Author: 3pranna

Selby Gardens Consorts with Phosphate Industry Oct. 2013

My “Letter to the Editor” (below) was published in the Bradenton Herald Tribune on December 9th. I submitted it simultaneously to the Sarasota Herald Tribune and the Tampa Bay Times, but am unaware that it was published by them since I was out of state at the time….

To hold Selby Gardens accountable for disavowing their stated mission and to inform their leadership of the environmental destruction caused by phosphate strip mining I have also been trying to arrange a meeting with the CEO of Selby Gardens, Mr. Thomas Buchter. He sent me the following short reply:

Dennis, when you are ready to get all nonprofits in the region that have received a grant from Mosaic Co. to support their mission then I will look forward to meeting with you (sic).

Selby Gardens Consorts with Phosphate Industry

Dear Editor,

It is disillusioning, to say the least, to learn that an historic icon of Sarasota, Marie Selby Botanical Gardens, accepts financial assistance from the phosphate strip mining company, Mosaic. The Mosaic logo was prominently displayed on the home page of Selby Gardens during the month of October in a $50,000 matching funds agreement for a children’s rainforest exhibit.

Mosaic is more than happy to have its name associated with organizations like Selby Gardens to boost its image as a “friend of the environment,” the thrust of its pervasive public relations campaign conveyed through television ads, public radio sponsorships, billboards, newspaper ads and direct mailings.

How can we forget that the phosphate industry has been ravaging eco-systems and wildlife habitat throughout west central Florida for generations in their quest for ore to manufacture fertilizer products sold on the global market? Phosphate strip mining burdens ground water resources, destroys wetlands and streams, creates thousands of acres of clay waste and toxic chemical disposal sites and permanently altars native soil conditions. Their attempts at “reclamation” have never replicated the fragile native environment that they systematically destroy to enhance their profits.

More specifically phosphate strip mining permanently eradicates the ecological conditions upon which native epiphytes or orchids depend for survival, yet in their mission statement Selby Gardens, which prides itself as being a ” world leader in conservation and display of epiphytes” states that they are committed “… to understand and conserve epiphytes and their natural habitats in a rapidly changing world.”

The phosphate strip mining industry is currently seeking permits to mine an additional 50,000 acres of native Florida prairies, woods and wetlands in Manatee, Hardee and DeSoto Counties. How many more native epiphytes will be permanently lost if these permits are allowed?

It seems to me that Selby Gardens should keep their word to preserve and protect native epiphyte habitats in west central Florida, and not consort with the very industry that is the perpetrator of their demise.

Dennis Mader
People for Protecting Peace River
www.protectpeaceriver.org
4224 Solomon Road
Ona, FL 33865

Phosphorus Pollution: How Mass-Produced Meat Turned Phosphorus Into Pollution Jan. 2014

Phosphorus Pollution Article by Dan Charles
(Article Link)

It’s a quandary of food production: The same drive for efficiency that lowers the cost of eating also can damage our soil and water.

Take the case of one simple, essential chemical element: phosphorus.

Phosphorus is one of the nutrients that plants need to grow, and for most of human history, farmers always needed more of it. “There was this battle to have enough available phosphorus for optimum crop production,” says , a scientist with the University of Maryland’s Wye Research and Education Center, which sits between farm fields and the Chesapeake Bay on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

That’s also the tension in this story: agriculture on one side, and water quality on the other.

Traditionally, farmers got phosphorus from animal manure. So if you grew crops like corn or wheat, it was good to have poultry or hogs nearby. Your grain fed the animals, and their manure fed your crops. Everything worked together.

Then came industrial fertilizer: big phosphorus mines; factories for making the other important nutrient, nitrogen; and railroads or highways to carry that fertilizer to any farmer who needed it.

“With the development of the inorganic fertilizer industry, it’s possible to grow grain without having animals nearby. So you can decouple the animal agriculture from the grain agriculture,” Staver says.

And decouple they did. Farmers concentrated on just one kind of production. So did entire . Georgia, Arkansas and Alabama, for instance, now produce the largest number of chickens — more than a billion of them every year. But they don’t grow much chicken feed. They haul in grain from far away.

As that grain flows from fields to chicken houses, or hog farms, so do the nutrients in it, such as phosphorus and nitrogen.

Some of it goes into meat that people eat, but a lot goes into animal waste.

This is where the problem starts. Farmers near those chicken houses or hog farms often take lots of that manure and spread it on their fields, partly just to get rid of it and partly for its value as fertilizer. Crops, however, need much more nitrogen than phosphorus. When farmers use manure to give their crops an optimal amount of nitrogen, they oversupply phosphorus.

