Credit Gov. Crist for new appointment to water management district board... by gimleteye

There will be one voice for the environment on the governing board of the South Florida Water Management District. Shannon Estenoz, regional director of the National Parks Conservation Association, has been appointed to the board by Gov. Crist.

Of the nine member board under Gov. Jeb Bush there were NO appointees who articulated dissenting points of view to the lock-step march of his administration's environmental convictions. Many of those were predetermined. (God forbid you were a state employee in an environmental agency who crossed what Jeb wanted, like the Scripps Institute whose locations was finally shot down by a federal court: in that case, you were transferred or fired.)

Balancing the competing interests on governor appointed boards relating to the environment, (The Public Service Commission and Environmental Regulatoy Commission, are two important state boards that come to mind) has always put the environment at a disadvantage, whether the leadership was Democratic or Republican.

The outcome of deliberations by these boards is predetermined by their composition. It is simple arithmetic. Blue ribbon panels, like Bush's Land Use Study Planning Commission, might be salted with an environmentalists here or there, but never enough to influence a particular vote.

Under Governor Lawton Chiles, a Democrat, the Governor's Commission for a Sustainable South Florida was comprised of a majority of representatives from agriculture and development--Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Dee.

It has always been an amazement that private industry in arguing the board composition issue adds government agency representatives to the SAME SIDE of the ledger as environmental appointees. (There are no governmental representatives on the water management district governing board.)

For public interest organizations it is a bitter pill to swallow when the starting point for compromise is off the chart from the start. And that's just the way that special interests want it. There is no mystery in the result.

It is exactly what happened in the composition of the South Miami-Dade Watershed Advisory Committee. After nearly four years, thousands of man-hours of meetings and nearly $4 million dollars, what the science showed is not what the farmers and developers wanted, and so they voted to kill the study and it looks like the county commission is going to go along.

The results of the imbalance in favor of builders, developers, and land speculators are obvious: South Florida is despoiled by overdevelopment and suburban sprawl, water resources are badly mismanaged, billions of dollars of infrastructure improvements are unplanned and unfunded.

Just take a drive down the Florida Turnpike to Homestead, for a glimpse of what a wreck has been made of Florida's environment and the interest of taxpayers in fiscally sound policies, all under the watchful eye of governor appointed boards.