DEP chief will join company he helped

[monobrau]

Florida's environment boss had struck a deal to benefit International Paper. Now he'll be on the payroll.

http://www.sptimes.com/2004/01/29/State/DEP_chief_will_join_c.shtml

TALLAHASSEE - After five turbulent years as Florida's top environmental regulator, David Struhs resigned Wednesday, announcing he would take a job with a company regulated by his agency.

When he leaves his post next month, Struhs will become vice president for environmental affairs for International Paper, which owns a pulp mill in Pensacola that has benefited from Struhs' personal intervention in a pollution case.
............

One of the longest running controversies during Struhs' leadership of DEP has involved the Pensacola mill that International Paper, the world's largest paper company, acquired in 2000. Built in 1941, the plant has for decades dumped its waste into nearby Eleven Mile Creek, one of the most polluted waterways in Florida.

The creek empties into Perdido Bay, which straddles the Florida/Alabama state line. Activists from the Clean Water Network have sued the company to try to stop the dumping.

DEP took a different approach.

Under Struhs, the DEP agreed to lend $56-million to a public utility in Pensacola at below-market interest rates to build a treatment plant and pipeline that would primarily be used to redirect International Paper's waste.

Such loans, which use federal tax dollars supplied by the EPA, are supposed to go to public utilities, not to a private company, contended Linda Young of the Clean Water Network.

So DEP persuaded the Escambia County Utilities Authority to apply for the loan with the promise that International Paper would repay 80 percent of it. When the authority balked at taking on 20 years of loan payments with no assurance International Paper would be around long enough to pay its share, Struhs called the authority's hesitance "a source of frustration."

One of the authority members who was skeptical of the deal, Dale Perkins, said DEP was "pushing it pretty hard" and Struhs called to "talk about the benefits of the project."

The pressure worked. The authority wound up agreeing to the deal, even though local activists say they don't believe it will help clean up the creek or Perdido Bay.

[Zhade]

1. My parents live in Pensacola.

This fucker should be forced to drink the water he polluted, and nothing but, until he gets ill.

[monobrau]

3. same here

I left over 20 years ago, but it makes me sad that people that I grew up with have to raise their kids in one of the most polluted places in the country. Sadly, most of them are probably voting republican.

[NWHarkness]

2. Juat another typical event in Bush's America

.