Next week a federal team will investigate "waste, fraud, abuse and a hostile work environment" at the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary.
As John Eustis, my husband's Keys fishing buddy told me Friday, "It's about damned time."
After decades of Marine Sanctuary leadership squandering millions of dollars on wrong science and literally destroying the very resources the sanctuary was established to preserve, could an investigation be more overdue?
The exact nature of the inquiry or the "charges" against the sanctuary haven't been disclosed. I'm trying not to hold out too much hope for any real change. I'm sure this isn't all I want it to be -- actually, all it should be. But I can dream.
The National Ocean Service is conducting an “inquiry into an Office of Inspector General complaint” and a three-person team will interview Florida Keys sanctuary employees next week, according to an email given to employees. The inquiry will also include a “review of relevant documents and materials,” the email states, and “as a NOAA employee, you are expected to fully cooperate with this inquiry.” The Ocean Service, like the Marine Sanctuary, falls under the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
According to a Tim O'Hara story Friday in the Key West Citizen, the inquiry comes after the sanctuary lost several top administrative personnel in recent months, including its science coordinator and public information officer.
Nobody at the sanctuary is free to talk to the press about this; neither would a communications official at NOAA in Maryland talk beyond the agency's scripted line ("We are not at liberty ..." etc. "But we take all complaints very seriously. NOAA values the importance of a safe and healthy work environment where employees can thrive and successfully carry out our mission.”)
About that mission.
I'm sure it has a lot to do with water quality, coral reef protection and taking care of spawning aggregation sites for all kinds of fish.
If that's the mission, it's been an abysmal failure.
Ask some of the folks who have been around awhile and served on Keys advisory boards. They've seen firsthand the fraud, waste, junk science, harmful water quality policies (e.g. promoting flooding of Florida Bay with high-nitrogen Everglades runoff that feeds the regional algae blooms) and lack of common-sense fisheries management actions such as protecting the mutton snapper spawning aggregations near Key West.
Water quality in Florida Bay and around the Keys has been disintegrating for a very long time. I've written about this before. The one and only good thing happening to improve water quality is the completion of the new advanced wastewater treatment system (AWT) throughout the Keys.
But don't let Marine Sanctuary officials tell you they had anything to do with it. They can take no credit -- zero credit. Neither can Monroe County or the Florida Keys Aqueduct Authority.
Who, you ask, made the decision to sewer the Keys and require AWT, which like magic brings nitrogen and phosphorus to low levels? It was Gov. Lawton Chiles and the Cabinet in 1996, at the recommendation of water quality experts who challenged Monroe County's comprehensive plan in an administrative hearing. In fact, it was 1000 Friends of Florida -- with Richard Grosso and Dexter Lehtinen on the legal team -- who filed the challenge.
Citizens should wonder why they had to rely on legal action to protect Keys water quality when so much federal money has been wasted on this "paper park," which may be doing more harm than good.
Try to remember for a minute how special the 2,900 square nautical miles of National Marine Sanctuary are. Within the sanctuary's boundaries lie spectacular, unique, and nationally significant marine resources, from the world’s third largest barrier reef, extensive seagrass beds, mangrove-fringed islands, and more than 6,000 species of marine life.
The sanctuary is administered by NOAA, a federal agency, and jointly managed with the state of Florida.
I have no idea what this inquiry is all about. I only know what I think it should be about -- Billy Causey.
Causey is the southeast regional director for the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary. He is the man most responsible for preserving the faulty hypothesis of Florida Bay needing more fresh water (instead of more clean water). Causey supported Jay Zieman, architect of the bogus hypersalinity hypothesis, who also received $5 million from Paul Tudor Jones for his junk science. It's a hypothesis the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and Florida Bay Report totally debunked.
Scary when you consider Causey failed to earn his doctorate, so in 2006 the University of South Florida gave him an honorary one anyway. "Oh, he likes to be called Doctor," one of his staff told me. "We have to call him Doctor."
Causey has been the lead NOAA official in the development of the management plan for the sanctuary -- and the Keys sanctuary is the third largest marine protected area in the United States.
I hope the investigation about to begin winds its way to Causey. He should answer for the millions of dollars the sanctuary has taken in federal funding -- and yet the reefs in the Florida Keys now have less living coral than any other reefs in the wider Caribbean region.
That's a fact, Billy Causey. On your watch. Why is that? How can it be?
Reach Nancy Smith at smith@sunshinestatenews.com or at 228-282-2423. Twitter: @NancyLBSmith
