We Aren’t Buying It

The Local Puppy Trainer is carrying a story that originated with the Pensacola News Journal: Panhandle legislators left off state oil spill response committees

TALLAHASSEE — Flatly rejecting Gov. Charlie Crist’s order to put an offshore drilling ban on the November ballot in Tuesday’s aborted special session, House Speaker Larry Cretul is forging ahead with his own response to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster.

But while tar balls are staining Northwest Florida beaches, none of the six legislative working groups Cretul assigned to the task is led by a Panhandle legislator.

Three of the lead lawmakers on the groups are from Southwest Florida, as is the chief coordinator they will answer to, Rep. Gary Aubuchon, a Republican from oil-free Cape Coral.

Three of the leads, including Aubuchon, serve on a committee that spent months laying the groundwork to lift Florida’s 20-year offshore drilling ban.

The working group membership is sprinkled with Northwest Florida legislators — including Republicans Clay Ford of Pensacola, Jimmy Patronis of Panama City and Marti Coley of Marianna and Democrat Leonard Bembry of Greenville — and the region’s voice will be heard, insists Rep. Matt Gaetz, a Republican from Fort Walton Beach.

First off, Greenville is East of Tallahassee in Madison County on the Georgia line which is a long ways from a beach. Marianna is in Jackson County on the Alabama line, and while it is at least in the Central Time Zone, again, a long way from a beach. That leaves two people who are actually concerned with the problem, and neither is in charge of anything.

Aubuchon thinks that listening “to more than 30 hours of testimony” justifies putting the cabal that was trying to open the coast to drilling in charge. Sorry, but the time equivalent of a two-credit-hour course, doesn’t even qualify those people as interested amateurs. The bulk of that testimony was telling the legislators about how wonderful it would be to have drilling rigs in Florida’s coastal waters, which has just been shown to be garbage – poisonous, sticky garbage strewn on our beaches.