News from Legislature devoid of evil or mangling

TROXLER E-mail: Click here Archive

© St. Petersburg Times
published February 25, 2002

Most news about the Florida Legislature can be represented by one of two models.

The first model is the "deadlock" or "train wreck." A perfect example is this year's fight about tax reform:

TALLAHASSEE -- The state House and Senate deadlocked Monday on some durned-fool thing or another, leading members on both sides to issue dire warnings of a legislative "train wreck."

The second model is "lawmakers do evil." The best example from this year is a bill to raise local telephone rates:

TALLAHASSEE -- The Florida Legislature is poised to give final approval to the "Let's Do Evil Act of 2002," over the strident objections of do-gooders.

You must admit that after a while, a steady diet of train-wrecking and evil-doing gets old.

Why is there no good news? Why doesn't a senator, say, find an envelope full of cash and turn it in, like those kids in Tampa? Why can't the Legislature make everybody happy by hiring Jon Gruden, or bringing back El Nino?

Lost in such morose thoughts last week, I was contacted by a representative of the Zephyrhills Spring Water Co., which is based, by an amazing coincidence, in Zephyrhills, in beautiful southeastern Pasco County.

The company was worried about a pair of bills in the Legislature that would block any new taking of water from large springs in Florida. You can see how that might worry an outfit that sells, you know, spring water.

Allow me to paraphrase our initial talk:

ME: Say, are you the bad guys here? Aren't you sucking water out of our precious springs for your own profit, while the rest of us live under water restrictions?

Z-HILLS: No, please, you're picking on the folks with the smallest straw! There are individual dairy farms in Florida that draw more water than we do. We take an average of 330,000 gallons a day out of Crystal Springs, which has an average daily flow of 35-million gallons. We are a good company, a good employer and a good steward.

This seemed like an interesting scrap. I talked to state Rep. Nancy Argenziano, R-Crystal River, one of the bill sponsors. She told me she certainly was not trying to pick on the bottled water companies; everybody in the affected areas would be covered.

Argenziano said all she wanted is for the state first to set a safe standard for how much can be taken: "If you don't know what you've got, how can you give it out?" Until then, as the bill was first written, no new permits.

I got in touch with Meg Andronaco, who is the company's natural resources manager and a geologist by training. She told me many interesting things about Zephyrhills and its "flavors" of bottled water (spring, distilled, drinking).

We were having this talk Friday morning. I asked Andronaco about the bills in the Legislature; and she mentioned, casually, that the ban on new water usage was out of the bill! I said: Huh? She said that a change had been agreed to just the day before. As long as the state water folks make it a priority to set the right figures for "minimum flows and levels" for Florida's springs, the lawmakers would drop any talk about a moratorium.

"The way this is written now, it seems reasonable to us," Andronaco said.

Feeling a story slipping away, I checked with Argenziano and state Sen. Ginny Brown-Waite; and they said: That's right. Their main goal was getting the numbers set, not punishing anybody.

Problem solved! Issue moot! The Zephyrhills representative up in Tallahassee who had set the whole thing in motion apologized, saying: Geez, sorry that it got fixed before there was time to write an article about it.

I thought: Hmm, let's see. Two members of the Legislature got what they wanted. The people of Florida could finally get some good standards for protecting their springs. The bottled-water companies were spared the role of premature scapegoat. This seemed to work out pretty well for all parties. Seeing that the story did not fit either the "train wreck" model or the "evil-doer" model for our Legislature, I decided to abandon the entire enterprise.

-- You can reach Howard Troxler at (727) 893-8505 or at troxler@sptimes.com.

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