Jeb Bush's war on Everglades preservation rips open old wounds

[seafan]

Jeb Bush speaks very little of his record on the environment as governor.


The New Yorker, January 4, 2016 Issue


Credit Illustration by Barry Blitt (Via The New Yorker)

What lingers in Florida is the memory of a governor who liked to announce “big, hairy, audacious goals”—often shortened to BHAG, pronounced “bee-hag”—and to pursue them zealously. Much of the time, in a state with natural bipartisan coalitions, it worked. But when it didn’t Bush pushed on, even at the price of gruelling (sic) and expensive political conflict. Nowhere was his style more evident than in his protracted struggle with the federal government over the fate of the Everglades—a fight that, according to people in both parties, could well have been avoided with a less autocratic approach. Nathaniel Reed, an Assistant Secretary of the Interior in the Nixon Administration, a friend of President George H. W. Bush, and a prominent Florida environmental activist, told me, “Jeb wouldn’t listen to anyone. He’s the most thin-skinned son of a bitch I’ve seen. If you criticize him, he never forgets it.”

(This is a long piece, so I will try to condense much of it below.)


The New Yorker article lays out the details of the protracted fight former Governor Jeb Bush waged over water pollution laws affecting the Everglades. The acting US Attorney from Florida, in 1988, bravely brought a lawsuit against the state of Florida's regulatory agency tasked to enforce clean-water laws, saying that it had failed to enforce those laws, after decades of clearing of land and diverting water flow for agricultural purposes had so destroyed the habitat of many endangered animal species, and severely diminished their numbers. Lawyers for the State of Florida, fought the suit for nearly three years.

It was then that the newly elected Governor Lawton Chiles, in 1991, broke the legal impasse. (RIP Governor, we miss you dearly.) Governor Chiles then took the lead in steering the Florida legislature in 1994 to pass the Everglades Forever Act, which committed the state to reach the clean-water standards set in the consent decree. The federal/state partnership to provide the money to protect the Everglades would then be preserved.

Enter one Jeb Bush into this equation, in 1994, in his first and failed attempt at a run for governor against Governor Chiles. In 1998, Bush finally muscled his way into the governor's office.

Florida's jewel of the Everglades has been on Jeb Bush's chopping block ever since.


In 2003, just into Bush's second term, a mystery bill popped up in the Florida legislature. It would amend the Everglades Forever Act by pushing back the deadlines for meeting phosphorous pollution levels for 10 additional years (from 2006), and additional delays in deadline dates after that, effectively unleashing polluters to have at the Everglades for years to come.

Enter the Sugar Barons.

Whatever the Fanjul family's sugar empire wanted from Jeb Bush, they got. And they also want things from Rubio.


Jeb was summoned to Washington in 2003 to defend his decision to dismantle the agreement between the federal government and Florida via this new law he was about to sign. His Republican cohorts in Congress did not take it well, warning him starkly that his new legislation could destroy the Everglades funding agreement between the federal government and the state of Florida. But Jeb was having none of it. He was going to weaken Everglades protection. Jeb Bush was determined that his friends, the Big Sugar barons, would win. It made no difference to him that editorial boards around Florida condemned the new legislation as a luscious gift to Florida Crystals, U.S. Sugar, and the Sugar Cane Growers Cooperative, collectively referred to as "Big Sugar".

According to two congressional staffers who attended the meeting, Bush made it clear that he had already decided. “He wasn’t really tolerating any sort of questions,” a former aide said. When the congressmen told Bush that he could be allowing an amount of pollution that would continue to harm the Everglades, he angrily dismissed their concerns. The other staff member said, “I served in government for thirty-four years, twenty on the Appropriations Committee, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone act like that. Bush was angry. He was in my face. He slapped us around. He had absolutely no thought about compromising. I remember thinking, If this guy becomes President, this is not going to work.”

And when William Hoeveler, an eighty-year-old senior judge in the Southern District of Florida, released a court order, 'arguing that the law not only potentially violated the consent decree but had been passed in a shamelessly undemocratic way', Jeb Bush and his benefactors ruthlessly pushed to remove the judge from the case. Bush was quoted in this article, saying of the court order, “It is quite an unusual legal statement,” “It didn’t have a lot of law in it.”

Bush then promptly signed the controversial legislation, then blanketed op-ed pages with terse defensiveness of his actions.

Federal officials say that the new law had been approved in a politically charged atmosphere. Harvey, the E.P.A.’s chief regulator in South Florida, said that when he raised objections he was ignored. Developers seeking permits to build on environmentally sensitive land, he said, were told to bypass him and go to E.P.A. officials in Atlanta, who were appointed by the White House. “You had a Bush in Washington and a Bush in Florida, and together they felt like they could do whatever they wanted,” Harvey said. Salt said that he and his colleagues were ordered not to speak publicly without approval from the Secretary of the Interior. “They absolutely shut us down,” Salt said. “I felt like I was getting squished.”

Two groups sued in 2004, to stop Bush's legislation from being implemented--- Friends of the Everglades and the Miccosukee Tribe of Native Americans, who live in the Everglades.


In 2008, U.S. District Judge Alan Gold sided with these groups, and found that the Florida legislature had “violated its fundamental commitment and promise to protect the Everglades.” Since 2012, new efforts have been undertaken to resume protection of the River of Grass.

But federal and state officials of both parties look back on Bush’s administration as a time of stalemate and lost opportunity, largely because Bush derailed the effort to clean up the water in the Everglades for nearly a decade. Under the settlement that resolved the long dispute, the clean-water standard will not need to be met until 2025. The cost of the restoration will be borne primarily by taxpayers, not by the sugar industry. “The goal of Big Sugar is always to put off the day of reckoning,” Draper said.

And the goal of We The People is to ensure that Jeb Bush will never finger the desk in the Oval Office.


Do we suppose that the mainstream media will ever publicly question Jeb Bush about any of this? Oddly, he speaks very little of his record on the environment.

[Scuba]

1. K&R

[hatrack]

2. Not surprising, but certainly interesting . . .

Thanks!

[RockaFowler]

3. Check out the St Lucie River

The runoff from his buddies at the Sugar Cane farms has ruined our river.

[Octafish]

4. Grueling thin-skinned son of a bitch.

No leadership skills, unless defined as greed and self-interest.

Thank you for the heads-up, seafan. This guy's one for the no-fly list.

[wordpix]

5. Finally thin skin is getting his environmental due

I was in Florida when this asshat was gov and shocked at the deforestation and water diversion for developments. Hope this locks ahole! out of the running.

[FSogol]

6. K & R. n/t

[Initech]

7. Don't worry, Jeb! can fix it!