Polk officials issued a terse press release Wednesday saying county code enforcement officials had decided to fine the controversial BS Ranch & Farm soil manufacturing plant on the outskirts of Lakeland $88,000 for a handful of verified odor problems traced to the business.

This enforcement dates to a 2019 code enforcement case. That case came after four years of problems at the plant, which began operating without proper state and local permits. Wednesday’s announcement apparently doesn’t involve subsequent problems over the past two years.

The Florida Department of Environmental Protection, which initially granted the plant and after-the-fact permit, finally had enough and filed a lawsuit in early 2019 to force the company to comply with the permits and to take action to curb its odor problems.

The reason this case has dragged on was because BS Ranch hired lawyers, who have fought the enforcement efforts and disputed the odor and environmental complaints. In addition because Polk officials naively rushed an initial approval of the plant, the business was able to argue it had some entitlements.

By the way, this saga could go on. BS Ranch has 10 days to appeal the county’s action, the press release said.

The Joseph Biden administration’s Environmental Protection Agency has withdrawn a proposal announced in October to the allow the use of phosphogypsum for road projects within 200 miles of the waste stacks.

Most of the waste stacks in Florida are in Polk County, the location of the major fertilizer manufacturing plants.

Phosphogypsum is one of the waste products from fertilizer manufacturing. It is slightly radioactive and contains unnatural concentrations of heavy metals and other contaminants that can potentially affect public health. The earlier proposed rule reflected that concern and included a condition that any roads made with this material could not be abandoned and the land converted to another use. The main concern was that if a home were constructed atop a road containing this material, residents could face greater exposure to radon gas.

The Trump Administration’s decision was in response to a long-time request by the fertilizer industry, which supplied research to support its requests, to allow other uses of this material as an alternative to the corporations’ responsibility for perpetual caretaking and monitoring of the stacks, even after they are no longer active.

This was more of a temporary political victory for the fertilizer industry than any else. It didn’t seem to produce any real effect on road construction practices in Florida. State and local road engineers said after the announcement that they didn’t plan to use the material, which some engineers consider inferior to conventional materials used in building road bases.

Lakeland is facing two federal lawsuits over the City Commission’s decision to deny applications erect a couple of cell towers in different neighborhoods, The Ledger reports.

These lawsuits allege the city’s decision was not based on much besides the number of residents who showed up to oppose the projects, arguing everything that the private property owner should build something on their property to raising concerns about the health effects about emissions from the towers.

However, unlike a lawsuit filed earlier this year over the Polk County Commission’s decision to approve a suburban development next to rural homesteads, Lakeland’s lawsuit will be defended by its own legal staff rather than hiring outside counsel for what will probably amount to a tidy sum.

Although the facts and law are different in the two cases, it will be interesting to see if the outcomes are any different.

Noah Valenstein’s resignation as the head of the Florida Department of Environmental Protection has touched off an interesting debate over executive power that may still be an issue during next year’s election.

Gov. Ron DeSantis recently announced he planned to name the new FDEP head all by himself without consulting the Florida Cabinet.

As it turns out, one of DeSantis’ announced opponents in his bid for re-election is Cabinet member Nikki Fried, Florida’s secretary of agriculture and consumer services.

She pushed back, charging that was illegal.

No, it’s not, DeSantis replied.

A check of the Florida Constitution and Florida statutes shows Fried was right.

20.055 (1) of Florida statutes reads:

“The head of the Department of Environmental Protection shall be a secretary, who shall be appointed by the Governor, with the concurrence of three members of the Cabinet. ”

Section 6 of the Florida Constitution reads:

“When provided by law, confirmation by the senate or the approval of three members of the cabinet shall be required for appointment to or removal from any designated statutory office.”

Florida has a three-member Cabinet, so that means the vote must be unanimous.

That means Fried potentially has veto power if DeSantis appoints, for instance, someone with strong ties to the enterprises the department is supposed to regulated.

That also may be why DeSantis doesn’t want to deal with any dissenting voices if he is thinking of making some Trump-like appointment (coal lobbyist to head EPA), which would mirror some of the other decisions that have emerged from DeSantis’ office recently.

Just for the record, Sierra Club has made no endorsements in the governor’s race.

Sierra does support strong environmental protection and who leads the agency sets the tone for whether the protection is strong or weak.

Polk commissioners voted 3-2 today to ditch a proposal by Waste & Recycling Director Ana Wood to get them to vote to consider commercial garbage franchising.

Ever since this idea surfaced earlier this year, the rationale has been a mystery.

Wood’s presentation that followed a video about how wonderful the landfill is because of its space and central location focused on a legislative-imposed deadline for deciding whether to get into commercial franchising.

It took persistent questioning from commissioners to draw out the reason this was even taking up their time in the first place.

As it turns, landfill revenue has not risen as projected, Wood testified, but was a little vague about what exactly accounted for that.

One possibility is that Republic Services, which contracts for commercial hauling and also operates a private landfill in Bartow, may have been taking its garbage to its own landfill.

A commercial franchise system could perhaps force Republic and any other commercial hauler to use only the county landfill, though the law is little murky on that point, commissioners were told.

That brought pushback from Commissioner George Lindsey, who said he didn’t think it was good public policy to use that policy as a hammer to squeeze private enterprise to the county’s financial advantage.