“This is happening everywhere,” Staver says. “Where you have large concentrations of animal production, you tend to have a buildup of nutrients — phosphorus is the one that accumulates — in soils around concentrated animal-producing regions.”

Wherever it accumulates, rain washes it into streams, lakes and estuaries, where it’s an ecological disaster.

“It drives algae growth, so it ends up clouding the water. You don’t get the light penetration to support the rooted aquatic plants that are important in the food chain,” Staver says. “You also get these algae blooms, and when they die, they draw oxygen from the water. You get dead zones.”

In many places, environmental regulators are trying to stop this buildup of phosphorus.

Until recently, it Maryland was taking the lead. The state has a big poultry industry right beside the Chesapeake Bay, which has been choked with nutrient pollution.

Last year, Maryland proposed new rules that would have stopped farmers from putting more phosphorus on any fields that already have too much of it. It required soil tests to determine a key phosphorus index number.

Lee Richardson, a farmer in Willards, Md., was worried. “The word we were getting — if [your fields] were over 150, you weren’t going to spread manure,” he says. Most of his fields are over that level.

The manure ban would have hit him two different ways.

First, he grows chickens; if their manure couldn’t go on his fields, it would have to go somewhere else. “Chances are, growers were going to have to pay to get it hauled away and taken out of the chicken house,” he says.

Second, his corn fields still need nitrogen. Without manure as a nitrogen source, he’d have to buy the manufactured kind of fertilizer, which is more expensive.

Richardson and other farmers protested, arguing that the new rules would inflict huge economic harm, while the environmental benefits are uncertain.

In November, the state of Maryland . It promised to study the issue some more. Kenneth Staver, from the University of Maryland, says it’s not that hard to imagine a solution to the problem.

“The obvious one is, find a way to redistribute the phosphorus from the animal production facilities back to where the crop production is,” he says. The manure would have to travel to the vast fields that farmers currently fertilize with fresh, mined phosphorus.

Hauling manure such distances would cost money. Staver says it’s the price of cleaner, healthier water.

If farmers have to pay that cost, growing chickens or hogs will get more expensive.

Then we, the consumers, would pay for it, through more expensive meat.

EPA abandons major radiation cleanup in Florida 2014

by Douglas Guarino
(Article Link)

The Environmental Protection Agency is walking away after a decades-long battle with Florida politicians and industry officials over cleaning up phosphate-mining waste in an area that could expose more than 100,000 residents to cancer-causing radiation levels.

Under a decision quietly finalized two weeks ago, the federal agency will leave it to state officials to decide the fate of the sites in and around Lakeland, an approximately 10-square-mile residential area midway between Orlando and Tampa.

However, Florida officials have long argued that the affected area need not be cleaned up in the absence of radiation levels well above what EPA policy would normally permit. The decision not to enforce the usual federal rules could have far-reaching implications for how the United States deals with future radioactive contamination anywhere across the country — regardless of whether it is caused by conventional industrial activities or illicit radiological weapons, critics say.

In a joint statement to Global Security Newswire, the Florida health and environment departments say they have no plans to examine the sites further, despite prior recommendations by federal officials that an aerial radiation survey of the area is needed. The state officials say they already have enough historical data pertaining to the sites, and that additional monitoring is not necessary.

The statement, provided to GSN by Florida environmental protection spokeswoman Mara Burger, suggests the EPA decision not to clean up the sites under its Superfund program indicated that the federal agency did not consider the Lakeland area “problematic” from a public health standpoint.

Under Superfund law, the federal agency is authorized to remediate contaminated sites that pose a threat to public health and the environment.

Internal documents released under the Freedom of Information Act in recent years show, however, that the federal agency’s lack of action was the result of state and industry opposition, and that EPA officials did in fact believe the sites could pose a serious public health threat.

“It’s probably the worst site EPA could clean up from a public health standpoint, when you consider the number of potential cancers and the size of the affected population,” one source familiar with the Florida case told GSN. The source was not authorized to discuss the issue and asked not to be named in this article.

In response to questions about the matter, EPA spokeswoman Dawn Harris Young did not address whether the sites posed a health risk. She said only that the state had separate “regulatory and educational programs in place.”

“EPA believes that addressing all of the former phosphate mines under one regulatory scheme would provide regulatory consistency for the landowners, businesses and residents of Florida,” the federal agency spokeswoman said.

