St. Johns River Under Assault By Toxic Waste Dumping???

[FloridaFishinFool]

Not sure where to post this, but right now, this story is causing a lot of people in Florida to get really angry and motivate us to uncover the truth of this matter and very quickly too. So for right now I am going to go ahead and post this breaking news... as I am not sure what to make of it right now, but I already have emails in to state biologists with FWC and checking with St. Johns River Management as well as other agencies to uncover the truth and full scope of this breaking disturbing story found published today by a Philadelphia news outlet:

OpEdNews Op Eds 1/26/2016 at 10:10:04 The St. Johns River, a pristine natural treasure, falls prey to the greed of the Koch Borthers and their powerful allies By Samuel Vargo (about the author)     Permalink       (Page 1 of 2 pages) Related Topic(s): Allies; Fishing; Greed; Koch Brothers; Koch Brothers Scandal; Koch-funded Pacs; Oil; Pipeline; State; Unfit; (more...) Addto My Group(s)  1    1    1    View Ratings | Rate It   opednews.com Headlined to H2 1/26/16

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I love the St. Johns River in Florida. It's a beautiful stretch of 310 miles of lackadaisical southern water that moves so slowly that it almost appears to be a large lake. 

The St. Johns River is a living example of the slowed-down lifestyle people appear to enjoy who live south of the Mason-Dixon line. Time ticks away at a slower pace 'down South' and folks enjoy the little things - like fishing, boating, picnicking near the river, or just sitting along the riverside and watching dolphins skip the surface of the river.

When I lived in Jacksonville for several years, I often enjoyed the recreational value of this beautiful waterway. I did a little fishing off the banks of the St. Johns with some of my friends and sometimes would just sit on a bench overlooking the river at the Claude J. Yates Branch of the YMCA on Riverside Avenue in the warm Florida sunshine and take in the serenity that this precious natural gem emitted. It's a beautiful river that's unique in many ways. And it's important to keep the water of the St. Johns pure because so many people live around it and will be affected adversely if its watershed becomes polluted irreparably. 

The St. Johns is unusual in that it is one of the few rivers in the world that flows south to north. Sometimes as I sat on the bench of the YMCA, I'd see dolphins jumping out of the water way on the other side of this wide river. Their schools were breathtaking - skirting the water and leaping into the air as they enjoyed frolicking to their destinations somewhere - who knows?

Numerous lakes are formed by the St. Johns or flow into it. And its width even outdoes Old Man River - at the St. Johns' widest point, it's almost three miles across. The narrowest point is in the headwaters, an unnavigable marsh in Indian River County. In all, 3.5 million people live within the various watersheds that feed the St. Johns River. The St. Johns winds through or borders twelve counties, and three of these counties are the state's largest. The drop in elevation from headwaters to mouth is less than 30 feet (9 m); and like most Florida waterways, the St. Johns has a very low flow rate - 0.3 mph (0.13 m/s) and is often described as "lazy", according to Wikipedia. 

The St. Johns River has fallen prey to the Koch Brothers and their very powerful friends, however. Georgia-Pacific/Koch Industries has been permitted to discharge up to 60 million gallons of toxic waste per day into the St. Johns, which will collect on the bottom of the river, making for a poisonous sludge collecting there, which will create a water-mass unfit for humans and animals. 

Greed and powerful sycophants that jump at the commands and demands of David and Charles Koch will in time see this once pristine natural wonder turned into a place where nobody will be able to fish, water ski, or do anything else - chalk off another fresh water body to the rubber stamping of our government. According to a petition being circulated online by change.org: "The pipeline easement was issued by FDEP, as agent for the Florida Governor and Cabinet, after a highly misleading newspaper notice and no fair opportunity to request an evidentiary hearing. (http://bit.ly/1zBpbMj.) The river should be held in trust by the Governor and Cabinet for the people of Florida, not given away for private use as dumping grounds and without just compensation."

Daily Kos writer Leslie Salzillo's article on Oct. 26, 2015 shows the debauchery, greed, and deception involved with selling the St. Johns River down the proverbial river: "The unethical, and allegedly illegal, Florida indenture involving four very well-known political figures, including a 2016 presidential candidate, continues. Now, the matter is before the U.S. Supreme Court. The scandal involves Charles Koch, Davaid Koch, Florida Governor Rick Scott and Presidential candidate Jeb Bush. ""They are part of a deal made that allows Koch Industries' highly profitable paper and pulp company, Georgia-Pacific, to dump millions of gallons of toxic waste per day into the St. Johns River in Florida."

An attorney from Florida, Steve Medina, has been working on this case, pro bono, to expose the corruption that has spiraled from this scandal in Tallahassee and Putnam County, Fla. Here are some of the court documents that are available. In a letter to Daily Kos writer Leslie Salzillo, Medina complains: "The corporate media simply will not cover these issues to any significant degree," another Daily Kos article explains, also written by Salzillo.

