Can you picture what will be
So limitless and free
Desperately in need of some stranger's hand
In a desperate land
—Jim Morrison, "The End"
I'm thinking about water — water in the desperate land of the Tampa Bay burgs — as I pack to head north to Atlanta. The "water story" is the perennial topic in Florida. It's the past and future and forever crisis. I penned water shortage stories two decades ago in Miami. I have harassed reporters at the Weekly Planet for six years to write the definitive water story.
Now, on one of my last days as a Tampanian, as I watch gray rain cascade outside my window, drumming a sloshing tattoo on the old iron fire escape at our El Pasaje office, I'm thinking that the truth about water is painfully clear. Every drop that falls washes away a little political power.
Drip: Lawns turn green and citizens turn skeptical at the dire warnings of Florida becoming a desert.
Splat: The aquifer begins to fill again and taxpayers wonder about the frantic and arrogant government demands for expensive new sources of water — such as environmentally dangerous and financially risky desalination plants.
Plop: Torrents of rain turn parts of Tampa into inland seas and voters angrily demand to know why truly needed projects — rebuilding the disastrously inadequate storm sewer system, for example — have been neglected.
Splash: In a wonderfully eloquent comeuppance to Tampa's maximum power tripper, Ed Turanchik, on the very day the U.S. Olympic Committee's city selection team arrives here, Tropical Storm Barry materializes overhead and dumps an ocean onto the Bay area. The Tampa 2012 Olympic boosters had gambled (ultimately with your money, not theirs, of course) that the drought would give the selection team the impression that it's always sunny in these parts. Heck, only a one-in-a-zillion chance of a hurricane hitting during the Olympic Games, the Tampa crowd told the U.S. Olympic Committee. As the Olympians mused over the likelihood of a similar downpour washing the 2012 games into the Gulf of Mexico, you could imagine Tampa's leaders muttering a collective "oops."
Water is, to me, the best example of what is fundamentally wrong with our leadership in the Tampa Bay area and in the state. You see, the conventional spin on the water crisis is a sham, a decoy, a red herring, a mirage crafted to deflect the public attention from real, very scary catastrophes that await this community.
It's not just that we're being lied to. The crime is that the definitions used by politicians, developers and their legal bully-boys skew reality. Up is down, red is blue, and a confused citizenry lurches along behind leaders who promise heaven but who are leading us to hell.
We were sold on draconian water strategies because we were in the middle of a "drought." Yet, how many people understand the cycle of wet years and dry years that are as natural for Florida as alligators in the Big Cypress Swamp? There are always droughts in Florida, and a few years later there are always tropical floods. Wet, dry, wet, dry. Not hard to figure out. It's been going on for as long as the sun's hot bronze rays have been steaming the water in Florida's river of grass.
If there is something extraordinary about the current drought, why haven't the battalions of scientists and government factotums provided us with a solid explanation, something we could grab hold of and exclaim, "Now I understand!" What haven't they told us? Do they know the answer?
Frankly, I think they do. And they fear we'll figure it out. A water "shortage" means they have power over us. They control us. They can ramrod through expensive and radical "solutions" that make millionaires out of their cronies. They can humble us by proclaiming that turning on the tap is sinful (while the most sanctimonious among our rulers are often themselves unrestrained water gluttons).
Don't get me wrong. There is something unusual — horribly so — about the current "drought." But for the scientists — whores to the companies and government agencies that pay the bills — to concede the real reason would be to admit that their "solution" will simply cause more of what they claim to be curing.
My reasonably informed conclusion is that what's deepened this drought is asphalt and concrete. That doesn't seem like an Einstein-caliber computation. It's pretty obvious.
If we're in the middle of the worst drought in a century, we should ask what's changed during the last hundred years? Let's see. In 1901, Florida's population totaled about 530,000. Now we have 16-million. That's a big change, easily measured. Anything else of that magnitude? Don't think so.
You pave over enough of paradise, and water can't evaporate in sufficient quantities to fuel the life-giving thunderstorms. The aquifers can't properly recharge. More and more people suck up more and more of what water there is. Finally, when Ma Nature's clock ticks around to dry time, it's really, really parched earth because the water reserves have disappeared.
Think about this. Each and every day an average of 400 acres in Florida is transmuted from wilderness and farms into houses, offices, roads and parking lots. Yesterday, 400 acres. Today, 400 acres. Tomorrow, 400 acres. Dirt to pavement. Scrubland to subdivisions. Mangrove swamps to beachfront hotels. There are 34,558,080 acres in Florida, maybe half of them already developed in one form or another. But the pristine lands are disappearing under the road graders at that unrelenting rate of 400 acres a day. That gives us another century, if we're lucky, before Florida is one seamless parking lot, wrapping around Disney World, encircling Wal-Marts and snaking through subdivisions with cute names like Fox Run and Pine Acres — but where, sadly, foxes and native pines have long been nothing but memories.
Keep those 400-acres-a-day in mind when you ponder our water crisis. The Oh So Grand Deceit when the Lords of Water told us we had to have desalination plants and reservoirs (not to mention recycling sewage as agua con yech) was that these measures were touted as necessary relief for groundwater pumping. Save the lakes by ending the reliance on the water wellfields, we were told. We believed them, and I'm sure the politicians and developers laughed uproariously that they had pulled off their magnificent scam. Never ask the Water Wizards about that man behind the curtain.
The truth is that "new" water sources aren't a substitute for sucking water out of the ground. The next drought — and it will be even worse, I fear — will still see lakes turn into moonscapes of dust and cracked mud. We'll still have brown lawns. The Hillsborough River will be demoted to an anemic creek.
