FOLIO
Money is power — and in Florida, it will buy you whatever you pant after, whether it’s a giant, taxpayer-funded scoreboard or the governor’s office, as Rick Scott discovered when he spent $70 million of his own money to win in 2010. The infamous billionaire Koch brothers want fewer regulations to get between them and even more riches, even if those regulations protect vital natural resources. So they’ve thrown their dollars at politicians, legislation and even state universities. Koch Industries and one of its 300 mega-wealthy like-minded donors gave $75,000 last year to Scott’s Let’s Get To Work PAC. The Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity PAC boasted that it knocked on 280,000 doors in support of Scott’s reelection.
Scott won the Kochs’ support in part by dismantling the state’s environmental regulatory framework during his first term.
In the old, funky town of Palatka, evidence of what the Kochs’ largesse can buy is spewing from a 1,100-foot pipeline laid across the bottom of the St. Johns River — millions upon millions of gallons of wastewater, laden with toxic chemicals like dioxin and harmful heavy metals, all from the Koch-owned Georgia-Pacific’s paper plant. That wastewater will create an environmental dead zone in a 100-foot-wide swath on either side of the pipe in the area where noxious gunk is most concentrated as it enters the river. The Department of Environmental Protection’s wastewater tests led the state agency to classify this area a zone of “chronic toxicity,” meaning it’s harmful to marine life. (The DEP, it’s worth noting, is the same agency in which we recently learned that, under the Scott administration, staffers aren’t allowed to say the words “climate change” or “global warming.”)
This angers environmentalists like Neil Armingeon, the former St. Johns Riverkeeper and current Matanzas Riverkeeper.
“Two of the richest men on Earth are using the water and the river bottom that belongs to all of us, to the public, to dilute pollution,” says Armingeon. “It is everything that is wrong. It is just wrong. It is a violation of the public trust, and it sends the message that if you are the Koch brothers and you own Rick Scott, you can do whatever the hell you want to do.”
Terry Hadaway, public affairs manager at G-P’s Palatka office, says that the company has fully complied with DEP and EPA regulations, and that issues related to the pipeline were resolved more than a year ago.
After the state permitted the pipeline in 2012, the Florida Clean Water Network and other environmental organizations sued. They lost the first round but have appealed. More recently, the FCWN posted a petition on change.org, provocatively titled “Demand Federal Criminal Investigation of Rick Scott’s Land Give-away to Koch Brothers.” As of March 9, it had collected 894 signatures.
The pipeline dates back to Jeb Bush’s gubernatorial administration, even before the Koch brothers bought G-P in 2005. G-P first sought permission to build a pipeline into the St. Johns River after the state ordered the company to clean up the pollution its paper plant had dumped into Rice Creek, a tributary of the St. Johns River. According to Linda Young, executive director of the Florida Clean Water Network, G-P reps said at the time that they wanted to secure an alternate discharge point. Bush and his cabinet, who didn’t even know what G-P would be dumping, gave tentative approval.
When G-P sought permission for the pipeline from the DEP under then-governor Charlie Crist, the state said the company needed to clean the dioxin coming out of the paper mill to a significantly higher standard. G-P resisted. After Scott’s election, G-P finally received its permit to build a pipeline from its Palatka plant through state wetlands and into the St. Johns River to dump its industrial waste — up to 60 million gallons of effluent a day, though the company usually dumps about half that.
In the process, activists say, G-P was allowed to subvert a state law that requires the governor and cabinet to approve uses on sovereign state lands. When G-P lined up permits to build its pipeline, it did so without ever going back to the governor and the cabinet for approval, as is required by state law. Only months after the pipeline began emptying the waste into the river did the company bother to seek a needed discharge permit; DEP agreed to issue that permit for the waste — usually the first thing a company has to obtain, Young says.
That, say environmental activists, is an affront to the people of Florida.
“How do you sit there, in front of God and everybody, and say this isn’t contrary to the public interest?” Young asks.
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