State: Right to 'green' lawsuits asserted

Three months after Gov. Jeb Bush signed it into law, a controversial measure making it harder for the average Floridian to challenge developers is headed to court.

Five environmental groups and St. Petersburg lawyer Tom Reese filed suit in Tallahassee on Wednesday to overturn the law, which Senate Majority Leader Jim King slipped through the Legislature on the last day of this year's session.

King, R-Jacksonville, got the law passed by attaching it to a bill providing money for restoring the Everglades.

The lawsuit contends hooking those two subjects together in one bill violated the state Constitution.

"This is a device to silence the voice of ordinary Floridians trying to protect their environment," said attorney David Guest of the Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund, who filed the suit. "This was such an odious act that it had to be attached to a bill that everybody favored, but the Constitution prohibits that."

Guest's clients, in addition to Reese, are the Florida Wildlife Federation, Sierra Club, Save the Manatee Club, Manasota-88 and Environmental Confederation of Southwest Florida. All of them have challenged developers' permits before, Guest said.

For instance, in 1999 Reese challenged a Hillsborough County plan that he contended would contaminate the county's supply of drinking water by routing treated effluent from the Hooker's Point sewer plant into the Tampa Bypass Canal, which leads to the reservoir.

"I called it the Toilet-to-Tap Plan," he said.

Reese's challenge -- backed up with testimony from a University of North Carolina expert -- persuaded county officials to withdraw their plan, he said. But under King's law, Reese said, he could not have challenged Hillsborough's plan because he lives in Pinellas County.

Other examples Guest cited in the lawsuit include a successful 1999 challenge by environmental groups to a permit for oil drilling off a Panhandle island and a 1986 challenge to the installation of 700 septic tanks near an aquatic preserve in Charlotte County.

King issued a statement Wednesday standing by his law, which he said is not as bad as the suit makes it sound.

"Petitioners still have a voice, while unavoidable development and growth is not unnecessarily delayed," he said.

King, the incoming Senate president, got the law passed to alter the 1971 Environmental Protection Act, which gave citizens the right to challenge developers and state agencies. The theory was that any citizen could challenge any project because every Floridian has a stake in protecting the state's environment.

King's law would allow only people who can prove they are personally affected by a project to file a challenge to a state permit for a development. To have standing to file a challenge, a group must have at least 25 members in the affected area, and it has to have been a Florida corporation for a year.

The senator said he made the change because of one case in particular. Three years ago, an American Indian activist named Bobbie C. Billie objected to a golf course community of up to 2,642 homes to be built near ancient burial grounds in Jacksonville. Billie and the local Sierra Club chapter won, forcing the developer to change the golf course, costing him hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The developer, Hawley Smith, was a constituent of King's who had contributed to his campaign. King contended someone in South Florida shouldn't have standing to challenge a development in Jacksonville.

Attorney General Bob Butterworth and thousands of voters asked the governor to veto the bill because of that controversial provision. About 100 groups called for Bush to reject the bill, including not only major environmental groups but also the Lutz Civic Association, the Florida Federation of Garden Clubs, the Tallahassee branch of the NAACP and the Sarasota Seniors Coalition.

But Bush, in a letter explaining why he signed the bill, said the provision will have "minimal impact" on citizen rights. He said only four of 298 challenges filed since 1991 have used the method being eliminated by the law. But he directed state Department of Environmental Protection Secretary David Struhs to study the new law's impact and report back in a year.

Struhs had not seen the suit and could not comment, DEP spokeswoman Lucia Ross said.

-- Staff writer Julie Hauserman contributed to this story, which also contains information from the Associated Press.

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