Submitting a public records request for the South Florida Water Management District's entire 5,000-strong email list? Risky move, environmentalists.
I would even call it stupid.
But that's what Lisa Interlandi, a lawyer with the nonprofit Everglades Law Center, did this week on behalf of a host of environmental groups.
Oh, I know she's entitled. We all are under Florida's Public Records Law and I wouldn't have it any other way. But now Interlandi, in a story headlined, "Message from South Florida water managers: Don't make us mad" has The Miami Herald fanning her flames.
The Herald writes, Florida lawmakers read. Could some of those Florida lawmakers, some of the ones on the email list, decide to push back? Some legislators take their privacy personally. Can another assault on Chapter 119 of the Florida Statutes be far behind?
It's a genuine concern. Stupid move.
The outrage on Interlandi's part is sheer theater. The Water Management District didn't refuse to give up the email list. Staff complied with the request immediately, they know the law. But they believed they had an obligation to the people on that list to tell them their addresses were going to a third party.
District spokesman Randy Smith said no one at the District can remember a previous request for the SFWMD email list. Ever. Interlandi's ask was a first. The District fields regular requests for individual email exchanges on one subject or another, but parting with the whole list, which likely will be shared around any number of environmental organizations, was unprecedented.
"We felt an obligation to inform the people on that list," he said.
I fail to see how that is anything but a proper reaction from a state agency that does, in fact, have a greater obligation to the people of Florida than the environmentalists.
The underlying contention, the tug-of-war that got us to where we are today didn't happen overnight. It's been heating to a boil over the last year. SFWMD officials have been dealing with an increasing amount of misinformation on the Everglades and a lack of civility among citizens who are swallowing it. District governing board members have been threatened, their families intimidated. And after one board meeting, residents of the Glades communities were attacked, literally, in the hallway outside the meeting room.
Show me where in Florida Statutes any water management district is prohibited from trying to set the record straight, or help Floridians separate fact from fiction. And that's all the District has been trying to do.
Frankly, I've been glad to see District people fight back a little. Scientists and engineers and politicians are still bothering with the details, but everyone expert in any area of Everglades restoration agrees on one fact: You can't just "go back to nature." The population of Florida has spread out as it's grown over the past hundred years, and in many places these days there's no nature to go back to.
Environmentalists want to keep the money rolling in.
"Bad news" is the big fundraiser for environmentalists and I know it's important for them to keep the fear alive. But the truth is, the Everglades -- what's left of it -- is not dying. For decades, the world's largest wetlands have been diked, dammed, diverted, and drained. Now massive earthmoving, underground plumbing, and statistical modeling are getting what's left of this wonder back to something as good as it can possibly be. That's just a fact.
Other misinformation out there:
- The Caloosahatchee and St. Lucie rivers are relief valves so the Everglades Agriculture Area (EAA) can keep the best growing conditions possible. No they're not.
- SFWMD is back-pumping water in the EAA at the same time the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is working to respond to rising lake water. No, it's not.
- Here's the biggee: More storage south will restore coastal estuaries, rehydrate the Everglades, recharge the Biscayne aquifer and protect private and public well fields. No, no, no and no. If that were true, explain how it would work during much of this year when the Everglades was several feet over its regulatory schedule, when wildlife and tree islands were threatened and state and federal agencies were calling on emergency procedures to get the water levels in the Everglades down. As the District repeats, more storage in the agriculture area would have helped the Everglades crisis, not the Lake or estuaries.
By the way, I personally have no problem if environmentalists have my email addresses (I have two of them). I'm thinking, maybe if they do, they'll send me information that will answer my questions. God knows they don't return phone calls.
Do you really think Lisa Interlandi needed the entire SFWMD email list? To fire up the troops and loosen donors' purse strings, maybe -- it ultimately pays her way. But I hope in so doing she hasn't opened the door for another Public Records Law exemption.
Reach Nancy Smith at nsmith@sunshinestatenews.com or at 228-282-2423. Twitter: @NancyLBSmith
