If you haven’t seen it, be sure to check out the Tampa Bay Times blockbuster two-part series on how Florida’s water quality is getting worse almost across the board — in large part because Florida lets special interests (developers, Big Sugar, etc.) pollute with impunity.

If you follow VoteWater you know this is our reason for being. But the Times brings it all together in one place.

The opening salvo from Part 2, published Oct. 30: 

Florida is supposed to police the state’s biggest sources of water pollution: agriculture and development.

Instead, regulators and lawmakers have protected the major industries at nearly every turn, a Tampa Bay Times investigation has found.

The approach has resulted in hundreds of waterways across Florida growing dirtier for decades — including the Caloosahatchee, where algae blooms have fueled fish kills, and the Indian River Lagoon, where scores of manatees starved to death as the ecosystem neared collapse.

It gets more grim and depressing from there.

Also included in the project: an interactive map showing which Florida waterways are improving, and which are getting worse. The St. Lucie estuary is improving; the Caloosahatchee is getting worse. Four of five water quality testing sites on Lake Okeechobee show the “beating heart of the Everglades” is getting worse. As is Florida Bay. And Biscayne Bay. And the Miami River… need we go on?

The story also contains the single best summation of how unchecked growth affects water quality in Florida that we’ve seen:

“When developers turn natural land into buildings and concrete, they replace ground that absorbs rainfall with sidewalks and roads that expel it. The rain flows over waste, lawn fertilizers and other chemicals before traveling down stormwater drains and into waterways.”

We’ll be doing more on this topic and series because this is the foundational problem: It’s not that we CAN’T do more to address pollution, it’s that we WON’T. We lack the political will; special interests call the tune and our decision-makers dance.

We can wait around for elected officials to grow a spine and stand up to those special interests. But, you’ll notice, that hasn’t worked.

So ultimately the power lies with voters/constituents. Too often, voters return polluter-friendly politicians to office and the pollution continues. But we’re increasingly seeing organized, mass pushback to some of the most egregious proposals – think the disastrous state parks development plan, where thousands of Floridians rallied, wrote letters and emails and bombarded legislative offices with complaints. It worked.

We’re beginning to see something similar happening with backlash to Senate Bill 180 and its preemption of local land-use planning. At the local level, check out this Craig Pittman column on how citizens in Sarasota, led by the Sarasota Audubon Society, beat back a proposal to develop a site next door to a bird sanctuary.

Bottom line: citizens CAN push back, and get the attention of lawmakers.

And the day lawmakers are more consistently worried about their constituents than special interests is the day when we’ll finally turn the tide in the fight for cleaner water in Florida.