Besides, he and other commissioners concluded, there was really no problem with the current system that the public was clamoring to change.

If there is one issue about which the public is clamoring for reform, it is Polk County’s recycling system.

The main problems are the confusion over what to recycle, which varies depending on where you live in the county for no reason that anyone has yet presented and the lack of a coherent educational or enforcement campaign to deal with the widespread contamination of recycling carts by people who are either wishful recyclers or ignoramuses who simply use their recycling cart as a second garbage cart.

Other counties offer much clearer information on this issue. There has been a discussion about hosting some kind of countywide forum among local officials involved in solid waste decisions to come up with a more consistent message to the public.

So far all that it has been is talk.

It’s long past time for action.

It seems nothing much has changed regarding the Polk County Commission’s willingness to further increase taxes or to go further into debt since I reported from the annual retreat that when the idea of seeking the fourth sales tax increase for roads in 30 years arose.

The Ledger reports in a followup story now that it has hired someone to cover county government again that the commission majority’s aversion to asking for more taxes has not changed since then.

You have to understand that although previous commissions tried and failed three times to persuade voters to pay higher sales taxes to fix a road backlog that was largely of their own making, they did raise taxes elsewhere to fund roads.

They raised the gas tax to the max , they added a special property tax for roads and they used most of the former Polk County Environmental Lands tax proceeds after the 20-year voter mandate expired. Those tax increases didn’t require a referendum.

A lot of this was developer-driven to meet transportation concurrency back when Florida had growth-management regulations that were enforced.

One key reason there are backlogs in road network capacity is that because for years Polk County approved development on the cheap. Road impact fees were either non-existent, temporarily suspended or imposed at a rate lower than what was required to fund the projects new growth was making more urgent. The local development community was the main opponent to impact fees.

The results were predictable.

So, it should not surprise anyone when voters look around and see what kinds of development decisions the County Commission has made—or refused to make—they are not eager to pour more money down the same rat hole to subsidize more of the same.

Finally, it might be useful to take a harder look at this long list of road projects to sort out which ones are true needs to solve real problems and how many of them are simply on someone’s wish list.

I’d add that it is hard to argue that in one of the fastest growing areas in the third-most populous state in the nation that traffic congestion will be the norm from now on in many places. Get used to it.

For the past couple of years transportation planners and local economic development officials have been huddling to come up with some recommendations for dealing with the increasing congestion along the U.S. 27 corridor.

It was no surprise, then, that when a report was presented to the Polk Transportation Planning Organization today the formerly shelved eastern leg of the Central Polk Parkway was back in the mix.

This proposed toll road’s route winds through northeast Polk near conservation l ands in the Marion Creek Basin and through what was once a totally rural area that is gradually seeing suburban development as Haines City and neighboring cities annex eastward.

Local economic development officials lobbied for the road years ago because it would open more land to industrial development, residential development and commercial development. Urban sprawl, in other words, which they consider a good thing.

But tying this road’s justification to traffic congestion on U.S. 27 is a bit of a stretch.

The fact is that tens of thousands of cars and trucks are clogging U.S. 27 every day is because people are commuting or traveling or hauling freight to and from destinations along this major highway or other highways such as Interstate 4 that intersect it.

Building a beltway around cities along U.S. 27 will simply add another feeder road that will ultimately simply increase the highway’s congestion.

And that’s not all.

There are proposals to extend Power Line Road east of Haines City to run from somewhere north of Davenport, maybe around the eastern end of Ernie Caldwell Boulevard , and south toward the outskirts of Lake Wales.

Meanwhile, there was another proposal to four-lane a section of Deen Still Road in the Green Swamp Area of Critical State Concern and continue that road-widening project down Old Grade Road to I-4. Local Sierra leaders spoke against this idea at today’s meeting because it could lead eventually to more pressure to develop deeper in the GSACSC and would not divert enough traffic from U.S. 27 anyway to justify the expense and ecological damage it would cause.

Another idea would extend County Road 547 westward from Davenport into another section of the Green Swamp to connect to Polk City Road at the edge of Hilochee Wildlife Management Area.

A major gap in the presentation was the lack of any mention of using improved transit to reduce congestion, This could benefit the large number of people who work at tourist attractions and the hotels and restaurants around them and now have little choice but to drive to work. This is especially significant since Polk planners several years ago created a so-called Transit-Oriented Development District overlay that allowed much denser development in the U.S. 27 corridor and elsewhere, arguing it would create higher density that would encourage transit.

So far all it has done is to create the higher density and higher traffic congestion.

The good news, if there is any, is that none of these projects are in anyone’s transportation budget at the moment and it could be some time before there is any funding.

Watch for further discussions at future TPO meetings and public workshops as project studies emerge.

Finally, monitoring some of what is occurring is not as easy as it once was.

The TPO has decided to meet at a sports complex in Winter Haven instead of the County Commission board room in Bartow. That means the meetings are not recorded and broadcast on PGTV where the proceedings are easier to review. It also means the meetings are being held in a room with poor acoustics and an intermittently dysfunctional sound system, which means even if you take time to attend the meeting in person, it may be difficult to hear the discussions among board members.

A more transparent process might be worth considering.