Dark Money, / Alex Coe / Red Tide

SCAN is about planning methodology as practiced in Sarasota County. Part of that "practice" involves the enormous sums of money that flow into our campaigns - especially during County Commission races, as that Board has the final say over land use and rezone decisions.

Cathy Antunes

Listening to Cathy Antunes' exploration of PACs the other evening at Fruitville Library was like following trails of money into a labyrinth of PAC managers, campaign coordinators and creators of nasty mailers. 

The mystery PACs - which are supposed to be totally separate from the candidates - show funds coming in from other PACs, which got them from yet others. At some point, though we're talking hundreds of thousands of dollars, the trail can simply vanish. Cathy's pertinacity in tracing the funds, the managers and the connections inside Florida and across state boundaries has yielded some astonishing results. One result I was unprepared for: certain candidates in our local elections are managing their own PACs, in direct contradiction to the lawful purpose of this funding method!

There are at least two recordings of her talk - one is on Facebook, done by Mark Warriner of WSLR - if you have a FB account, it's here, and starts around the 9-minute mark:

Dark Money at Fruitville - Cathy Antunes for SCAN

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Alex Coe

Meanwhile, there are two other items I wanted to share with you: The first, again, is Cathy - this time interviewing District 1 Candidate for the County Commission Alex Coe. Alex has a varied background and has served on the Charter Review Board, and has insights into what is going on with a fake voter guide, a closed District 1 primary, and local flooding among other things. Coe has experience with the planning process and is worth listening to on that as well, which you can do here:

Alex Coe talks with Cathy Antunes

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And last for now, a paper about Red Tide in our waters has been published that we should all be aware of. The research was done by local investigators including Dave Tomasko and Steve Suau, and it offers strong evidence that Red Tide at Siesta Key correlates with the flushing of highly nitrogenated water from Okeechobee, which the Army Corps releases periodically into the Gulf of Mexico.

 

Not only do these releases provide the nutrients to feed Red Tide -- they affect the duration if and when the Red Tide makes to the shoreline. In brief, the duration of our Red Tide events appears to correlate closely with deliberate releases from the lake. 

Recentl the Army Corps of Engineers, which organized the releases, reportedly stopped sending Okeechobee waters to the Atlantic Ocean. Releases to the Gulf are ongoing.

An evaluation of the relationships between the duration of red tide (Karenia brevis) blooms and watershed nitrogen loads in southwest Florida (USA)

As Steve Suau said to me, this biological link between Lake Okeechobee and Siesta key shows how interconnected are the ecosystems in which we live - far more than we imagined them to be. 

This is Nature, complex and co-involved - the plans of our developers never dream of thinking in this way. They do not seek knowledge or resilience in scraping and building on our land - the end game is to prosper.

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