Commentary: Here are the messes the next Florida governor needs to clean up

Dear Governor-elect Donalds:

Congrats on your historic win! Feel free to continue celebrating for (checks watch) the next 24 hours. Then you better buckle up.

What’s that, sir? What am I holding?

Oh, this is your official Gubernatorial Mop and Bucket.

Turns out being governor of Florida these days is like being the new janitor at the elementary school. There are LOTS of nasty messes you need to clean up.

I know you were endorsed by your two Republican predecessors, but you don’t have to copy them.

I’m not going to say Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis were the worst governors ever. That dubious distinction belongs to a dimwitted Democrat, Fuller Warren, who before his 1948 election thought the job would be all ceremonial duties like ribbon-cuttings. Then he discovered the state was broke and he was expected to do something about it.

“He was surprised to find … that the position was much more complex than he had envisioned,” historian David Colburn wrote.

The big flaw with Scott and DeSantis wasn’t not knowing what the job entailed. The problem was that neither ever cared much about one of the state’s most important issues, the environment.

Florida’s natural bounty is a big tourism attraction. It draws tons of people willing to spend billions of dollars to go hiking, kayaking, horseback riding, biking, birding, or fishing.

The environment is also pretty important for the continued quality of human life in this state. If you don’t believe me, try drinking a glass of bright green algae blooms.

Conservation used to be a conservative cause. Jeb Bush launched the Florida Springs Initiative, and Charlie Crist tried to buy out an entire sugar company to help the Everglades.

Scott and DeSantis paid lip service to Florida’s waters and wildlife. Scott even cosplayed as a park ranger — the least convincing performance since Jim Carrey pretended to be Clint Eastwood. Alas, their actions never matched their words.

So now it’s up to you, sir, to clean up what they left behind. For your benefit, I’ll run down the most immediate crises and suggest fixes. To create this list, I called on a number of experts.

Let’s start with the toughest problem: Water pollution.

Taking care of business

Water defines our life here in Florida. We’ve “surrounded on three sides” by it, as humorist John Keasler joked.

And yet our state government has treated our waterways the way a dog treats a hydrant.

Florida is the No. 1 state for polluted lakes. A pollution-fueled algae bloom killed off so much seagrass in the Indian River Lagoon that more than 1,000 manatees starved to death. Florida’s longest river, the St. Johns, is coping with steadily increasing pollution from septic waste and biosolid dumping.

As if that’s not bad enough, our largest body of water, Lake Okeechobee, has been named the dirtiest lake in the United States. Things have gotten so bad there that Bass Masters removed Lake O from its Top Ten Bass Lakes in the country.

When DeSantis was first elected in 2018, Floridians were concerned about toxic algae blooms that lasted so long we called it “the Summer of Slime.” Scott had been so negligent about the problem, people heckled him as “Red Tide Rick.”

DeSantis swore he’d fix it. He said he’d appoint a panel of scientists to tell him what to do. He appointed the panel — then he and the Legislature failed to follow most of the scientists’ recommendations.

Instead, DeSantis cut a deal to pay millions of dollars to an Israeli company that dumps a hydrogen peroxide mix into algae-tainted waterways. Then the algae comes back and the Israelis have to do it over.

Even the head of the Israeli company thinks this is futile.

“DeSantis’ fight against algal blooms in Florida will fail,” he wrote on X, back when it was just plain Twitter. “There is no question that preventing raw sewage and runoffs from spilling into waterways must be addressed.”

You, as our new governor, need to do better. You made a major misstep on this issue in 2024. I’m praying you learned your lesson, because EVERYONE I talked to named poor water quality as the state’s biggest issue.

Even Elizabeth Fleming of Defenders of Wildlife said in an email that the top issue is “poor water quality management across the state” involving urban and agricultural runoff, because it “can cause fish kills and die offs of manatees, dolphins, seabirds and other wildlife and cause respiratory discomfort in people.”

The passage of Amendment 3 means local governments will be severely hampered in cleaning up their own pollution problems. They will look to the state for help, especially when it comes to our beaches.

“Florida needs the next governor to focus on statewide water quality improvement and public health,” said Katie Bauman of Surfrider International, which promotes healthy beaches. “This means addressing the gaps and inconsistencies in the Florida Healthy Beaches Program, the state program responsible for monitoring fecal indicator bacteria in coastal waters and informing the public for safe recreation.”

You may be thinking that only a nincompoop would oppose warning people about poop at the beach. But as Bauman reminded me, two years ago DeSantis, with only the flimsiest of excuses, vetoed a bipartisan bill updating this program,

How can you bring water pollution under control? I asked Estus Whitfield, who advised five Florida governors from both parties on environmental issues. He said the key is getting the Department of Environmental Protection to go back to actually, you know, protecting the environment.

Even when the Legislature specifically ordered the DEP to set new standards to clean up Florida’s springs, the agency dragged its feet like a mopey teen who doesn’t want to leave the mall.

“The DEP just doesn’t take care of business,” Whitfield told me. “They take care of the big donors’ business.”