Behind that truth is one even more frightening. The "new" water is needed for even more development. More and more and more. When the Tampa Bay Water regulatory agency was created in 1998, the politicians were not being progressive. They were butt-kiss catering to the developers. The agency was specifically denied authority to say, "No. We have no water today. You can't build." Tampa Bay Water has to deliver whatever the local governments approve. And approve they do. How much can they approve?
Throughout Florida, builders wail that government is too restrictive, that growth management is a horrible, just plain horrible impediment to The Holy Quest for Economic Development. The Florida Legislature this year almost gutted the meager laws that protect citizens from unrestrained development. By next year, certainly by the year after that, sane growth management laws will be history in Florida.
The bottom line is this. If you add up the populations currently allowed by the modestly restrictive growth plans in Florida's cities and counties, enough little boxes could be built to house more than 100 million people, more than seven times the state's current population. Hey, that's real economic development — emulating, say, Calcutta or the Mexico City slums.
Speaking of Third World cities, multinational companies have found a great new source of revenue: "privatizing" water supplies. It's already happening in Latin America. For that matter, it's a trend right here in River City, where Perrier has usurped the public's right to Crystal Springs. As shortages turn water into liquid gold, how long do you think it will be before politicians allow corporate logos to be branded on the Hillsborough River? Or the entire aquifer?
All the children are insane
Waiting for the summer rain
—Jim Morrison, "The End"
So, what have we learned? First, drought and flood are a naturally recurring cycle in Florida.
Second, something has interfered with the cycle to deepen the drought.
Third, the only reasonable explanation is development.
Fourth, we are being asked to pay for "new" water sources that, if the truth were told (which it isn't), won't supply H2O for current residents. Rather, the new water is, in effect, gasoline that will ignite rampant new development. You are being asked to foot the bill so that developers can build and build. And build some more.
Fifth, the "crisis" will only deepen because unrestrained growth will further erode existing water supplies. Politicians will scream that more "new" sources of water are needed. We'll build desal plants by the score. We will start perfuming sewage and calling it drinking water. If Tampa Bay turns into a reeking salt flat, so what? If our water bills double and triple (desal uses lots and lots of electricity, and TECO is already salivating) what the hell? A small sacrifice in order to secure "progress."
Sigh. I need to chill out. You do too, in all likelihood. Go pour yourself a drink (of water) sit down and then read on.
Is there a solution? In a minute you're going to read two words, just two, that will forever brand me a heretic and pariah among Florida's powerful and privileged. Should I ever return to Florida, despite four generations of Key West and Apalachicola ancestors, I fear that I will be pilloried as a traitor, and like Hester Prynne, I will be forced to wear a scarlet letter. Perhaps an "E" for "environmentalist" or "economic terrorist."
Because the two words scare the ever-lovin' bejesus out of our rape-the-land-grab-the-cash business leaders and their politician vassals. The words are so potent that a large headline in the Aug. 2 Tampa Tribune proclaimed: "Area Developers Band Together." The developers know the score. They understand the problem — basically that they are the problem.
So, before you catch on, they've formed the "Tampa Bay Regional Water Coalition." It sure sounds like a nice grassroots group. But it's pure Astroturf, fake to its roots.
What did the developers close ranks to fight?
My modest two-word proposal: No growth. There, I've said it. No growth. No growth. No growth.
Not "smart growth," which invariably is a shell game. Not "slow growth," which remains slow only as long as it takes to get the first bribe to a government official. I mean exactly what I say:
No growth. A 100 percent, no-exception moratorium on new residential and commercial building. Not one brick stacked on another. Not one square foot of new asphalt.
At this point, my Republican and libertarian friends are swooning in dismay. "Ohmy-god," they're choking. "Sugg has gone and become a bloody communist. He's proposing an end to the free economy." I don't think so. Florida's traditional pattern of growth has been: Developers profit; the public pays. Until current growth management laws imposed modest impact fees, governments (you and me) bore the full weight of paying for the cost of growth. Our taxes built the schools, roads and sewers. Those impact fees, however, were like a Band-Aid on a huge sucking chest wound.
What the ersatz "Tampa Bay Regional Water Coalition" doesn't want you to discover is that you're going to pay for all of the water that will make developers' projects possible and profitable.
My call for "no growth" means that until communities and the state can figure out how to make new developments pay for their public cost — all of the public cost — we don't build.
We deserve to live in a community that has sufficient schools and well-paid teachers, adequate roads, unclogged sewers, healthy budgets for police and fire departments. And, not least, gushers of clean, cheap water.
What has been proven repeatedly since Henry Flagler and Henry Plant carved their railways into Florida is that "private" developers are greedy for corporate welfare. It's time to kick the welfare loafers off the public dole.
If a developer wants to build another Ugly Acres, then he should stand up and be a true-blue American capitalist, not a whining, spineless socialist looking for a public handout.
What self-respecting capitalist would expect someone else to pay his bills? If a development means another school should be built, another road paved, another cop hired, then the developer should salute our noble flag and gladly settle those accounts with his own cash.
That is doubly true with water. Our business leaders must call for a halt to the chicanery that dominates talk about water. Give us a little capitalism, please. If we need new water sources to pay for more growth, then our developer John Galts should eschew government subsidies and, checkbooks out, demand to pay for the water their projects will require. If some of the water "solutions" they seek pose grave threats to the environment, these developers surely wouldn't be so un-American as to propose that the public should bear the risk.
No growth — until those who profit from the growth pay their bills. It's the American Way, after all.
Ex-Editor John Sugg, awash in his own liquid words, will appear from time to time in the Weekly Planet. He can be reached at Creative Loafing in Atlanta, 404-688-5623, ext. 1057, or at john.sugg@cln.com.
This article appears in Aug 16-22, 2001.