The EPA decision not to enforce its Superfund standards at the Florida sites is consistent with a controversial new guide for dealing with the aftermath of dirty bomb attacks, nuclear power-plant meltdowns and other radiological incidents that the agency published last year, Daniel Hirsch, a nuclear policy lecturer at the University of California-Santa Cruz, told GSN.

Documents GSN obtained in 2013 prompted concern among critics that EPA officials are looking to use the new guide — which is backed by the nuclear power industry — as a means for relaxing its radiation standards.

The agency’s approach to the Florida case lends further credence to the concern that it is backing away from its long-held radiological cleanup rules generally, Hirsch said.

“The agency is lowering the EPA flag outside the building and raising the white flag of surrender,” he quipped.

THREE DECADES OF CONCERN

Although government officials have said little about the Florida situation publicly, federal involvement at the sites surrounding Lakeland began in 1979. That’s when EPA scientists first warned their superiors that the area could pose a health threat.

The scientists noted that past phosphate mining had created elevated concentrations of radium-226 in the area’s soil. Radium produces gamma rays that can penetrate the body and increase the risk for a variety of cancers. Inhaling or ingesting the uranium byproduct can increase the risk of leukemia, lymphoma and bone cancer, specifically.

In addition, the decay of radium creates radon, an odorless, radioactive gas that can increase the risk of lung cancer by seeping into homes and polluting indoor air.

Given these risks, the EPA scientists advised that no new homes should be built on the sites until further studies were completed, but the agency took no action and residential development continued.

The Environmental Protection Agency paid little attention to the Lakeland area sites until the new millennium, agency documents show. By that time, agency officials estimated that as many as 120,000 people living on 40,000 residential parcels could be exposed to unsafe radiation levels.

In 2003, EPA officials deemed the potential problem at one Lakeland subdivision — an upscale development of about 500 homes called “Oakbridge” — to be so bad that they considered it a candidate for emergency cleanup action. Low-income and minority communities might also be affected, internal documents show — creating so-called “environmental justice” concerns for the agency.

Regional politics intervened, however, and the agency did little more in the way of studying the issue over the subsequent decade. Residents were not warned of the EPA concerns and no remedial actions were taken.

Phosphate mining industry officials, who represent the second largest revenue-producing enterprise in the Sunshine State, made it known in private meetings that they strongly opposed the agency declaring the parcels Superfund sites. Such a move could make mining companies liable for as much as $11 billion in cleanup costs, according to estimates of the potential scope of the contamination that the EPA inspector general included in a 2004 report.

State health and environment officials operating under Republican governorships sided with industry, taking the position that no cleanup action was necessary if residents were being exposed to less than 500 millirems of radiation per year. State officials said this approach was permissible under guidelines suggested by the privately run National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements.

However, at the 500-millirem-per-year level, the cancer risk for humans is roughly 1 in 40, the U.S. Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry noted in a 2006 internal report it prepared regarding the Florida dispute.

EPA cleanup policy dictates that, in a worst-case scenario, no more than one in 10,000 people should be put at risk for developing cancer from manmade contamination.

Following 2010 news reports about the standoff, EPA officials began making preparations for an aerial radiation survey that was to enable them to get a better handle on the scope and severity of the problem. The plans stalled, however, after a group of Republican lawmakers from Florida — siding with state and mining-industry officials — pressured the agency not to conduct the survey.

THE AGREEMENT

Last March, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection proposed that the state — rather than the federal government — direct all future actions pertaining to the sites, according to a March 13 letter sent by Jorge Caspary, waste management director at Florida’s Department of Environmental Protection, to Franklin Hill, EPA Region 4 Superfund director.

Hill agreed to the Florida proposal in a letter back to Caspary earlier this month.

The Jan. 14 letter suggests that after more than three decades of internal concerns about residents’ health — and years of disagreement with the state and mining industry — the federal government is walking away from the sites permanently.

“Because the state would manage the phosphate mining sites that were historically listed in [the EPA Superfund database] under Florida’s existing programs, there would be no further federal interest in these sites under Superfund and EPA would change their [database] status to ‘Archived,'” Hill wrote.

In the letter, Hill does not explicitly agree with Florida’s previously stated position that cleanup action is unnecessary unless residents are being exposed to more than 500 millirems of radiation per year. In fact, the correspondence between Hill and Caspary makes no mention of numerical cleanup thresholds at all.

In their statement to GSN, the Florida environmental protection and health departments said it is “not necessarily the case” that they would take no remedial action unless residents are being exposed to more than 500 millirems of radiation per year.

