On July 29, a presentation was made to Governor Jeb Bush by the Florida Council Of 100`s Water Task Force which proposes a total overhaul of Florida`s water management policies. As reported by the St. Petersburg Times in two articles, August 10 and August 16, pumping water from water rich north Florida counties to water poor central and southern counties is at the center of the plan. The following article is an interview with , the Cedar Key News conducted by phone on August 26, 2003 with Republican State Senator Nancy Argenziano, who represents Levy County.
This is part two of that interview. CKN: Are there going to be any public hearings on this proposal? Argenziano: Well there better be and I know I am going to fight for them and I`m going to ask the citizens to do the same thing. Years ago before I was in the State House, before I even thought I would be a legislator, I forced the legislature to have meetings in Citrus County because what they kept doing was saying we`re targeting you for a donor for water. They had meetings, public meetings in Tampa, Miami, in all the places that wanted our water, but they didn`t come to the donor places. So what I did was I got a whole bunch of groups together from ten different counties, I even came up to Levy with Save Our Suwannee, I made a big presentation to them and said you need to be part of my group and send this message. Many of us sent these water jugs out individually to the House Select Committee on water policy and said you have to have a meeting in our area. So we need to basically do the same thing and that`s through people power. The only way that`s going to happen is when people say hey, if you`re talking about coming to take my water, you better come here and have a public hearing in my backyard. We can do that, we have growth that we want in our area, we have people who come to just see our waterways, that makes money for our counties, you need to protect your own home, and our water resources should never, and I repeat should never be treated like a commodity. And I have learned very much about this issue and that`s why I get so emotional about this issue, that`s why I say over my dead body. I will work as hard as I can and I will go out and knock on peoples doors if I have to, to get them incited and say to them you need to be paying attention or the next thing you know you will have no water. CKN: If there are some solutions available and they seem to be working, then why is there such a push right now ? Why would they bring the water south if they can solve the problem locally? Argenziano: Money. Money, this is like liquid gold, well number one, you start looking at the people who were on this task force. Nobody asked me about this task force, nobody even asked any of the legislators to recommend anybody to come on the task force, and I will be honest with you, people need to be very wary any time they hear task force, because you can develop a task force to do whatever you want to do. And I have sat on too many of those, they had one on nursing homes many years ago that I almost got myself in trouble with because it was a bunch of lies, there wasn`t anything I found out for real and they said I had to do what the task force said even though we hadn`t found anything. We just went through the same thing with the medical malpractice crisis, we found that the task force was skewed to the position of what the person wanted it to be. Right now water is going to be seen as liquid gold. CKN: As a commodity? Argenziano: As a commodity, exactly, and not only that, think about who may get the contracts to lay pipes and put pump houses in and so on and so on, I mean they could be big campaign contributors in this for all I know. CKN: In 1997 when Jeb Bush published some articles from his Foundation For Florida`s Future, he had Cathy Vogel write an article, and in that article was a proposal for the privatization for water in the state of Florida. Argenziano: Oh Yes it it`s a marketing plan. CKN: It was a marketing plan and it had the sale of bonds for future water, and tradeable certificates.
Argenziano: How devastating CKN: At that time she (Vogel) was a lobbyist for Azurix, which was a subsidiary of Enron. And now she (Vogel) is the head lobbyist for one of the developers on the task force. Argenziano: Oh Yeah, Al Hoffman, I think it`s WCI Development one of the biggest developers and he chaired the task force. Don`t get me wrong, I understand that the developers are going to look and say we need water to grow, but hey, right now we solved the problem in Pinellas, why would you now take us back? And the reason for doing that, and this is what confuses me a little, they see LOCAL SOURCES FIRST as an impediment, and that`s what it was supposed to be. It says you will do what we think is right first, for the environment, for the counties that may suffer from your action by taking water, and what we said was, what you`ll do, and now they say it gets in their way. I can almost show you with the cost to transport water, it`s not going to be cost efficient, not as cost efficient as the cost of desal (desalinization), or reservoirs, those costs are coming down quite a bit, so it leaves one to wonder why do this if it`s not cost efficient and it may be a couple of reasons, one you are guaranteed that you have the mother load of waters (Suwannee River) that you can keep growing even at the expense of Suwannee or Levy or one of the counties, but also you have to think, who is going to get the contracts? There`s a lot of money in transporting water and having control of the water. It`s the first step in the door to changing this resource to a commodity. CKN: So there hasn`t been any conversation about this privatization or the market of water? Argenziano: There has, as a matter of fact it was last year or the year before one of the water management districts symposiums, that they have every year, I am attending the one this year I think it is in a couple of weeks, in Tampa. They had a big thing on water marketing, and this was supported by the DEP (Florida Department of Environmental Protection), it was supported by the Governor, and I said now wait a minute; nobody else supports it, what`s going on here? So it is and it has been a very big issue and it has been there and I think that now, I don`t know how much the Governor does know about water and I don`t know what he doesn`t know about water, I just know what I have found, and the experts that I confer with tell me this is a very, very, very bad idea. And I see just common sense says so, I believe that the forces are on to try to get this done before
this Governor leaves office. |
