No Red Wave But A Red Tide Catches Up With Florida Governor Rick Scott

Last month, in a post, Florida's Lovely Beaches-- Over-Run With Deadly Human Waste, we looked at a gigantic problem for Floridians that their politicians aren't adequately addressing. When I woke up yesterday, I was glad to see a headline from a Florida newspaper, Rick Scott campaign stop besieged by red tide protesters.

Zac Anderson wrote that "Protesters jammed the sidewalk and spilled into the street around Mojo’s Real Cuban, forcing Scott to enter the restaurant through the back door and leave the same way after just 10 minutes as members of the crowd shouted 'coward.'... With the noxious odor of red tide hanging in the air and a fresh wave of dead fish washing up on nearby Gulf beaches, a large crowd of people incensed about the devastating algae bloom that has plagued the region for months directed their anger at Gov. Rick Scott during a campaign event in Venice Monday." And does Scott ever deserve it!

The Republican governor is on the defensive about his environmental record as he tries to unseat Democratic U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson. Protesters gathered Monday took aim at Scott for cutting funding for environmental agencies early in his first term, arguing Scott’s cost-cutting and deregulation have kept the state from implementing measures that could have helped minimize naturally occurring red tide blooms.

“The more I learn about red tide the more I can point to Rick Scott making it worse,” said Venice resident Rich Peabody, 71. “It’s not his fault, but he’s making it worse.”

Peabody stood by the back door to Mojo’s and shouted “coward” at Scott as he left the restaurant.

“He’s a coward; he wouldn’t face these people,” said the semi-retired Peabody, who moved to the area nine years ago. “Look at our beaches.”

...Scott’s critics say his policies have exacerbated the problem. Red tide blooms start offshore but can feed on nutrients found in nearshore waters. Leaky septic tanks, lawn fertilizer found in stormwater runoff and other factors can add to nutrient levels in nearshore waters.

Scott signed off on legislation that repealed a mandatory septic tank inspection program. The inspections were intended to identify failing septic tanks that are leaching pollutants.

The governor also cut $700 million from the state’s water management districts, which help implement a range of water quality programs. And Scott reduced staffing at the state Department of Environmental Protection and pushed to speed up and streamline environmental permitting, leading some to accuse the state of cutting corners in protecting the environment.

...The unusually strong red tide bloom that has lingered along a vast stretch of Southwest Florida coastline for nearly a year and a separate blue-green algae bloom that originated in Lake Okeechobee and is fouling estuaries on both coasts have mushroomed into major campaign issues in Florida’s midterm election.

Sarasota resident John Citara, 52, came out to protest Scott’s visit wearing a white hazmat suit and a gas mask.

Citara said he used to take his sons to the beach on a regular basis to go swimming, but now they go to document the environmental devastation.

“Once you wipe out the economy and the tourism, Florida’s dead,” Citara said. “If this doesn’t show us we need to do things differently and hold people accountable, what will?”

Nokomis resident Kim Hileman, 60, moved to the area from Pennsylvania in April “for quality of life.”

“Thinking I would escape the snow and enjoy the warm weather and beaches,” Hileman said.

But there have been very few nice beach days since Hileman moved south. So on Monday she led the crowd outside Mojo’s in a chant of: “Hey hey ho ho red tide Rick has got to go.” The “red tide Rick” moniker was featured on a range of other signs.

Jane Hunter helped organize the protest as a leader with the liberal-leaning Englewood Indivisible group.

“We need to make a statement back to our community and the Scott campaign that you can’t just totally befoul the Southwest coast of Florida and then run for Senate and vote against the environment,” Hunter said. “Nope. Not gonna happen. There needs to be some accountability.”

South Florida congressional candidate Tim Canova was the first person to warn me about the scope of the environmental catastrophe unfolding in Florida right now. And though Rick Scott deserves all the blame in the world, this problem is the result of corrupt politicians from both parties playing footsie with fat cat polluters. Tim's opponent, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, is as culpable as Scott. Yesterday, Tim told me that "The Gulf coast of Florida is being devastated by Red Tide and the blue-green toxic algal, both fed by agricultural runoff from massive factory farms. This has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of sea turtles, manatees, dolphins, sea otters, and thousands of fish, pelicans, herons and other birds. Hundreds of people have fallen sick with respiratory illnesses. According to Toxic Puzzle, a documentary film narrated by Harrison Ford, scientists are now connecting these toxins with higher rates of Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease and Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. Unfortunately, this deepening crisis is brought to us by the pollution in our politics. Politicians in both parties are taking millions of dollars in campaign donations from Big Agribusinesses and Big Sugar, including my opponent Debbie Wasserman Schultz who repeatedly voted to appropriate billions of dollars in federal subsidies for these same polluters. My campaign takes no corporate money, perhaps one of the reasons we are now being throttled and shadow banned on social media, making it more and more difficult to raise money in small online donations. We are standing up to Big Sugar and other predatory corporate interests, and our grassroots campaign is growing on the ground where it matters most."