"I think this is partly because the subject matter can be wonky," Medina writes in his letter to Salzillo. "And Americans are presumed to be stupid. But mostly I think it is because critiquing public officials as potentially 'mercenaries' when they are supposed to be 'fiduciaries' strikes a little too close to home for news outlets primarily funded by advertising revenue. Because I believe that this particular public trust case is so important and potentially precedent-setting, when I took my current job as an assistant public defender in the Florida Panhandle a couple of years ago, I got special permission to take off vacation time and continue to work on the case as long as it did not interfere with my regular job. A lot of late nights, early mornings, and weekends later, we are still alive, barely, and sure as hell kicking."

(Please click on title for link to original article in full)

[lo n slo]

this is sad

[FloridaFishinFool]

I am trying to do my part to spread the word on this situation. So I am contacting news agencies across Florida about it, and state and local governments about it, especially those in the affected areas. And I have a friend here in central Florida who is a lawyer and a fisherman so I let him know about it and he is already doing some digging.

What I am hearing so far is yes, this story is true. But the dumping has not begun because the approval process is in jeopardy right now.

Our state of Florida Constitution and laws require certain things from our elected officials and how they operate and this is where they have failed.

It appears what has happened is that big money businessmen approached our governor here in Florida, another big money businessman with a past of corruption, so together they colluded to approve this project and move it forward under radar so to speak and this is giving we the people some ammunition to use against them.

They were able to get a federal court to approve this toxic waste dumping, but it is presently being held up on appeal now going all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. The first issue of the appeal is that when this project was moved forward under the radar, our laws and Constitution REQUIRES a public notification and a public objection process.

The governor and his big money friends skirted this in a shady way. So the appeal is bringing this issue up that the governor failed to follow the law as well as his big money friends. They did not want public notification and they certainly did not want any of us to object to it either.

So the appeal might be won on this issue alone. But there is a second issue in the appeal which is an interesting one... in Florida we have a "constitutional requirement involving public trust review" which was also ignored. And this one involves the governor directly because as governor he is the chief executive of this state and required by law to follow the law, and in this case he failed to do so trying to sneak this toxic waste dumping into existence without following the law.

So in effect what governor Rick Scott has now done is considered a dereliction of duty. All of Florida's public waters are held in trust and it is we the people who own this trust, but it is the governor who oversees and executes the trust, and in this case, governor Rick Scott has failed to do his duty to the benefit of we the people and what is in our best interests as well as the state and condition of our natural environment held in trust he is sworn to uphold and execute for us.

So not only can this help the appeal process to stop this toxic waste dumping from moving forward, but if enough people were inclined to push the issue the governor could face some penalties himself for failing to follow the law intentionally and willfully trying to get away with this.

There are a couple of up sides to this situation, namely for one, the dumping is not approved and now has legal support to help stop it. And, the toxic waste dumping will be into the river in Palatka and will only affect the river to the north of Palatka where it flows out into the Atlantic ocean, so the lower river basin will remain unharmed by this willful destruction of nature and our water supply. And I am also being told that "the waste goes thru a process similar to what all public utilities have to do to make our drinking water safe." So this means that the toxic waste to be dumped into the river will be filtered and treated to a certain approved level of contamination before reaching the river. The question is to what degree will it be treated and how contaminated will the waste be when it reaches the river.

I am hoping to hear back from some state biologists concerning exactly what this waste water will contain.

I have mentioned before that the St. Johns river had a pollution problem that reached a peak in the early and mid 1980's before river cleanup operations began. Even back then the main contributor to river pollution came from the paper mills in Palatka, and it is precisely from this same industrial site where this new toxic waste project will be dumped into the river.

I do not want to see the river as polluted as it was when I was a kid. It was so bad we could not swim in the river, and we had to stop fishing it because the fish and blue crabs were coming out of the river with black cancerous looking abscesses on them and missing fins eaten off by the pollution and crabs were missing legs and had stubs where legs should be with black nasty cancerous looking discoloration creating a situation where we were afraid to eat or consume any fish or crabs caught in the river north of Palatka.

Let's hope this toxic waste dumping can be stopped on legal grounds, and I would like to see those responsible held accountable too.

[FloridaFishinFool]

I sure wish BassMaster would get into helping us protect this river! They sponsor pro bass fishing tournaments in Palatka of all places! The main source of the toxic waste!

I surely wish BassMaster and pro bass fishing organizations would help publicize this and take a stand on not doing any more tournaments at the site of toxic waste dumping into the river!

I'd like to see those tournaments moved further South in the river where it is much cleaner and only contains tons of cow dung  and regular run off waters.

But I think the situation is for one, not having large enough facilities to accomodate all the boats, trucks and trailers, and general public, and the event- which we do not have, and also a problem of navigation. Up there in Palatka the river is navigable and you don't see or hear about boaters grounding out and getting stuck on sand bars. Down here in central Florida this would surely be an issue.