“You put all these engineers in a room, you put all these federal and state partners in a room,” he proclaimed, and “they come up with these big plans and they only seem to last until the next election, when somebody else wants to airdrop in a new boxcar load of cash for the latest new shiny object solution.”
Forget the reservoir, says Putnam. “I was opposed to it the first time under Gov. (Charlie) Crist, and I still am.”
The real culprit, Putnam believes, are broken septic systems — with a healthy dollop of good old-fashioned Florida regionalism on the side.
“Nobody has been more focused on getting water policy right than for the state than I have,” he asserted. “For the whole state, not just the part that is south of Lake Okeechobee.”
Call me cynical, but I can’t help thinking that the commissioner might be influenced by more than a quarter-million dollars that the sugar giants, Florida Crystals and U.S. Sugar Corp., have poured into his “Florida Grown” political committee in just the last 20 months. It might be a mere coincidence that these two sugar companies happen to own much of the land in question (at enormous profits), but I think not.
