If the Florida Department of Environmental Protection isn’t protecting anyone but polluters, I think we know who should take the fall. It’s Hamilton, the guy that our guv put in charge.
Craig Pittman
Craig Pittman gives Shawn Hamilton, head of the DEP, a low grade in job performance.
Yesterday we called on Hamilton to fix the Hillsborough River. We had no expectations that he would do that, even if he personally wanted to. If he were to undercut his boss DeSantis, as things are now, quite likely he would be fired in a heartbeat.
Such is the sorry state of water protection in Florida. Our shining light of hope now lies with the Right to Clean & Healthy Waters amendment. If you have not already done so, please go to Floridarighttocleanwater.org and sign the petition.
Read below the excerpt from Craig Pittman’s article today in the Florida Phoenix and count on the amendment, to help us, not on Hamilton.
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
…A little help from their friends
Hamilton has only held the top DEP job for a year, but he was with the agency for 13 years before that.
How’s he doing? Absolutely outstanding, according to the polluters. But if you’re interested in clean waterways, the answer is: Not so good.
Every year, Jerrel “Jerry” Phillips of the Florida chapter of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility runs the DEP’s enforcement numbers and issues a report. The report for Hamilton’s first year, issued last month, found some major problems.
Big sewage leaks happened nearly every day around the state in 2021, noted Phillips, a former DEP enforcement attorney. Yet, he wrote, “despite a growing water quality crisis, meaningful enforcement designed to curb this major source of pollution is virtually nonexistent.”
Then came the good news/bad news part.
FL DEP
The good news: Under Hamilton, the DEP conducted three times as many inspections of potential polluters over the previous year (which, as it turns out, isn’t saying much because in 2020 the agency did hardly any).
The bad news: the DEP filed “substantially fewer enforcement cases than the year before, taking formal enforcement against just 10 percent of the noncompliant facilities, a recent record low rate.”
I asked the DEP about this. The response from spokeswoman Alexandra Kuchta was to dismiss PEER’s criticism as if waving off an annoying mosquito.
“PEER is once again perpetuating an inaccurate characterization of the department’s enforcement, based on information that has either been misinterpreted or misrepresented,” she said via email.
“DEP’s statewide compliance rate for 2021 was a very high 93 percent, with compliance rates of 93.6 percent for drinking water facilities and 91.8 percent for wastewater facilities,” she said.
Well then, everything’s fine and — what? Oh, I see. I skipped over the part of the PEER report that explains that.
When Rick “Jobs Are More Important Than Clean Water” Scott was governor, the DEP adopted something called “compliance assistance offers.”
Every time companies dumped Really Bad Stuff into the state’s rivers, streams, and estuaries, DEP employees were not supposed to hammer them as evil polluters anymore. Instead, they were supposed to lend them a helping hand, just like a friend would.
The one-time regulators were supposed to treat them like customers, not rulebreakers. They were supposed to figure out some way to make them “compliant” with the rules.
“It’s not about compliance. It’s about making things look like they’re compliant,” one of the scores of longtime DEP employees whom Scott laid off told me at the time.
Turns out that’s still going on. By using those “compliance assistance offers,” the PEER report says, “DEP allowed most polluters the opportunity to have their violations ‘forgiven.’ Since DEP has no limit on how many free passes are issued, repeat violators can easily skate.”
If the DEP had really succeeded in making nine out of every 10 polluters follow anti-pollution rules, our waterways would look a lot different than they do now. They wouldn’t be so stinky that they regularly sprout toxic algae blooms.
When DeSantis took office, he appointed a panel of scientists to recommend ways to prevent those nasty algae blooms. The panel turned in its recommendations, most of which were completely ignored.
“Ecological conditions in Florida have not improved and, in many cases, they have worsened,” a coalition of 12 environmental groups noted in a recent report on the algae bloom task force’s recommendations. “Lack of meaningful water quality protections have resulted in persistent harmful algal blooms, a record number of manatee deaths, and an overall decline in water quality statewide.”
Even members of the algae task force, meeting recently for the first time in half a year, bemoaned the lack of progress.
And whose fault is that? If the Florida Department of Environmental Protection isn’t protecting anyone but polluters, I think we know who should take the fall. It’s Hamilton, the guy that our guv put in charge.
Although come to think of it, maybe there’s someone else….
