Scott Powers
Democratic nominee Fred Marra has opened up his campaign by going after his opponent on the fracking front in the House District 29 race.
Marra, who spearheaded an anti-fracking petition drive in 2013, released a statement Thursday denouncing his Republican opponent, incumbent state Rep. Scott Plakon, for voting in favor of a fracking bill in January.
House Bill 191 was approved 73-45 but a companion bill died in the Florida Senate. The bills would have regulated, but allowed broad loopholes for, the controversial hydraulic fracturing drilling technologies that find and produce oil and gas by pumping liquid chemicals underground, fracturing rock structures.
“Plakon and his pals in the Legislature are pushing to allow our underground aquifer — the main source of all our drinking water — to be threatened by fracking,” Marra stated in his news release. “But that’s not all. They actually would allow potential polluters to keep secret the kinds of toxic cancer-causing chemicals they would be pumping into our already-besieged source of drinking water.”
Shortly after Plakon and two other Seminole County Republican lawmakers voted in favor of B 191, the Seminole County Board of Commissioners — an all-Republican board — voted a countywide ban on fracking.
Plakon, who was not available Thursday to respond to Marra’s salvo, and the other two Seminole representatives, Bob Cortes and Jason Brodeur, were put on notice by that commission vote that the issue could become divisive among Seminole voters.
“It really kind of burns me up that we have to put laws on the books to keep the people in Tallahassee from doing things that are not best for our community,” Commissioner Brenda Carey said at the time.