For instance, residents might be exposed to gamma ray radiation through direct contact with radium-contaminated soil in their yards. Florida officials say that while they have no plans to investigate the sites further, they hypothetically would consider taking action if such exposure caused residents to receive a dose of more than 100 millirems of radiation per year. At this level, about one in 300 people would be expected to develop cancer — a risk 30 times greater than the EPA worst-case-scenario of one in 10,000.

Even then, however, “the state would need additional site specific information in order to determine what actions may be needed, including whether work should be done to mitigate risk or otherwise remediate the site,” state officials said.

Florida officials say they do not believe direct exposure to radiation from the soil is a significant risk, and that the main factor in determining whether there is a public health concern at a home should instead be the amount of radon gas polluting indoor air. Mitigating indoor radon contamination is generally cheaper than cleaning up radium-contaminated soil. Indoor radon pollution can often be addressed though the installation of ventilation systems beneath homes, while cleanup of radium-contaminated soil can require massive excavation projects.

But according to critics, focusing on radon — and not soil contamination — is a dramatic break from how the federal government would normally address such a site. For one thing, this approach does not account for the body-penetrating gamma rays residents might be exposed to through more direct contact with the soil in their yards. Nor does it factor in the risk of inhaling or ingesting the contamination.

In addition, the EPA reference level that state officials say they would use to determine whether action is needed to address indoor radon pollution is not based on health considerations. Instead, it is based on how much radon current ventilation technology is capable of eliminating.

According to the federal agency’s website, there is no “safe” level of radon exposure. However, it can be difficult to reduce radon levels much lower than 4 picocuries per liter of air — the level that Florida officials are using as their threshold for health concerns. Congress passed legislation in 1988 setting a goal of reducing indoor radon levels to between 0.2 and 0.7 picocuries per liter, but the technology needed to meet that goal does not yet exist.

One in 43 people would be expected to die of cancer from a lifetime of radon exposure at the 4 picocurie per liter level, the EPA website says. The average level of radon in homes is about 1.25 picocuries per liter.

A DIFFERENT APPROACH

While the EPA Superfund program considers the amount of radon gas entering homes, its decisions regarding whether to remediate manmade radium contamination are usually driven largely by how much of the radioactive metal is present in the soil. For radium in soil, the threshold the federal agency normally uses is 5 picocuries per gram, not including the amount of radium that would occur in soil naturally. It is at this level of radium and below that the agency would consider a site to be in compliance with its cancer risk guidelines.

In its 2006 report, the U.S. Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry noted that the federal government has relied upon the 5 picocurie per gram of soil standard at many sites, and listed some in Pennsylvania, New Mexico, New York and Michigan as examples. However, Florida officials considered the threshold to be “overly conservative,” the federal agency’s report noted.

At the time, Florida officials were pushing for the 500 millirem per year radiation dose limit to be used as a threshold, though they now say they would focus largely on radon in indoor air, with the possible 100 millirem per year dose threshold for exposure to gamma rays from radium in the soil.

Either way, not relying on the 5 picocurie per gram of soil threshold as a trigger for remedial action is a major departure from normal EPA policy, critics say.

Until now, “I’ve never heard of them abandoning their 5 picocurie per gram limit — that’s used all over the place,” Hirsch told GSN. “What EPA ought to face is that it looks as though, under political pressure, they’ve undermined their entire regulatory structure for cleanup of radium-contaminated soils.”

POLITICAL CONCERNS:

According to EPA documents released in recent years under the Freedom of Information Act, a lack of financial resources has contributed to the agency’s reluctance to enforce its usual public health standards at the Florida sites.

Normally, the agency can conduct cleanups on its own terms and then sue the companies it believes are responsible for the contamination in order to recoup its costs.

However, a tight budget environment — along with the anticipated enormous scope of the contamination in Florida — gave the agency little leverage in negotiations with the phosphate mining industry, according to the EPA documents.

Industry officials made clear they were not interested in assisting with a cleanup conducted along the lines of the agency’s usual Superfund protocols. Without sufficient federal funds available, EPA officials could not credibly threaten to force industry’s hand.

Meanwhile, Florida Republicans in Congress argued that the phosphate industry was too important to the state’s economy to risk harm by undertaking costly cleanup actions they thought unnecessary.

Faced with a difficult political situation, it appears that EPA officials tried to word the new agreement with Florida in a way that would defer oversight of the contaminated area to the state without acknowledging the difference between the state and federal public health standards, Hirsch said.

