Florida may be the Sunshine State but it’s the drinking water in our underground aquifers and wetlands as big as the Everglades — serving as bird and wildlife habitat and helping cleanse rainwater back into aquifers, rivers and lakes — that has enabled millions of people to move to this paradise we call home.
As the Legislature moves at warp speed to end its 60-day session by Friday, three issues crucial to South Florida’s ability to grow responsibly and prosper with sufficient clean water are in play. Legislators should restore funding to water management districts, keep their hands off Miami-Dade County’s urban development boundary and provide land for expansion of Florida International University’s medical school at the current fairgrounds in southwest Miami-Dade without putting into jeopardy environmentally sensitive land now being eyed for new fairgrounds.
Fund water districts
After decades of new developments putting pressure on Florida’s water supply, wise state leaders in the 1970s, led by then-Gov. Reubin Askew, created land planning agencies and five regional water districts based not on political power plays but on the state’s natural watershed areas. In 1976, Florida voters approved giving district boards, appointed by the governor, the authority to raise taxes to buy land and manage the water supply in their area. The districts have been instrumental in ensuring there’s enough water before any new massive developments can pop up, and that floodwaters get directed away from existing homes and businesses.
Then last year the Legislature and Gov. Rick Scott — in the name of “economic development” — stripped the state Department of Community Affairs of most growth planning duties, decimated Everglades restoration projects and gutted regional water districts’ budgets by lowering their tax rates, crippling budgets statewide by $703 million. That sent almost 600 of Florida’s top scientists, engineers, flood managers and planning experts packing. All that pain, and the typical taxpaying property owner saved $20 to $40 a year.
Now there’s a chance to restore the five districts’ tax rate cap, but SB 1986 carries meddling strings that would require water districts to get their budgets, at all stages, approved by the Legislative Budget Commission. Such legislative interference not only diffuses accountability away from the governor’s office, where the buck should stop, but injects another political layer on water use decisions that should be based on science, not on what pricey lobbyists say is right.
Restoring funding is a desperately needed first step in getting water resources back on track. A second step would restore water districts’ ability to pay for projects through the sale of bonds. But budget leaders should butt out of micromanaging water policy.
FIU expansion
An amendment that would force a land swap to help FIU’s medical school expand to land around the current fairgrounds south of the campus sets up a conservation nightmare. The problem isn’t the expansion, but the swap that would turn over 350 acres of wetlands in the Bird Drive Everglades Basin for a new fairgrounds far west. That land was bought by the state to protect wetlands and water recharge areas and prevent flooding. As Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez points out, fast-tracking is not advisable. That land is not the right fit for parking lots and buildings.
Miami-Dade UDB
At least a move by Sen. Ellyn Bogdanoff, R-Fort Lauderdale, to require only a majority vote by local governments to change long-term growth plans has died. For now. The change would have meant that Miami-Dade’s urban development boundary — which protects taxpayers from willy-nilly growth in the county’s far western fringe near the Everglades — could be changed by a simple majority instead of a super majority commission vote as Miami-Dade now requires.
Stop meddling with local control, legislators.
via miamiherald.com