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Despite Escambia County’s outward beauty, our community has long been plagued by pervasive pollution from industrial plants, landfills, septic tanks and the like.
Pollution was so bad that in 1999, a special grand jury was convened to assess local air and water quality. The jury found that local regulators were falling down on the job, that local elected officials were serving corporations rather than citizens, and that we needed to take immediate action to stem the tide of toxins in our community.
The grand jury issued an array of recommendations to improve pollution control, environmental monitoring, government accountability and other issues, but 20 years later, we’re still seeing a lot of the same old problems.
In this special series, the News Journal will look at the state of our natural resources to help answer: Have we squandered paradise?
Read the full series here: Paradise Squandered: Legacy of pollution haunts Escambia County
The final installment of the series looks back on the perspectives of Judge John Kuder and Assistant State Attorney Russell Edgar, two men who helped launch the grand jury review of our environment.
► One of the most damning findings of the report was that the DEP’s then-district director, Bobby Cooley, had “ignored and concealed environmental violations against the sound advice of staff.”
► The 1999 grand jury report recommended the local head of the Department of Environmental Protection be terminated for ignoring and concealing violations, and proposed that dereliction of duty by a public officer be designated a criminal offense.
► After the completion of the grand jury report, then-head of the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, David Struhs, left the DEP for a job in International Paper’s corporate administration.
► A defiant DEP administration said it would take the grand jury’s recommendations under consideration, but ultimately refused to terminate Cooley and balked at implementing many of the sweeping changes recommended in the report.
► Local and state officials responded to the report with denial and denouncements. Elected officials scoffed at the suggestion they put corporations ahead of citizens.
► Then-Assistant State Attorney Russ Edgar was attacked by elected officials and business interests for the grand jury’s findings. “After the report was issued and presented publicly, there were a group of people, chamber of commerce people and others, who came to the aid of the local director who had served their interest and not the public’s,” Edgar said. “They criticized the report and took out ads in the paper against it, chastised me for it and so forth. I even had a county commissioner who accused me of just doing it because I wanted to run for office, which was just laughable.”
► The grand jury report offered 27 recommendations for local and state regulators to reverse the harm to the environment. Yet in the months following the grand jury report, the News Journal reported that few of those ideas gained much traction.
► Commenting 20 years later, John Kuder, the former chief judge of Florida’s First Judicial Circuit who oversaw the grand jury, said, “A lot of very good people in this community spend all of their spare time trying to get the right thing done and not being able to.”
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Read or Share this story: https://www.pnj.com/story/news/2019/11/21/politics-stymied-local-environmental-reforms-paradise-squandered-takeaways-part-5/4192140002/
