News And Updates
Commissioners wrong to settle with Mosaic
Published By: Sun Herald
Editor: What incompetents do we send to the table to discuss a settlement with the phosphate industry? Those Mosaic executives must be laughing all the way to the men's room. How did the County Commission appoint this inept Tricia Duffy to belly up to the Mosaic executives alone, with no legal counsel, to bargain away any possibility of saving our precious water supply.
Who in this world would ever agree to a marriage clause (with an already proven contentious proposed partner) that "I shall never again object to anything you do for the next 30 years?" That clause alone makes any other parts of the lopsided agreement just immaterial. Nothing else matters in the face of such an moronic ultimatum.
Have Commissioners Duffy and Loftus completely lost their sanity? Their public support of this draft agreement only demonstrates their dangerous incompetence as the representatives and keepers of the public faith. Is there someone out there, anyone on the County Commission, who hasn't succumbed to the political payoffs of the phosphate industry?
We don't need phosphate mining in Southwest Florida. It offers little to the economy and the net result is ultimate destruction of the land for any other use forever. This idea that we should accept planting of useless grass on top of the radiation heaps and call it "restoration" is only for the totally uninformed to agree to.
A vast majority of the Florida phosphate goes China. The long-term liability at public expense far exceeds the value to our support of the Chinese fertilizer industry.
Stephen Crow
Punta Gorda