Maxwell: Florida fights efforts to save manatees. Insurance costs rise again

Today we’re looking at new developments in stories featured in two previous columns. And fair warning: Both are pretty depressing.

In one case, Florida has decided to fight a court ruling that ordered the state to stop allowing the water pollution that has led to record manatee deaths. (Yes, the state’s environmental protection agency is fighting an order to protect the environment.)

In the other, a new report shows that home insurance rates are continuing to rise in Florida, despite Tallahassee lawmakers repeatedly telling you they delivered relief. (In other words, the politicians hope you’ll listen to their words and not look at your own bills.)

Let’s start with the manatees.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the record number of manatees starving to death due to water pollution that has killed off the seagrass they eat to survive.

Stories from both the Orlando Sentinel and Tampa Bay Times described nightmarish demises of the state’s official marine mammal with the docile creatures literally rotting from the inside due to empty bellies.

In one case, biologists found a calf still trying to nuzzle its mother’s corpse. Other sea cows were found so starved that their bones had pierced their thinned skin.

Maxwell: Manatee corpses — the price of the ‘freedom’ to pollute in Florida

The in-depth reporting by the two newspapers detailed how water pollution in the Indian River Lagoon had killed off much of seagrass, contributing to the deaths of around 1,900 manatees over the past three years. I wrote at the time: “To stop that pollution, lawmakers would have to stand up to development interests, agribusiness and influential utility companies, something they rarely do.”

Well, an animal-rights group called Bear Warriors United filed a lawsuit saying the state had a legal obligation to do just that. And a federal judge agreed, ruling that Florida had violated the federal Endangered Species Act in allowing the wastewater discharges to pollute the habitat of the threatened species.

But instead of agreeing to belatedly fight to save the sea cows, Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration decided to fight the ruling — and made some eye-popping arguments in a court filing last week.

In its appeal, the state’s laughably named Department of Environmental Protection agreed that there is an indeed existential threat afoot. But it isn’t manatees that the state is worried about. It’s developers. As the News Service of Florida reported, the state argued that the judge’s ruling “threatens to impede commercial and residential development in the state.”

Yeah, forget the dying sea creatures. Florida is rallying to protect the state’s development interests, whom the state said “have no ready means to challenge this moratorium.”

You know who else has no ability to show up in court and file a brief? The dying manatees.

Admittedly, the judge’s order is severe in calling for a temporary pause on all new development with the septic systems that have created much of the pollution. But the state ignored one warning after another to do the right thing on its own. So now the state’s acting like a whiny kid who was warned time and again to stop misbehaving and then complained when Mom and Dad finally laid down the law.

The bottom line: You know things are bad when the state not only allowed the manatee die-off to happen, but is now fighting for the right to let the deaths continue.

Insurance rates rise again

In the insurance arena, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel’s intrepid insurance reporter, Ron Hurtibise, just reported that home insurance rates are rising again in Florida.

The latest quarterly report from the Florida Office of Insurance Regulation showed an average premium increase of less than 1%. That’s small. But it comes on the heels of increases in nine of the previous 10 quarters. All told, the average premium price in Florida is now 30% higher than it was in 2022 — when lawmakers claimed to have “reformed” the market.

In other words: you got conned. Lawmakers in Tallahassee definitely made reforms, but most of them benefited the insurance companies, not consumers.

Insurance costs edge higher for Florida homeowners and condo owners

Yes, there are more insurance companies now in Florida, which is good. But most homeowners aren’t seeing financial benefits. The insurance companies are. So Florida’s politicians and insurance officials carefully choose words like “stabilization” to refer to the relief they delivered and hope you won’t notice your costs keep going up.

The reality is that Florida has a complicated and risky insurance market, thanks to frequent storms and rising floodwaters. The only way to provide meaningful relief to consumers — meaning lower rates — would be for lawmakers to either beef up the state-run Citizens Insurance program, so that more people can access it, or use tax dollars to subsidize the market even more than it already does by investing even more in underwriting of reinsurance or through direct subsidies.

Because it’s clear that the state’s version of “reform” — which mainly involved making it harder for homeowners to sue their insurance company, even when they’re denied benefits they’re owed — didn’t bring down costs. The state’s own numbers say as much.

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