Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
DeSantis tours the Everglades
Republican governor candidate touts environmental record.
By offering up a 12-point policy plan and made-forTV visuals, Republican governor nominee Ron DeSantis is attempting to brand himself as a champion of Florida’s environment.
He started Wednesday morning, rolling out an environmental plan that his campaign said would restore the Everglades, stop toxic algae discharges, look for solutions to red tide, ban fracking for oil and protect the state’s beaches, water supply, springs, parks and air.
DeSantis also said he would promote policies to deal with rising sea levels in South Florida, though the plan didn’t address global climate change. And it included a pledge to use his “unique relationship” with President Donald Trump to “ensure that oil drilling never occurs off Florida’s coastlines.”
He ended the day with a symbolic show of his support for the environment: an airboat tour of the Everglades in western Broward County, where he declared restoration of the troubled ecosystem is “very, very important.”
“I represent, maybe, an emergence of a Teddy Roosevelt-style Republican Party here in Florida,” DeSantis told reporters after the tour, recalling the conservationist president at the beginning of the 20th century.
Key flashpoints
Aliki Moncrief, executive director of Florida Conservation Voters, scoffed at the notion that DeSantis would be good for the environment.
“When it comes to DeSantis’s environmental plan, it almost reads as if he’s applying for the job of branch manager of the Florida branch of the Trump administration,” she said in a telephone news conference organized by the Florida Democratic Party.
DeSantis argues he’d be in a good position to fight offshore drilling, which is a federal issue, if he’s elected with governor because of his close ties to the president. DeSantis has been a tireless defender of Trump, and the president’s endorsement is seen as the pivotal factor in his victory over Adam Putnam in the primary for governor.
Moncrief, whose organization has endorsed Democrat Andrew Gillum, ridiculed DeSantis’s citing Trump as his way to prevent oil drilling off the Florida coast — since it’s the Trump administration that wants to increase offshore drilling.
She also faulted DeSantis for not outlining state initiatives to combat climate change. Instead, his plan calls for dealing with the effects of rising sea levels.
Pressed by reporters after
his airboat ride, DeSantis declined to definitively state if climate change is real and, if so, whether human activity is contributing to it.
“The sea rise may be because of human activity and changing climate. It may be. It may not. I don’t know,” he said, adding that human activity clearly has effects. “I think we contribute to changes in the environment, but I’m not in the pews of the global warming left” that attributes things like powerful hurricanes to climate change.
DeSantis plan
Several of the points in DeSantis’s plan don’t fit neatly with conservative Republican orthodoxy or deviate from policies pursued by Gov. Rick Scott, who can’t run again because of term limits.
The plan includes: ■ Completing Everglades restoration projects, including water storage south of Lake Okeechobee.
■ Pursuing “innovative technology” as well as money to combat beach erosion, an important priority for the tourism industry.
■ Emphasizing smart growth and efforts to improve South Florida’s resilience to rising sea levels.
■ Pushing legislation to ban fracking for oil in Florida.
■ Requiring that money voters set aside for land and water conservation efforts actually be spent on those priorities. Republicans who control state government have siphoned some of that money away for other purposes.
Democratic response
The Florida Democratic Party distributed a statement that called DeSantis “a sham environmentalist who has consistently done the bidding of Florida’s biggest polluters…. A few soundbites can’t erase Ron DeSantis’ atrocious voting record.” Democrats cited his votes to prohibit the Environmental Protection Agency form regulating certain pesticides and to cut federal spending on the environment and land and water conservation.
Moncrief said a hole in the plan is not addressing significant reductions implemented by Scott in the budgets for the state’s water management districts, which she said has reduced environmental spending.
Gillum’s communications director, Geoff Burgan, said by email that DeSantis “marched in lockstep with Donald Trump in Washington,” and that if elected governor would “help the special interests continue their
stranglehold on our environment.”
Friend or foe
DeSantis is a conservative who has frequently sounded the alarm about the excesses of big government.
The conservative group Heritage Action rated him as the most conservative member of Congress from Florida during his three terms. His free-market approach helped make DeSantis a congressional foe of federal policy that benefits the sugar industry through price supports designed to limit production and keep the price of sugar high.
Big Sugar is seen by many in the environmental community as the prime cause of environmental problems and the slow pace of Everglades restoration.
On Wednesday, DeSantis said his willingness to speak critically about Big Sugar contributed to his primary victory.
DeSantis questioned the proposed American Dream Miami, which would transform what is now 511 vacant acres in unincorporated northwest Miami-Dade into a mini-city off Interstate 75. Many environmentalists oppose the idea.