Act now to protect a right to clean and healthy water and First Amendment Rights in Florida!
Floridians need a right to clean and healthy water! Watch the short video above to learn why.
Citizens have tried through their local governments to protect our waters, such as voters in Orange County and Titusville. The laws were knocked down. In 2020, the state Legislature feared how effective environmental rights could be. They explicitly preempted the authority of local governments to pass laws granting citizens any rights to the natural world.
Because our Legislature does not want us to have a right to clean water, the only way we are going to get it is if we amend our state constitution through a citizen petition initiative.
The nonpartisan Freedom Forum says, “Many of the nation’s founders considered petitioning to be the most important First Amendment freedom.” It is, they say, a way “to speak truth to power.”
Swimming against the current
Currently, the citizen initiative process in Florida requires we collect nearly 900,000 signed petitions in two years, a daunting task. Up until 2011, it was four years. This is just one of the ways the Legislature has made the process increasingly more difficult.
Now, HB 1205, recently passed by our state House of Representatives, would, among many other things, require that a petition sponsor post a $1 million bond payable to the Division of Elections. It would require that when signing petitions, voters would have to provide their driver’s license number or the last four digits of their Social Security number. Petition collectors would have to submit petitions to supervisors of elections offices within 10 days, down from 30.
Legislators claim they are protecting ballot integrity. But in passing HB 1205 (and, potentially, sister bill SB 7016), they are driving an iron spike into the heart of citizen initiatives and the fundamental democratic freedoms these legislators say they seek to protect. Their fix is so disproportionate to the problem that one must wonder about their true motives.
Florida Veterans for Common Sense urges Florida registered voters to sign the “Right to Clean and Healthy Waters” petition at FloridaRightToCleanWater.org.
And like Floridians did last summer when our parks were threatened, raise an outcry about SB7016 our elected officials cannot ignore. Click here to call your State Senator to tell the senator to oppose any legislation that burdens the citizen initiative process.