He suggested that the omission of numerical standards in the Hill and Caspary correspondence this month appears to be a veiled admission by EPA officials that the amount of radioactive contamination the state would allow would not be considered safe under federal policy.

“What the agency doesn’t say speaks volumes — they know these numbers are outrageous,” Hirsch said. “The fact that they capitulate without even discussing them is further evidence of their dirty hands.”

The source who asked not to be named said it was doubtful the exclusion of specific numbers in the correspondence would actually stop parties responsible for radioactive contamination from trying to cite the Florida case as a justification for not cleaning up to normal EPA standards, however.

“I would make that argument if I was on that side,” said the source. “You’d be stupid not to.”

T. Mims Petition – Mosaic Mega-WUP

Click to read in entirety:  Mosaic Mims Hearing

Re: Petition for Hearing on the Approval of Individual Water Use Permit 20011400.025 also known as “Integrated Water Use Permit (IWUP)” issued to Mosaic Fertilizer, LLC, Permit Issue Date February 28,2012.
The T. Mims Corporation of Lakeland, a large land-owner, has petitioned the Florida Administrative Law court alleging serious irregularities in Mosaic’s proposed “Integrated Water Use Permit” (loosely known as “Mega-WUP”) which would allow world’s largest producer of phosphate fertilizer to withdraw 69 million gallons per day (MPG) from our (Florida’s) aquifer to satisfy their demand for water to run their mining and fertilizer production operations. The petition includes a 15-page review of the proposed SWFWMD permit by Mike Cotter, P.E. Among the allegations contained in the petition are numerous data on the negative effects of phosphate mining on the groundwater table and wetlands on properties surrounding the mines.

The Inherent Conflict

The following letter was published in Wauchula hometown newspaper, The Herald Advocate, April 3, 2012….

April 1, 2012

Dear Editor,

The lawsuit filed by FINR against CF Industries as reported in your March 29, 2012 edition (FINR Sues CF – Wants Quarter-Mile Setback) spotlights the conflict inherent in land-use for phosphate mining as opposed to other more desirable and environmentally benign uses as represented by FINR. It is clear that Mr. Brennick’s interests are the kind that we as a county should want to promote. His institute is the highest employer in the county at 600 jobs with intentions of expanding. (Both phosphate mining companies put together don’t employ that many people in Hardee County. Their long-range plans will result in a profound alteration of the natural habitat and drainage patterns of more than 100,000 acres of land in this county and the elimination of thousands of agricultural jobs.)

Note the conditions Mr. Brennick sited that make his location desirable: “… the rural and peaceful setting” of his institute, “… and the peace and serenity it offers [the] clients.”  I hope the lesson that our local decision-makers (BOCC and Planning Board) will take home from this confrontation is that peace and serenity are assets for attracting certain desirable businesses and developments to our county. For the most part agricultural land-use is compatible with these assets, but phosphate mining is not, by the nature of its operation and treatment of the land, peaceful or serene.

The same issues were at stake in a recent mine hearing in Bradenton as voiced by the people of Winding Creek subdivision when they found out that Mosaic had intentions of expanding their mining operation on the adjacent Wingate Creek Mine. People generally consider the constant drone of pumps, the 24/7 operations of draglines and the resultant air and light pollution, alteration of groundwater flow, the threat of dam breaches and flooding a detriment to their quality of life.

I wish Mr. Brennick best of luck as the court hands down a decision. I hope our county leaders will familiarize themselves with the underlying issues in this lawsuit and how they will affect our future as we seek economic growth and stability as a county moving forward.

Dennis Mader

Lily

1997 Alafia River Acid Spill

Restoration Work Still to Be Completed After Alafia River Acid Spill
The 1997 spill from a fertilizer plant damaged 377 acres of riverine habitat.
Restoration-Work-Still-to-Be-Completed-After-Alafia-River-Acid-Spill

By Tom Palmer
THE LEDGER
Published: Monday, April 2, 2012 at 11:33 p.m.
Last Modified: Monday, April 2, 2012 at 11:33 p.m.

