Today we find another of those rare items where we can praise at least one action taken by a water management district: SWFTMUD and Kings Bay is indeed a success story. Thanks go also to the Florida Springs Institute for their work there, without which the project would likely not have happened.
It needs to be said again and yet again that mitigation is almost never a solution to an environmental problem, and we think it is not here.
These bills in Tallahassee are a dream by developers and those who owe favors to developers to make more money.
We appreciate the editorial board of the Citrus County Chronicle for their continued interest and concern for our environment.
And good for Charley Crist in 2008. Mr. DeSantis, are you up to this?
Read the complete article here in the Citrus County Chronicle.
Comments by OSFR historian Jim Tatum.
jim.tatum@oursantaferiver.org
– A river is like a life: once taken,
it cannot be brought back © Jim Tatum
With Florida currently experiencing another population surge and pressures building for more coastal development, two bills, HB 349 and SB 198, are working their way through the legislative process. The bills call for the use of seagrass mitigation credits that would allow developers to purchase credits from private “mitigation banks” to replace destroyed seagrass beds with the planting of new seagrass beds in other locations where they do not already grow.
Florida’s native seagrass is vital to the health of the state’s marine ecosystem and is the main forage for its manatee population. However, it is experiencing an alarming decline as a result of deteriorating water quality, destruction from human activity and sea level rise.
Repeated scientific studies dating to the 1980s have found that mitigation credits frequently failed to replace what had been destroyed. Given the track record of failure for mitigation credits, respected environmental organizations as the Ocean Conservancy, Florida Conservation Voters and Save the Manatee Club oppose the measures because seagrass is particularly one of the most costly and difficult habitats to restore since the water quality has to be good.
Rather than risk accelerating the destruction of the state’s established seagrass beds by offsetting their loss with the uncertain effectiveness of mitigation credits, Florida lawmakers should be looking to improve water quality to protect established beds and to restore the acreage lost over the years, as Save Crystal River and the Southwest Florida Water Management District are successfully doing in King’s Bay….
