Water district’s defense lame for stealth Big Sugar deal

South Florida’s most important public agency is hard at work — on damage control.

I don’t mean the Broward County School District, despite that agency’s deplorable attempt to hide the facts about the Marjory Stoneman Douglas massacre.

In this case, I mean the South Florida Water Management District.

In theory, the district exists to keep South Florida from flooding and to promote environmental restoration. More recently, however, the district’s priority has been to work for the agricultural industry.

Last month, the district’s government board unanimously approved a lease that would allow Florida Crystals to keep growing sugar on state land that will be a reservoir to hold water released from Lake Okeechobee. Under the lease, the land would be off-limits to the public for at least two years and perhaps as long as eight years. It thus would be unavailable to help reduce discharges that have harmed estuaries in Martin, Lee and Collier counties.

The board acted with almost no public notice. Ron DeSantis, who still wasn’t officially governor-elect one day after the election, asked the board to wait. So did U.S. Rep. Brian Mast, who represents Martin County.

Criticism from environmental groups justifiably followed that Nov. 8 vote. The Florida Wildlife Federation filed a legal challenge. So the district began using public resources to defend a deal that is not in the public interest.

Step 1: Demonize the critics. A Nov. 29 public relations release from the district accused the federation of trying to “delay” the reservoir. The release said the Legislature, which approved the reservoir in 2017, “represents 21 million Floridians” while the federation “touts a membership of 14,000.”

Actually, the federation’s lawsuit is about how the board approved the lease. State law requires three public notices of lease deals at least one month before any vote. In this case, notice went out just hours in advance.

In addition, the lawsuit claims that the lease – not the federation – would disrupt any quick fixes the reservoir land could provide. The plaintiff is a resident of Martin County who lives a block from the St. Lucie River. Discharges from the lake flow into the river.

Step 2: Create an alternate universe. A Nov. 30 public relations release announced that the district’s Water Resources Advisory Council would “discuss facts” about the reservoir and the lease. A Dec. 7 release announced – surprise – that the panel had found “misinformation” within the criticism.

District board member Brandon Tucker said the goal was “simply to get down to the basic facts of South Florida's most pressing water resource issues and bring them to light through public participation.” Perhaps he missed the irony. Tucker continued the defense that state law required the board to extend the lease, even though it doesn’t expire until March.

The release quoted a woman named Nyla Pipes, representing the One Florida Foundation, criticizing “irresponsible activism” by groups claiming that the state could use the reservoir sooner without the lease. An early donor to the foundation was a sugar executive. In 2015, a Martin County environmentalist called the foundation “a pro-sugar, pro-development lobbyist group disguised as an environmental group.”

For all its stated support of the reservoir, the water management district opposed early efforts to create it. That opposition came when Peter Antonacci was executive director. Gov. Rick Scott put Antonacci – his favorite fixer – in that job, just as he named Antonacci to run the Broward County elections office.

Antonacci dismissed any suggestions that the district even should study a southern reservoir. Scott has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the sugar industry, which didn’t want to lose land for the reservoir.

Then came another round of poisonous discharges. The Senate president was from Martin County. The politics shifted. Scott signed the bill authorizing the reservoir, but only after sugar growers lobbied to make it much smaller and much less effective.

Despite the PR/misdirection campaign, the district board hasn’t persuaded Mast. Appearing on CBS4 last Sunday with Jim DeFede, Mast said the board had acted “with malice” and “couldn’t give a rat’s caboose” about the public. He called on the nine board members to resign.

That won’t happen, but DeSantis can replace three of them in March. Those and other changes would mean less damage at the district – and less need for damage control.