EDITORIAL: Friday A weaker EPA means a more vulnerable Florida

Sept. 22--A man-made environmental disaster is looming over Florida.

And Florida's recent brush with a natural calamity -- Hurricane Irma -- highlights the reason why we need to halt this man-made one while we still can.

The latest crisis comes in the form of a House-approved budget for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that, if accepted by the Senate, would be the lowest budget for the agency since 2001.

That would be no small feat: The EPA has historically been an agency forced to operate with one of the smaller budgets in federal government.

Granted, the House's $7.8 billion budget proposed for the EPA is better than the $5.7 billion President Donald Trump initially requested for the agency, but it would still hurt. Under it, agency staffing levels would be cut to pre-1990 levels. And such drastic cuts would hit Florida extremely hard.

Here EPA funds are used to restore polluted sites, protect the state's beaches and estuaries, monitor and enforce air and water quality, repair leaking underground storage tanks and more.

The budget cuts would certainly lead to a reduction in the annual amount Florida receives in grant funding from the EPA, which totaled $600 million over the last five years.

epa's help needed more than ever

What does this have to do with Irma?

Plenty.

The EPA has traditionally operated in an almost emergency-management role before and after natural disasters to mitigate and prevent environmental damage.

It is, in a sense, the science arm of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

When a hurricane hits, the agency:

--Monitors air and water quality.

--Evaluates spills, including those of oil and raw sewage.

--Collects toxic household debris.

--Secures brownfields and Superfund sites.

All of these tasks are extraordinarily important in hurricane-prone Florida -- and if they are made harder to perform because of budget cuts, our state stands to pay a huge price.

Just consider this fact:

The floodwaters in Jacksonville from Irma contained chemical pollutants and bacteria that could be flowing through our city for weeks.

Yes, weeks.

That's an especially frightening scenario for many people, including Heather McTeer Toney, a former EPA regional administer for the Southeast region, which includes Florida.

"The thing that is scary to me right now is because of the massive budget cuts, the EPA is not going to have the funding or the personnel to (fully monitor Irma's lingering effects)," McTeer Toney told the Miami New Times.

EPA IN TRUMP'S CROSSHAIRS

Sadly, the fact is the EPA has been in Trump's crosshairs from the moment he took office.

Not so many months ago, he proposed nearly a 30 percent reduction to the agency budget, a cut that would have eliminated many programs.

And Trump ran on a campaign platform that also focused on reducing the hurdles businesses faced from federal agencies by reducing federal regulations.

To Trump's credit, there is a valid argument to be made that there are many federal regulations that deserve to be overhauled or eliminated.

But the president's wholesale push to take down the EPA and its environmental regulations is not merely unnecessary.

It's dangerous.

Trump's choice to lead the EPA, Scott Pruitt, is a former Oklahoma attorney general who made his political reputation by relentlessly attacking and opposing the very agency he's now leading.

Indeed, many observers view Pruitt as being among the least qualified figures to head the EPA in recent history.

And it's already clear that Pruitt's well-documented hostility and antipathy toward the EPA hasn't eased since taking over the agency: Eight months into Pruitt's reign, the EPA has collected 60 percent less in civil fines against polluters than was brought in by any of the previous three administrations over the same time period.

It's a clear sign of how the Trump administration feels about environmental regulations.

LAX ON POLLUTION

The impact of the cuts on the EPA -- as well as the Trump administration's lax oversight on polluters-- could truly be devastating for Florida.

They could negatively affect the state's ability to deal environmentally with natural disasters.

And they could limit the ability of Florida to deal with everyday pollution.

In turn, those vulnerabilities could affect Florida's economic base, which is centered on the tourists -- the people who come to our state in huge numbers because they want to enjoy various outdoor activities.

And over the long term, a weaker EPA could impact Florida's public health, too. There's no getting around the fact that more pollution in our air and water raise the risk of poorer health for everyone in this state.

Although the bill the House eventually passed a week ago was much less grim than Trump's plan, it's still 7 percent less than the amount budgeted for the EPA for 2017. Now it's up to the Senate to pass its version of a budget.

When that might happen is unclear.

"Who knows how all this will shake out," said Elgie Holstein, senior director for strategic planning of the Environmental Defense Fund and a former staffer of the U.S. Office of Management and Budget.

He fears that in the end the House and Senate won't be able to agree on a single budget for the EPA and that negotiations will then be held in behind-closed-door meetings where the administration's representatives would have greater sway.

"(There) will be a lot of pressure from the administration to get deeper cuts," Holstein said.

That means it's high time Florida's elected officials take the time to notify our nationally elected legislators to tell them how important it is to at the very least maintain the EPA's budget at its fiscal year 2017 levels.

Florida depends on environmental oversight in so many ways.

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