Yes! to Fairchild Tropical Botanical Garden "Environmental Challenge", the rest is just taxing, by gimleteye

The Miami Herald is full of note-worthy information, today, and the dots deserve connecting.

Jim Morin’s editorial cartoon captures it all: the folly of Florida’s tax system that, absent a personal income tax, only works when wetlands and natural areas are gobbled up by suburban sprawl and the needs of the poor are avoided.

The Metro section story by Curtis Morgan and Charles Rabin, “Water bills to rise under new deal”, reports the long-term agreement with the water management district to expand water supply.

“County leaders insist the goal is to supply projected population growth, not fuel rampant development.”

But the story misses serious questions about water quality, especially related to water re-use, and the timing of a pilot project meant to discover the effect of industrially treated wastewater to the environment in advance of massive application to wetlands, to the bay, and possibly to the Everglades. In other words, use precaution: test first, apply as industrial scale AFTER.

In a follow-up story, the Herald might answer the question, or try, why wasn't the county required to complete its pilot project BEFORE any agreeement on a massive expansion of consumption? What are the issues that county scientists are concerned about, in the pilot project, not to mention the Seijas Plan for More Pollution. In other words, why is the state giving a long-term consumptive use permit to a County that has repeatedly violated state and federal laws that are supposed to protect the public health (ie. rock mining permits putting carcinogens in the drinking water aquifer), when the re-use technology is unproven and untested for impacts to Biscayne Bay, to fish we consume, to wetlands where our water comes from?

It's a frigging nightmare and practically advertises to the rest of the world: Don't come here! Stay out!

Of course, this is not a popular view with either the mainstream media or our elected officials. But it is an underlying reason why citizens and voters are so fed up that they might just embrace the state-wide constitutional amendment, Florida Hometown Democracy, that would put land use changes to master plans to a popular vote.

In fact, there are enough unanswered questions—and enough doubt about the county’s honesty—to make this consumptive use permit the most complicated agreement ever undertaken by the state. “The new permit is ‘the longest you’ll ever see’” according to a district executive. But that only captures a tiny piece of the story, too.

The Herald editors chose not to focus on how Miami-Dade County, under the bad leadership of Natacha Seijas—who is chair of the county environment committee—has terribly abused the environment and our quality of life in order to underwrite exactly the rampant overdevelopment that scars the landscape today and puts public health at risk.

The state doesn’t trust the county, but some of the key politicians who allowed Miami’s quality of life to be ruined are either current or past power brokers in Tallahassee. Some, like Carlos Lacasa, wear the green hat interchangeably with the Latin Builders Association hat. They've spent their whole careers criss-crossing between voting for lousy laws and regulations and clucking about how important it is to protect the environment-- from laws they helped to support and create because that's what the builders wanted.

The Herald is not making this point, but rather giving the builders a pass: Truly Burton, lobbyist for the South Florida Builders Association, says, “What this has done is heighten our awareness.”

Of course the builders’ awareness is heightened! Their housing and construction markets collapsed under their pressure for rampant overdevelopment: a phenomenon that makes Miami the epicenter of the housing bust and world-wide credit crisis. That's a distinction that the Herald editorial board, by the way, has never-not once-mentioned. Oh well.

The effect of the housing boom, which civic activists and conservationists and civic and neighborhood associations tried to repel at the level of zoning councils and the county and city commissions –where they were ignored and scorned—is to have pumped up government budgets. The result is a front-page fiasco in newspapers around the nation. A legitimate crisis born of the enthusiasms for the housing boom of the Jeb Bush administration now resting squarely on the political shoulders of Governor Charlie Crist.

That’s the top story in today’s Herald: “Budget gap widens”. “Florida’s economy, which forced a $1 billion cut in the state budget just weeks ago, is sputtering so badly economists gave lawmakers more grim news Wednesday: Prepare to lose another $2.5 billion over the next 18 months.”

Voters must hold accountable politicians who let this massive crisis develop: it was not a matter of spontaneous generation.

Real, walking elected leaders—like Natacha Seijas, for instance—built political careers on fanning the flames of the building boom that was unsustainable from the first.

As a result, our democracy has deformed into a special interest piñata run by powerful interests looking for a bail-out, or another zoning change into wetlands, another Lowe’s store at the edge of the Urban Development Boundary, another office park to fill in a “hole in the urban boundary donut”.

What our elected officials need to think about--when they are set to vote on changes to the Urban Development Boundary in just a few weeks--is how there is a direct connection between the smooth talking lobbyists they see at every re-zoning opportunity, millions of foreclosures around the nation, and hundreds of billions of losses to the world's largest financial institutions.

In other words, they need to see the Big Picture. God help us.

The most hopeful prospect, and story in The Miami Herald, is the one about The Fairchild Challenge. “In six years, the Challenge has found the keys to getting teenagers involved in science and environmental issues: make it fun, make it an adventure and let kids speak in the language of their choice—debate, essay, painting or song.”

Congratulations, Fairchild. Your recognition in The Miami Herald is well-deserved.

A representative of the school district says of the 40,000 students who are participating: “They’ve taken hold of the world they live in. They’re looking for solutions on their own. And when you empower students that way, there’s nothing like it.”