MULBERRY | It’s been nearly 15 years since 56 million gallons of acidic waste water from the now-defunct Mulberry Phosphates fertilizer plant turned the Alafia River into a killing zone.
Much of the river has recovered naturally, as environmental systems eventually do in response to natural or man-made assaults.
But the $3.7 million settlement with Mulberry Phosphates’ insurance company in 2002 included $2.4 million to pay for habitat improvement in the freshwater sections of the river to compensate for the damage.
The December 1997 spill damaged 377 acres of riverine habitat and killed or injured any wildlife that couldn’t get out of the way quickly enough on Skinned Sapling Creek and the North Prong of the Alafia River on the outskirts of Mulberry.
The North Prong begins near Mulberry and joins the South Prong, which begins near Bradley, to form the main river channel in eastern Hillsborough County. The river flows to Hillsborough Bay in Riverview.
But the planned restoration won’t occur in the environmentally damaged land along the river in Polk County. Instead, scientists involved in the restoration planning issued a report in February recommending a restoration project in an environmental preserve about 15 miles southwest of the spill site.
The restoration work will occur in an area known as Stallion Hammock in Hillsborough County’s Balm-Boyette Scrub Preserve, a 4,933-acre public preserve and recreation area south of Brandon. Pringle Branch, a tributary of Fishhawk Creek, flows there. Fishhawk Creek is a tributary of the Alafia River.
The proposal involves restoring wetlands in an area that has been impacted by phosphate mining to improve water quality and wildlife habitat.
The 18-page report mentions other projects in the Mulberry area closer to the actual impact of the spill that were considered and rejected.
The report said the five projects were ruled out either because they involved work on private land or because they may not have produced significant environmental improvements or, if they did, would have required long-term monitoring and maintenance.
John Ryan, a Winter Haven environmentalist who was involved in efforts to make sure restoration occurred in upstream areas, said it doesn’t bother him that the final restoration plan will occur in another part of the river basin.
“It doesn’t make any sense to be parochial,” he said, adding that the important thing is that some restoration will occur.
Florida Department of Environmental Protection spokeswoman Ana Gibbs said the report has been forwarded to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for review.
She said there was no time schedule for getting the work done, explaining that even after the plan gets the go-ahead, it will then require engineering plans and construction bids.
That means the work isn’t likely to occur until at least next year, she said.
[ Tom Palmer can be reached at [email protected] or 863-802-7535. Read his blog on the environment at environment.blogs.theledger.com. Follow on Twitter @LedgerTom. ]

FINR Sues CF Industries

The attached article appeared on the front page of our local newspaper, The Hardee County Herald Advocate. Since the HA does not have an online presence I had to clip the article out and scan it.

The gist of it is that FINR, the Florida Institute for Neurological Rehabilitation, (largest employer in Hardee County) is suing CF Industries (one of two phosphate mining companies operating in central Florida) for encroaching on the institute’s 872 acre campus which lies just south adjacent to CF’s current mine expansion – the 7500 acre South Pasture Extension.) The lawsuit spotlights the conflict inherent in land-use for phosphate mining as opposed to other more desirable and environmentally benign uses as represented by FINR.

Stop Mosaic in Their Tracks

On Thursday, February 2, at 9 am, Mosaic Phosphate will go before the Manatee Board of County Commissioners to ask for another permit to mine in eastern Manatee County.  The permit would allow Mosaic to mine 661 acres and destroy another 50 acres of wetlands.  Our Planning Commission voted in favor of this permit and now it goes before the Board and this is where it must stop.

This $3.9 billion cash corporation has severely mined Central Florida (over one million acres) and is now coming south into Northeast Manatee County and our Peace River and Myakka River watersheds.  They draw 65 million gallons of water a day from our already declining aquifer, while we are on water restrictions. This water that they are stealing from the state is non-replaceable and will come to tremendous cost to us all.

Don’t be deceived by their showy ads on TV and their jobs claim.  Mosaic provides fewer workers per acre, than any other industry. They are currently spending millions of dollars monthly on advertising to convince you that they are doing a good thing.  Why would a company advertise so much and put large billboards on 301 when they do not sell their product to you?  They want to conceal the negative aspects of their operations which add billions of dollars of cleanup in its wake.

The Federal Courts have insisted Mosaic STOP any further mining until a complete and thorough Area-wide Environmental Impact Study (AEIS) has been performed. Evidently, Mosaic is in fear of the outcome, as they chose to circumvent the rules by attempting to secure another mine before the truth comes out.

Please stop Mosaic in their tracks, have the wisdom and courage that The Planning Commission lacked, and find out the real story.

Mosaic and their consenting codependents are counting on the apathy of Manatee citizens to get their way. Please, please, make an effort to show-up on Feb. 2, at 1112 Manatee Avenue, First Floor Commission Chambers and STOP this from going any further. We need to fill the chambers. You may or may not speak, but fill a chair.

We can’t leave our kids with enough of anything to fix what Mosaic is getting away with.