Florida - Thursday September 21, 2023: The deadline is fast approaching for organizers to gather enough signatures to get a proposed ‘Right-to-Clean-Water’ amendment to the Florida Constitution on the ballot in next year’s elections. They still need nearly eight-hundred-thousand more signatures.
The petition drive is being organized by the political action committee of the Florida Rights of Nature Network, an organization chaired by Joseph Bonasia. The amendment to the Florida Constitution they’re proposing would create a fundamental right to clean water for all state residents, which would allow individuals, as well as businesses or other organizations, to take legal action against any state agency that fails to protect water resources.
“If the state executive branch does something that harms or threatens to harm our waters," says Bonasia, "then we can take them to court. That gives us the ability to hold the state accountable when it permits the degradation of our waters and our aquatic eco-systems.”.
The petition drive, says Bonasia, was launched after the state legislature in 2020 preempted the right of local governments to protect their regional water resources. “It was that preemption that compelled us to launch this effort. If the Legislature isn’t going to let us work on water quality issues at the local level, then we have to go over the Legislature’s head and imbed this right at the constitutional level.”
But in order to do that, they need nearly nine-hundred thousand registered state voters to sign the petition. Bonasia hopes to reach that goal by the end of December. Each signature has to be verified before the February 1st deadline to get the proposed amendment on the 2024 ballot.
As of mid-September, roughly eighty-five-thousand people had signed the petition.
““I don’t think a lot of people understand that we’ve got a thousand springs in Florida but over eight-hundred of them are polluted. I don’t think they know that we’ve got nearly a million acres of estuaries and nearly nine-thousand of rivers and streams that are contaminated with fecal bacteria," said Bonasia, "which is why we need a new approach because our regulatory system is failing.”
The petition can be found at florida-right-to-cleanwater.org.