Citizen ballot initiatives are in jeopardy in Florida. At stake: clean water and First Amendment freedoms 

By Joseph Bonasia, FloridaRightToCleanWater.org 

I help lead a grassroots citizen initiative that aims to amend our state constitution to grant all Floridians a fundamental right to clean and healthy waters: aquifers, bays, lakes, rivers, springs and wetlands.   

Our Legislature, however, is close to killing the initiative process.  

Here’s what’s at stake: 

Let’s say you and your neighbor share a lake, and the water your family drinks comes from the lake. Your kids swim in it. You love your waterfront views and the lake’s wildlife. You love knowing your family gets to experience all this because it’s a key part of living the good life in Florida. 

Furthermore, you love to fish, and you sell what you catch. The lake provides your income. 

One day, your neighbor starts a business that pollutes the lake. Suddenly, you and your spouse get sick and your kids, smaller and more vulnerable, get alarmingly sick. As fish populations in the lake fall, so does your income. Your family’s quality of life decreases as pollution levels rise. 

Shouldn’t there be a law to protect your vital interests in clean and healthy lake water? 

Now let’s say there are good laws to protect the lake water, but your government doesn’t enforce them. Shouldn’t there be a law to make it do its job and ensure these laws, critical to your family’s well-being, are enforced? 

Finally, your neighbor is donating lots of money to lawmakers, and they in turn pass laws that favor his commercial interests over your health, economic well-being and quality of life. Shouldn’t there be a law to protect your family from this political corruption?  

In each case, a fundamental right to clean and healthy waters enshrined in our state constitution would be such a law. 

Now let’s consider the state of Florida’s waters, which you do share with all Floridians: 

• Eight hundred of Florida’s 1,000 springs are polluted. 

• Nearly a million acres of estuaries and 9,000 miles of rivers and streams are contaminated with fecal bacteria.  

• Blue-green algae blooms are common and can cause neurodegenerative diseases. 

• Red tides have exploded in frequency, duration and intensity, costing local economies billions of dollars. 

• No state has more acres of polluted lake water or has lost more acres of wetlands than Florida. 

When citizens have tried through their local governments to protect our waters, such as voters in Orange County and Titusville have done in passing their own right to clean water laws, we’ve been knocked down. In 2020, the state Legislature — fearing how effective environmental rights could be — explicitly preempted the authority of local governments to pass laws granting citizens any rights to the natural world.  

Because our Legislature does not want us to have a right to clean water, the only way we are going to get it is if we amend our state constitution through a citizen petition initiative. 

The nonpartisan Freedom Forum says, “Many of the nation’s founders considered petitioning to be the most important First Amendment freedom.” It is, they say, a way “to speak truth to power.”   

Currently, the citizen initiative process in Florida requires we collect nearly 900,000 signed petitions in two years, a daunting task. Up until 2011, it was four years. This is just one of the ways the Legislature has made the process increasingly more difficult. 

Now, HB 1205, recently passed by our state House of Representatives, would, among many other things, require that a petition sponsor post a $1 million bond payable to the Division of Elections. That’s too much money to post up front for a grassroots organization like ours.  

It would require that when signing petitions, voters would have to provide their driver’s license number or the last four digits of their Social Security number. Many people will instead choose not to sign.  

It would require that collected petitions be submitted to supervisors of elections offices within 10 days, down from 30, which is extremely difficult. 

Legislators claim they are protecting ballot integrity. But in passing HB 1205 (and, potentially, sister bill SB 7016), they are driving an iron spike into the heart of citizen initiatives and the fundamental democratic freedoms these legislators say they seek to protect. Their fix is so disproportionate to the problem that one must wonder about their true motives. 

FloridaRightToCleanWater.org believes these bills, if signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, will be challenged in court and found unconstitutional. 

We therefore urge Florida registered voters to sign the “Right to Clean and Healthy Waters” petition at FloridaRightToCleanWater.org and, like they did last summer when our parks were threatened, raise an outcry our elected officials cannot ignore.   

Joseph Bonasia is Southwest Florida regional director for FloridaRightToCleanWater.org. Banner photo: Dirty water pours from a pipe into a lake in Florida (iStock image).

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