I’d recommend you find that list of scientific recommendations in DeSantis’ waste basket, uncrumple it and start making those things happen. Then pick a DEP boss who’s willing to make the polluters stop fouling the waterways, no matter how much they howl.

Speaking of people howling, let’s talk about the Everglades.

Guarded by gators

In June 2025, Attorney General James Uthmeier — the mastermind behind the Hope Florida scandal and the political guru who ran the DeSantis presidential campaign into the ground — unveiled his latest brainstorm.

Florida would build a massive immigrant detention center in the middle of Big Cypress National Preserve and then pretend the inmates were being guarded by the gators.

“You don’t need to invest that much in the perimeter,” Uthmeier said at the time. “People get out, there’s not that much waiting for them other than alligators and pythons.”

His boss DeSantis gave it the green light without first checking its environmental impact, which left a lot of environmental groups howling.

After less than a year, the camp shut down, thanks to the $1.2 billion cost to the taxpayers. It’s not cheap to make people live in tents in the Everglades.

“Alligator Alcatraz will likely turn out to be the single most expensive immigration detention center in the history of the United States,” WFOR-TV reported.

While Uthmeier raked in big bucks for his successful political campaign, his project gouged out a deep wound in the Glades, one that still needs to be repaired. To Eve Samples, executive director of Friends of the Everglades, that repair needs to be extremely high on your priority list.

The cleanup should focus on removing “more than 20 acres of new asphalt and heaps of trucked-in fill with invasive plants that have taken root,” Samples told me. “Remove the asphalt, eradicate the invasive vegetation and restore the land.”

If you’re surprised that DeSantis would treat the Everglades this cavalierly, remember that he also tried to build golf courses in a state park — which brings us to the next crisis.

Parks and wreck

Both DeSantis and Scott — other than his stint as “Ranger Rick” — had little love for our state parks. Scott even tried selling some of them off!

Both of them also tried to add golf courses to these green spaces. Apparently, they believed Alan King in the movie “Sunshine State” when he described a Florida golf course as “nature on a leash.” They didn’t realize that this would be wrecking the parks.

You see, Florida parks are wildly popular even without any 18-holers. More than 28 million visitors hit the 176 state parks every year, generating $3.6 billion in direct economic benefits to the surrounding local communities.

In fact, the most popular Florida park is Honeymoon Island, by DeSantis’ hometown of Dunedin. I wonder if he’s ever been — with or without his white go-go boots. I bet he hasn’t or he wouldn’t have tried to build pickleball courts in that park.

Yet our duly elected do-nothings have repeatedly failed to spend enough money to fix up the facilities. The list of repairs is a long one, too, according to the DEP’s own report from last year.

“Florida state parks face $759 million backlog of needed repairs, state report finds,” said the headline on a Tampa Bay Times story. That includes visitor centers, cabins, pavilions, boardwalks, fences, restrooms, boat ramps — you name it.

I asked former Florida State Parks director Eric Draper, a Florida native who was in charge from 2017 until 2021, what the next governor should do. He strongly recommends tackling that parks backlog.

“When as director I visited parks, conversations with the volunteers and the managers started with requests for funds to fix facilities,” Draper recalled. “Managers put me in their rustiest truck for tours of leaky roofs, crumbing paths, and closed bathrooms. It was frustrating to not be able to get the money from the state budget to fund the repairs.”

Mry advice is to hold a press conference at Jonathan Dickinson State Park in Hobe Sound, the park that DeSantis tried to give golf courses. Hold up the DEP report and say you’re committing yourself to a four-year program of addressing every item.

Then every year after, hold another press conference at a different park to outline what you’ve done and what you’re going to do.

That’s a good segue to my final recommendation, this one on land-buying.

Not easy being green

Florida once had a magnificent program for preserving environmentally sensitive land. It was the envy of the nation and strongly supported by the voters.

But it’s not easy being green, as we learned from Kermit the Frog. In the past year, the Florida Forever program has been battered by a couple of big problems.

One was that our Legislature decided that it would devote ZERO dollars to the Florida Forever land-buying program. Instead, it sent millions to a program to buy conservation easements on farmland.

Remember that land bought with Florida Forever funds can be used by the PUBLIC, while farms protected by an easement remain PRIVATE.

Then devious politicians in the Legislature steered the state to squander some of its remaining conservation cash on 4 acres of land in Destin that no agency had put on any land-buying list.

DeSantis could have objected, but he didn’t. He and the Cabinet voted unanimously to spend $83 million on the property, which was owned by one of his campaign contributors. That was 10 times what the buyer had paid.

One expert told me then that $83 million would have bought 25,000 acres of land sold outright — a much better deal than the 4 acres.

This is why several experts, including Fleming and Whitfield, singled out Florida Forever as another top priority for you.

Urge the Legislature to pass a law that forbids the kind of financial finagling that DeSantis & Co. pulled on that Destin deal, then vow to put at least $100 million into land-buying every year, not conservation easements.

All right, sir, those are the immediate priorities. Get these all taken care of, and then we can talk about (lowering voice to a whisper) how climate change is sending us big rain-bombs and king tides that flood our cities. Maybe with DeSantis gone, we can finally discuss that.

As this stuff continues, that mop will definitely come in handy.