Ever since I was a kid, I’ve always been a huge fan of Bugs Bunny cartoons. I just love it when he does something outrageous and then turns to the camera and says, “Ain’t I a stinker?” It’s hilarious!
But now Gov. Ron DeSantis has done something that means he’s a real stinker. And I don’t find it funny at all.
That image popped into my head recently when the governor issued one of the last and most consequential vetoes of his career.
The bill he vetoed involved “biosolids,” the inoffensive term given to a horribly offensive waste product long known as sewage sludge.
There hasn’t been any news coverage of this veto that I can find, perhaps because it’s such a smelly subject. But it’s going to affect the quality of the water people drink all over Florida, so you should know who’s responsible.
The bill he vetoed, House Bill 1245, was designed to fill a huge gap in Florida’s pollution regulations by limiting the dumping of Class AA sludge.
Class AA is the highest quality sludge, which is a little like saying it’s the best flavor you can get from licking a well-used ashtray.
“We’ve been working for nearly a decade on the disposal of Class AA biosolids,” said Lisa Rinamin, executive director of the St. Johns Riverkeeper organization. “There are no current protective guardrails for Class AA. … It’s not regulated.”
The practice of dumping this stuff on farmers’ fields will continue to be unregulated all over Florida, thanks to the governor.
What I found particularly interesting were the justifications he gave for vetoing the bill. If we ever run out of sewage sludge, we can substitute his veto message.
It’s just as big a load of fertilizer.
Tidal wave of toilet waste
The Chamber of Commerce folks like to brag about how we get 900 new people moving here every day, but they never mention the corollary.
Those big crowds of people produce an ever increasing amount of poop. How can we deal with that tidal wave of toilet waste?
Our sewage plants — many of them old and outdated and lacking capacity — collect all the poop, then treat it. But they can’t make it entirely disappear like David Copperfield with the Statue of Liberty
After treatment, the sewage plants have to figure out what to do with the concentrated waste from your waste. That’s the sewage sludge — er, excuse me “biosolids.”
Farmers wind up using it as fertilizer for their crops, but inevitably what they get is far more than what they and their crops need. The sludge carries lots of nasty pollutants too — 352 of them, according to a 2018 Environmental Protection Agency report. That list may include those “forever chemicals” that tend to cause cancer.
When the haulers were dumping the sludge on farmers’ fields around Lake Okeechobee, the excess pollutants wound up flowing into the Everglades.
Thus, in 2007, the Legislature passed a law that basically banned farms near Lake Okeechobee, the Kissimmee River, and the Everglades from accepting the 100,000 tons of South Florida’s Class B sewage sludge being trucked in there.
But that law didn’t stop them from dumping the sludge elsewhere.
The trucks began heading northward to dump it in the watershed of the St. Johns River. By 2019, Florida Today was calling Central Florida “sludge central.”
So here’s the good news: One bill passed by the Legislature this spring included new rules that ban Class B biosolids from being dumped anywhere in the state, period, beginning in 2028. It’s part of a nationwide push to halt use of this harmful gelatinous mess.
If you’re done shouting huzzah, I will now deliver the bad news.
The other bill that passed would have limited the amount of Class AA biosolids applied to farmers’ fields to how much those fields needed for the crops, period. No longer could the hauler dump it all and wash their hands.
Thanks to the governor’s veto, no law will now stop the indiscriminate dumping of Class AA all over the state.
And it’s clear from the guv’s veto letter, he’s flushed with pride for doing that.
All in favor
I went back and reviewed the legislative committee hearings on the biosolids bill. They were quite amazing.
I have frequently made fun of our fine Legislature. After all, these are the folks who once accidentally outlawed sex. But for once, they got something right — proof of the old Southernism that even a blind hog finds an acorn now and again.
At every committee stop, both in the House and Senate, the biosolids bill passed by a unanimous vote. Then, when it reached the floor, the bill passed the full House and Senate without drawing one single vote in opposition.
No matter the party, the committee, or the caucus, everyone agreed this was a big problem and the state needed to fix it.
“Florida spends billions of dollars on water quality,” said Sen. Jennifer Bradley, R-Fleming Island, who sponsored the Senate version. “That is what makes our state special and beautiful and wonderful. But we can’t maintain that if we have a big loophole in our biosolids regulations.”
Here’s the loophole: When sewer plants produce sludge, they pay someone to haul it away. The company that wins the hauling bid is often the one that charges the least. Usually that means the hauler is looking for the cheapest way to dispose of it.
That often involves dumping it on some farmer’s field not far from the sewer plant. The decision on how much to dump is driven by the amount the hauler is carrying, not the amount the field needs. That’s why there’s often an excess that gets washed away in the first storm.
