deny something you never speak of, which is what concerns Webber of Florida Conservation Voters.

“The biggest issue for us and probably for the state of Florida, is climate change,” he said. “The fact that DeSantis, as well as numerous other candidates state and local did not even mention climate change in any kind of serious way during the campaign we find extremely disturbing.”

Water champions are celebrating what they see as two unequivocal victories for Florida's environment.

Nikki Fried's surprise ascent to the state's commissioner of agriculture seat, despite her opponent Matt Caldwell's backing by the powerful sugar industry, elated advocates, as did the passage of Amendment 9 (banning offshore drilling in Florida waters) "with flying colors," says Matt Schwartz, executive director of South Florida Wildlands Association.

Though his nonprofit will continue to fight inland drilling in the Big Cypress and elsewhere, "I'm still amazed that the oil and gas industry didn’t pour millions of dollars into defeating it, because Amendment 9 means they will never, ever, ever be allowed to drill in the water of Florida ... It’s very rare in environmental issues that you get a final victory, and Amendment 9 is, for all intents and purposes a final victory."

Though myriad other battles remain, Schwartz said, the amendment's success gives him hope. It also demonstrates another important point about the state's electorate.

"Give the Florida voters credit," Schwartz said. "Whenever good environmental legislation is put forward to the people of Florida, they vote for it.

"We’re not as divided as the midterm elections might indicate."