Disposable City by Mario Alejandro Ariza

Author:Mario Alejandro Ariza [ALEJANDRO ARIZA, MARIO]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2020-07-14T00:00:00+00:00

FEUDING WHILE ROME BOGS

The West Palm Beach campus of the South Florida Water Management District could be mistaken for the suburban offices of a telemarketing firm. A pair of long rectangular three-story buildings clad in highly reflective glass flank an unremarkable parking lot. A third building, squat and square and similarly built, sits just southeast of them. To the west of the lot, there’s a fountain and a small lake. No outward signs indicate that the decisions made here will shape the future of the eight and a half million people who call this region home. No symbols point to the fact that unless the people who run this system act quickly to adapt it to climate change, all of the resilience work done by the municipalities it serves will be rendered moot. But this is how true power works—it is boring, it is mundane, it is as ineluctable as the water you drink.

Inside the first structure, there’s a security guard, a subcontractor. When I ask if he knows where the governing board meeting might be held, he stares back blankly. I decide to try the other building. There I find a media check-in table and a comms officer who ushers me into a nearly full council chamber. Of course, I’m late, and what’s left of the governing board is up on the dais hearing the end of the latest ecological conditions report from the head of water resources, Terrie Bates.

There are normally nine governing board members. It is an unpaid, volunteer position to which one must be appointed by the governor of Florida. Today there are only four because the new Republican governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, had asked all of them to resign. Five have already jumped ship, and this is the last meeting for the remaining four. The reason for the governor’s demand ostensibly has to do with a last-minute vote the board held during its November 7, 2018, meeting to allow Florida Crystals, a sugar grower, to continue farming operations on a piece of land needed for a reservoir.30 Representative Brian Mast, chair of the governor’s Transition Advisory Committee on the Environment, Natural Resources & Agriculture, had argued that the board had shown “a huge level of arrogance… and a huge level of entitlement” during its tenure and the lead-up to the vote.31

Bates pulls up a slide in her presentation that details the release of water from Lake O into the Caloosahatchee and St. Lucie Rivers during the previous several months. A subsequent slide features satellite imagery monitoring the toxic blue-green algae blooms in the lake, and a third graphs the declining health of oyster beds in the two estuaries after the summer rainy season freshwater releases. It takes me a second, but I realize that Bates is walking the four remaining board members through the ecological effects of this seventy-year-old water management system in real time. The freshwater releases are harming the oyster beds. Blue-green algae blooms are expected to be reduced as the Lake O sediment churned up by the summer’s storms finally settles.

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