Here is a brief but not exhaustive list of negatives surrounding North Miami Beach’s plan to outsource its water utility to a massive private company: The FBI looked into the deal. So did the Miami-Dade County State Attorney’s Office. The city’s own Public Utilities Commission did not sign off on the plan.
Mosquito season in Miami begins every year when the so-called black salt marsh mosquitoes, a buzzing cloud of bugs not known to carry the Zika virus or other tropical diseases, descends upon the area. The insects arrived a few weeks early this year — so, after sundown tonight, Miami-Dade County will send airplanes to blast naled, the controversial mosquito-killing pesticide, over wide portions of Homestead, the Redland, Florida City, Cutler Bay, and South Miami-Dade.
Miamians still don’t spend enough time worrying about global warming. Sure, we’ve got multiple city task forces dedicated to making sure Dade County isn’t underwater by the year 2100. But construction across town has continued to boom, to the point that it seems like real-estate developers believe they’re building in landlocked Colorado as opposed to a city that can adequately be described as “pre-Venice.”
On April 3, the City of North Miami Beach began negotiating with a global engineering firm to take over the city’s water utility, which services close to 200,000 people in North Miami-Dade. Clean-water activists vehemently opposed the move, citing research that water utilities run by private companies tend to get much more expensive over time and typically provide services at “cheaper” rates by cutting staff or services.
Florida Power & Light, the ultrapowerful electricity monopoly, and its parent company, NextEra Energy, spend millions lobbying in Tallahassee and Washington. And those lobbyists spend most of their time arguing against changes FPL’s customers actually want, like the right to cheap home solar panels or better clean-air regulations. Sometimes, they…
The Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan — a state and federal project to restore the Glades to some semblance of its former glory — passed in 2000. That plan called for a 360,000-acre-foot reservoir south of Lake Okeechobee. But in the years since, climate scientists have warned that planners underestimated the amount of water the Glades needs to replenish itself, and that the original benchmark might not be large enough.
Sure, that Styrofoam cooler is handy when it’s keeping your drinks cold. But once you’re done with it, the light-as-a-feather material doesn’t go away — it crumbles into chunks of plastic that clog waterways, threatening sea life for years to come. Mindful of the environmental ramifications, several South Florida cities have banned polystyrene products…
There is no more obvious symbol of the sugar industry’s stranglehold on Florida, or its waning grip on the state Legislature, than the story of the Everglades reservoir plan. The idea — to buy land south of Lake Okeechobee back from sugar growers in order to let water flow freely south to the Glades after close to a century of misdirection and mismanagement…
For the past seven years, Florida Power & Light has battled environmentalists over its plans to build two new reactors and inject their radioactive waste 3,000 feet underground, just below the aquifers where South Florida gets its drinking water. Environmentalists have vigorously argued that science shows the dangerous waste could leech upward into Miami’s drinking water. And yesterday, those green activists finally earned a hearing before the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).
It’s becoming increasingly obvious that federal officials won’t begin treating climate change like a real problem until a whole lot of people die or lose their homes. Donald Trump is trying to cripple the Environmental Protection Agency, and his latest budget asks Congress to strip funding from every single federal agency studying global warming.
Two positions by Florida Power & Light don’t quite add up. First, the electric monopoly contends it’s leading the charge to invest in renewable energy in the Sunshine State.
Multiple studies have warned that fluid injected into the “Boulder Zone,” the lowest section of the aquifers that sit underneath South Florida, could leak directly into Miami’s drinking water.
Now that Cuban migration into Miami has slowed, the city’s Republican legislators have pretty much decided that they hate refugees. State Rep. Carlos Trujillo in 2016 tried to give Gov. Rick Scott military power to police which refugees enter the country.
Since 2016, Florida Power and Light, the monopoly consumers are forced to pay if they want electricity in Miami, has been accused of the following: Leaking radioactive wastewater into Biscayne Bay; trying to trick consumers into giving up their rights to solar power; attempting to stash radioactive waste in an…
If it comes to fruition, American Dream Miami would be one of the largest malls in the nation. The $3 billion project is the definition of South Florida largesse: In addition to offering the standard list of luxury shops, American Dream would include an ice rink, a lake for submarine rides, a water park, a theme park, and an indoor ski slope.
About 1,000 people have already registered for Miami’s March for Science.
At the beginning of North Miami Beach’s meeting last night about a plan to privatize its water system, City Manager Ana Garcia asked residents to trust the city based on the commission’s track record. That was an odd appeal, considering that Mayor George Vallejo is the subject of an…
Floatopia-style parties — where attendees bring inflatable rafts and get hellaciously drunk on the ocean — would be totally fine if people just cleaned up after themselves. But instead, partygoers have treated the ocean like an open garbage can and left beer cans, food wrappers, loose garbage, and all sorts of marine-life-killing flotsam drifting in the current.
Public utilities never quite work great. They function without (typically) poisoning people, but they’re almost always wrapped in red tape and slathered in layers of needless bureaucracy. But lately, right-leaning politicians have loved to harp that selling off publicly owned water, sewer, or power grids to private companies will somehow cut costs and public waste.
The folks who support fracking or nuclear energy need to distract people, so they call their dirty, carbon-emitting industries “job-creators,” and accuse green-energy advocates of being “job-killers.” But that’s all bunk. Study after study has shown recently that solar energy is getting cheap. Scores of workers have been hired to make…
The history of Florida is the adjustment to intrusion. In the state’s short 172-year history, armed U.S. troops have chased native Seminoles out of the Everglades, pristine beaches once considered worthless land have become vacation hot spots, and cattle pastures have given way to Disney World food courts.
Ignore the fact that the FBI has probed the City of North Miami Beach’s proposal to hand the operation of its entire water system over to a private company, and brush aside that the third-ranked company bidding for the project, the French firm Veolia, has ties to lead crises in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and Flint, Michigan.
