RENEE MONTAGNE, Host:
In Florida, an argument between the state and federal government is heating up. For more than a year, Florida has fought with the Environmental Protection Agency over new water quality standards. It is the first state required to implement these strict guidelines and says it's being singled out unfairly. Florida Public Radio's Trimmel Gomes reports.
TRIMMEL GOMES: To show what this legal battle is all about, Manley Fuller with the Florida Wildlife Federation paddles a canoe down the Wakulla River near Tallahassee.
MONTAGNE: If it was a little warmer, I normally would just jump in and just shove us around and go on, but I'm going to be a little more fastidious today.
GOMES: It's one of the coldest days of the season in North Florida. As Fuller glides across the water, he tries to show why his organization sued the EPA in 2008 to make the state comply with the Clean Water Act.
MONTAGNE: There is a lot of algae on these aquatic plants, growing on it, but it's not as evident today as it sometimes is.
GOMES: Fuller says too much phosphorus and nitrogen from fertilizer and storm water runoff could lead to massive algae blooms. Scientists say those can kill fish and animals and cause breathing problems in humans. But the state's business leaders say it's not much of a problem. Barney Bishop is president of the lobbying group Associated Industries of Florida.
MONTAGNE: This is the federal government coming down and trying to tell the state of Florida what to do. And quite frankly, we don't need no stinking feds telling us what to do here in Florida.
GOMES: Bishop says the EPA is picking on the state by imposing strict new numeric standards of measuring water pollution to boost the water quality standards in lakes and rivers. The EPA's regional administrator, Gwen Keyes-Fleming, says they aren't picking on Florida, it just so happens to be the first state it's examined.
MONTAGNE: Our job is to make sure we take each state and each situation as it comes. Again, we recognize the geographical diversity of Florida versus other states. We'll look at it as a state-by-state basis.
GOMES: Thirteen other states have already accepted similar rules voluntarily. The fact that the federal government forced Florida to adopt them has rippled across the country, says Don Parrish of the Washington-based American Farm Bureau Federation.
MONTAGNE: Other states are looking at Florida as the bellwether on this, and as clearly as state officials understand and recognize, this is taking away local control, local government, local governance and investing it in EPA.
GOMES: But Monica Reimer says that's not necessarily a bad thing. She's a lawyer with Earthjustice, the organization responsible for forcing the EPA to act. She says, in the past, the state used to wait until environmental issues were already a problem.
MONTAGNE: What that really means is, is that until the water turns green, everything is OK. And as we have learned to our great cost in the Everglades, when you wait until a water resource has deteriorated it is extremely costly and almost impossible to get it back to some sort of normal condition.
GOMES: Just before he left office, former Florida attorney general Bill McCollum filed a major lawsuit against the federal government. He says the EPA rushed to judgment only to settle its battle with Earthjustice. He argues the rules are unfair and arbitrary.
MONTAGNE: They put the horse before the cart to settle this lawsuit and that's going to cost Floridians a lot of money if this goes forward, and we're going to have criteria that shouldn't be applied to one body of water being applied to that body of water - just all kinds of lawsuits and litigations, and it's a mess.
GOMES: For NPR News, I'm Trimmel Gomes in Tallahassee.
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