The bill the Legislature passed would change that. Dumping would be limited to the amount that’s best for the farmer, not to the hauler. “Beneficial reuse” is now the objective, not just plain disposal.
I talked with a biosolids executive whose company does NOT do it the wasteful way that most others do.
Merrill Brothers, an Indiana company, has been hauling sludge since 1982, and doing so in Florida since 2011. Blake Merrill is the second generation of the family to run the place.
Class B biosolids, he said, have “the consistency of mud” (yuck!) as well as that well-known stench. Class AA biosolids, by contrast, are pasteurized like milk. The process involves drying the sludge out in places like a 3-acre Merrill greenhouse in Pasco County.
The result is that Class AA biosolids look like pellets, he explained. Doing it that way costs more, but it’s worth the extra steps to clean up some of the pollutants.
But Class AA still packs plenty of nutrients too. Merrill Brothers supported the bill that passed.
“The thing to remember is that you and I and everyone else in Florida is generating this waste every day,” he said. “So you can’t just say, ‘Oh, this is not my problem.’”
A lack of understanding
Rinaman’s St. Johns Waterkeeper wasn’t alone in pushing for the state to better regulate the sewage sludge industry. John Henry November of the Public Trust for Conservation was working on it too. In fact, his group had been wrestling with the biosolid problem since 2013, he said.
You can guess how frustrated both of them were to see the bill zoom through the Legislature without even a hint of opposition, only to be tackled mere inches from the goal line.
As for the reasons DeSantis listed for his veto, November told me they “show a lack of understanding of what the legislation was going to do.”
November’s comments echoed those of a Fort Pierce environmental consultant named Gary Roderick, former southeast bureau chief for the Florida Department of Environmental Protection.
In his letter, DeSantis contended that the bill “creates unnecessary regulations” and “subjects landowners to onerous record-keeping requirements.”
Bear in mind that there are currently NO regulations for Class AA biosolids. So to DeSantis, any regulations on these pollutants are unnecessary.
As for the “onerous record-keeping,” Roderick pointed out to me that the state used to require records to be kept of where and how much sludge was being dumped.
That stopped in 2013 under former Gov. Rick Scott, who valued business over the environment in every situation. Scott told his environmental regulators to “help” businesses comply with the law rather than hammer them for violating it.
Before 2013, Roderick said, “we actually had an idea of how much and where (by sites and county inventories) this human waste was being disposed.”
Because the state repealed those reporting requirements, now no one can say for sure how much sewage sludge is being dumped where, he noted. But it’s likely a lot, given the fact that our population now tops 23 million people who use the toilet regularly.
Given the governor’s clueless comments, Roderick suggested that DeSantis, a lawyer by trade, may not know much about how farming works and how important record-keeping is.
“Does he think [a farmer] doesn’t know how much fertilizer he is … applying to their land?” Roderick asked. “Or does he think ag people can’t read or write?”
Those “onerous” records would most likely be “used to file dubious legal actions,” the governor warned without explaining why he thought they would be dubious. To which Roderick responded with obvious sarcasm, “Gosh, we may have to do something about all of this contamination.”
DeSantis wrote that while the bill’s goal of cleaning up pollution is an admirable one, it “can be achieved through the existing oversight” of the DEP and the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services.
If those state agencies have come up with measures to control the sludge being dumped around the state, “I’d like to see them!” Rinaman said.
A clear commitment
By far the most ironic line in the governor’s letter says, “My administration’s commitment to improving water quality is clear.”
That sentence is incomplete. What it should have said was “clearly non-existent.”
As I pointed out just a couple of weeks ago, DeSantis was elected in 2018 promising to fix Florida’s growing toxic algae bloom problem. He appointed actual scientists to advise him — and then ignored nearly everything they told him to do.
Our boot-wearing governor boot-scooted away from his commitment because he lacked the will to crack down on the polluters. After all, they tend to be major campaign contributors.
Instead, he cut a deal with an Israeli company to repeatedly dump a hydrogen peroxide mixture into the waterways, quelling the blooms for a while. But they always come back.
He’ll be gone by January, out of office and no longer able to block environmental progress. According to the Lakeland Ledger, he’s bought a home near Lake Wales.
I am sure that the folks who pushed this bill through the Legislature this year will try again in 2027. We will have a different governor in charge, presumably one who possesses a spine.
I don’t think clean water advocates should forget about how DeSantis did us all dirty. I think next year’s bill should say that the only place in the state where anyone can dump as much sewage sludge as they want is in ex-Gov. DeStinkus’ new front yard.
It’s for his own good. All that excess fertilizer will help him grow a big enough hedge to hide from all the people angry about his repeated betrayals.
