Scott appoints his unqualified, longtime attack dog to run elections

We can only hope that

Pete regards elections with more reverence than he had for the Everglades. Else, Broward voters might fare no better under his auspices than the woeful snail kite.

Pete Antonacci, foisted on Broward County last month by Rick Scott after the governor ousted Supervisor of Elections Brenda Snipes, had been similarly ordained by Scott in 2015 to take over the South Florida Water Management District. Antonacci, without a line on his resume suggesting expertise in hydrology or limnology or biology or botany or any of the scientific or engineering skills that might correspond to the watery needs of 16 counties, was jammed into the SFWMD top job by Scott. Come hell or high water.

The previous director, an engineer with two decades of experience, had displeased Scott and was forced to resign. That very same day the district board, a cabal of Scott flunkies, couldn’t think of a better replacement than the governor’s own chief counsel. No need to trouble themselves with a search for qualified candidate. The only job qualification that mattered was Antonacci’s readiness to cut taxes, slash budgets, fire longtime professionals, belittle environmental activists and disparage scientists. Without a whit of worry about snail kites.

Antonacci was like Trump before Trump was cool. He picked a fight with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which had the temerity to suggest that the district take pains not to disturb nests of the endangered kite. He accused the federal biologists of “stormtrooper tactics.” He groused about the endangered species act.

He ordered his staff to stop cooperating with the National Academy of Sciences, which issues a report every other year on the state of Everglades restoration. Antonacci accused the NAS of “unscientific meddling,” and demanded that its pointy-headed scientists “tend to their knitting.”

The Tampa Bay Times’ Craig Pittman suggested that Antonacci’s tantrum might have been set off when NAS noticed that the glades restoration plan failed to consider the inevitable effects of climate change and sea level rise. Those are forbidden terms in the Rick Scott administration.

Antonacci’s SFWMD accused the Everglades Foundation – not exactly a band of wild-eyed eco-radicals – of employing “irresponsible science” in a study that suggested an urgent need for a 60,000-acre water filtering reservoir below Lake Okeechobee. My how Antonacci hated that reservoir proposal -- a sentiment that just happened to coincide with the policies of U.S. Sugar, a major campaign contributor to Rick Scott.

SFWMD, under Antonacci’s leadership, tried to bully the Everglades Law Center. Audubon Florida was attacked as a gang that “wants to raise your taxes.” The Caloosahatchee River Watch was dismissed as a collection of “one-sided detractors in pursuit of an agenda without facts to support it.”

But his mean boy talking points didn’t hold up so well, not last summer when the befouled water spilling out of Lake Okeechobee into the Caloosahatchee and St. Lucie estuaries triggered yet another stinking outbreak of toxic green algae. Downstream residents were sickened. Marine businesses were devastated. Dock-side restaurants were deserted. And, in retrospect, outfits like the Everglades Foundation and Caloosahatchee River Watch looked downright prophetic.

Suddenly, Pete’s condescending complaints against environmentalists and scientists and citizen activists were inundated by thick foaming layers of guacamole-green algae. Except, by the time his know-nothing policies evolved into an environmental disaster, Antonacci had been placed in yet another job for which he had no discernible qualification. Except, of course, for his status as Rick Scott’s attack dog. (Antonacci earned that sobriquet in 2014, when he was sicced on FDLE Director Gerald Bailey. The director had claimed Scott’s political operatives had tried to pressure him into ordering an unwarranted investigation of a political foe. So Antonacci fired Bailey, a hinky move considering that the state constitution requires a majority vote of the cabinet, not a unilateral move by the governor – or his attack dog – to fire the FDLE chief.)

Last year, Scott decided that instead of water district director, Antonacci would be just the guy to run Enterprise Florida, the public-private partnership tasked with luring businesses to Florida. The governor called Pete “a team player.” True, except Scott happens to be the only other member of this particular team.

And now Scott has done it again. First, he removed Broward Supervisor of Elections Brenda Snipes for “misfeasance, incompetence and neglect of duty.” It was an odd bit of political theatre, given that the much-criticized Snipes had already announced that she was retiring at the end of this month. She reacted to Scott’s bully boy act by rescinding his resignation, setting us up for a nasty and needless fight – with a racial subtext -- next year in the Florida Senate.

The divisive move was the governor’s parting gift to Broward. That and replacing a local county official with an outside interloper.

Scott could have picked, instead, someone with the experience and technical expertise needed to modernize an elections office crippled by archaic methods and outdated machinery.

Instead, the governor saddled us with his attack dog, someone whose chief attribute seems to be his eagerness to impose Scott’s agenda, snail kites be damned.

Fred Grimm