The sugar lobby has long had a lock on Congress and on the Florida Capitol, as evidenced most recently when the Legislature and Gov. Jeb Bush agreed, indefensibly, to prolong the Everglades cleanup by a decade.
Now this arrogant industry wants to dispose of the federal judge who insists on holding its Tallahassee subsidiary to the state's original agreement. It's too much.
Judge William Hoeveler's remarks to the press, the ostensible reason Sugar wants him off its back, compare neither in tone nor significance to the out-of-court interviews that got another judge bounced from the Microsoft antitrust case. The Microsoft matter was still essentially in trial, short of a final judgment.
The Everglades lawsuit was settled 11 years ago, when the state consented to an order setting 2006 as a deadline for reducing phosphorus pollution to 10 parts per billion. Hoeveler's role is now that of a judge enforcing his decree, which he perceives being violated. Nothing obliges him to be impartial about that. Nothing he has said to the press deviates from what he has said in court.
Sugar's attack, accompanied by crocodile tears over how much they hated to have to do it, appears timed to delay if not defeat Hoeveler's announced intent to appoint a special master next week to oversee the Everglades cleanup. It should be as apparent to the judges who will hear the motions as it is to the people of Florida that only the force of law, forcefully applied, can restore Florida's great and unique natural resource.
In Tallahassee, meanwhile, the Department of Environmental Protection and the Environmental Regulatory Commission appear poised to dilute the restoration effort yet again. Proposed changes to a pending rule would allow phosphorus readings to be averaged over time in much of the area in question rather than applied rigidly to each individual measuring station. The effect, according to the Audubon Society, which objects, would be to tolerate "hot spots" that exceed the 10 parts per billion standard.
That's not all. The "Everglades Florida Partnership," an unregistered political committee that fronts for the sugar lobby, has sent large color postcards to voters in the districts of at least three House members who voted to delay the deadline. Attractively printed and plainly expensive, the propaganda praised their "hard work, leadership and commitment to our environment" as if they had been sponsors of the bill, which it mislabeled as "something that keeps the process going . . ." rather than as an artifice to stall it.
The worst of it is that the legislators, who have already opened campaign accounts, may not have to report the mailings as in-kind campaign contributions, and the so-called "Partnership" won't have to disclose how much it spent or where it got the money. Though it resembled campaign ads in every other respect, the material carefully avoided the magic words "re-elect" or "vote for."
"They are completely out of the light of day," concedes Ben Wilcox of Common Cause, who is lobbying for a Florida law, similar to a provision of the McCain-Feingold federal legislation, that would treat such advertising as a contribution to a candidate, rather than as "issue advertising," if it is circulated within 30 days of an election. Even that would not apply, however, to the sort of mailings that went out last week.
If the election law were a horse, they'd have to shoot it.
