FL GOP Legislative Leadership Make Harrumphing Noises About Dealing With Rising Sea Levels
Planning work to address flooding from rising sea levels, similar to how the state maps out road and bridge projects for five years, is being considered by the new Republican leaders of the Florida House and Senate. House Speaker Chris Sprowls, R-Palm Harbor, and Senate President Wilton Simpson, R-Trilby, expressed a desire Tuesday to establish work programs that would address the increased impacts of rising sea levels in coastal communities. “We need to identify our most vulnerable areas, where the need is,” Simpson said. “And it's not like we don't have engineers that can tell us that around the state and develop a priority list.”
Their comments, which came after they were sworn in to lead the House and Senate for the next two years, represented a further evolution in the position of Florida Republicans about climate change. But environmentalists said the GOP leaders are not going far enough. “They're acknowledging the need --- how can you not in Florida acknowledge the need to start making our communities more resilient?” Florida Conservation Voters Executive Director Aliki Moncrief said. “But they still sort of have their heads deliberately in the sand when it comes to tackling what's actually causing the problem in the first place.”
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Simpson suggested working with local governments to put budgets together to establish future work plans in line with the Department of Transportation’s five-year work program for roads and bridges. The Department of Transportation has long used the program to set plans for projects.
Sprowls, meanwhile, suggested shifting environmental spending from land acquisition to addressing rising waters that flood streets, damage homes and ruin businesses. “We need to stop treating our environmental budget like a giant pork-barrel buffet. We need to bring the same long-range planning and strategic discipline to our environmental programs that we bring to our transportation work plan,” Sprowls said. “We need to stop fixating on land purchases as the sole measure of conservation and embrace the spectrum of priorities from beach renourishment to septic tank conversion to flood mitigation.”
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https://www.cltampa.com/news-views/florida-news/article/21146504/florida-gop-will-look-at-future-climate-change-plans-but-critics-say-they-still-have-their-heads-deliberately-in-the-sand
