To save a river, Florida small town’s activists oust every incumbent

Blackwater River is one park benefiting from new ed kits. Image via Florida State Parks.

I’m back in the Panhandle this week visiting family and while here I felt compelled to check in on the Blackwater River. It’s the first river I ever canoed back when I was in Boy Scouts, so it holds a special place in my memory.

Imagine my surprise to learn that the river had just swamped four politicians.

Or, to be more accurate, river advocates had helped to toss four of Milton’s pro-development City Council members overboard.

“All Milton City Council incumbents lose in huge upset,” the Pensacola News Journal reported.

They replaced them with four people who seem more attuned to the public’s needs than what developers need.

“Clean sweep,” Pam Mitchell of Milton’s Concerned Citizens told me with what I thought that was an apt pun. “Woohoo!”

Mitchell’s house overlooks those tannin-stained waters in Santa Rosa County, so she’s extremely concerned about the fate of the Blackwater and what the city’s new sewer plant might do to it.

You may find it hard to believe that a dispute over a river and a sewer plant could lead to a wave of anti-incumbent votes as powerful as a tsunami. But this is Santa Rosa County, where politics tends to be a blood sport.

One politician from Santa Rosa was busted for hiring a hit man to take out a radio commentator he didn’t like. The politician’s son became Florida House Speaker — then wound up in prison for tax evasion because he failed to report the money corporations were slipping him under the table.

I tell you this river story because there’s a lesson here, one that can apply to everywhere in this wild, weird state of ours: Small but determined groups like the one Mitchell leads can change things for the better for the environment.

“We worked our butts off,” Mitchell told me. “We couldn’t have done it without all the grassroots people helping.”

The lemonade and cookies helped, too.

‘Unavoidable delays’?

Milton is one of the state’s oldest cities, first incorporated in 1844 — a year before Florida became a state. It exists where it does because of the Blackwater River, which provided the settlers with a way to transport lumber and other goods. The town’s name is shortened from “Milltown.”

Milton’s existing sewer plant was built 60 years ago, when the city’s population was about 4,000. Now it’s more than 10,000 and still growing. The plant is nearly at capacity. That means it can’t accept sewage connections from new development.

The plant sits downtown, 100 yards from the Blackwater River. That’s where it dumps its treated effluent, too — right in the river.

This despite the fact that the river is generally regarded as one of the most pristine sand-bottom rivers on Earth. It’s a key part of the area’s tourism industry, drawing canoeists, kayakers, and tubers, not to mention campers visiting Blackwater River State Park.

The river is also an important breeding ground for the federally threatened Gulf sturgeon. Sturgeon are a marvel, armored like prehistoric creatures and up to 9 feet long. Federal biologists have counted up to 700 of the armor-plated fish in the river basin in one season.

The Florida Department of Environmental Procrasti — er, excuse me, “Protection” — has ordered Milton to stop dumping its treated effluent into the Blackwater River by the end of 2025. (No rush, folks, take your time.)

Thus, the city is under pressure from the state to stop dumping treated sewage in the river and under pressure from developers to boost its sewer capacity. The solution: Build a new multimillion-dollar sewer plant.

The problem is where to put it.

When I visited Milton two years ago, Mitchell and her husband, Jerry, and I jounced around the backwoods in a Ford F-150 so they could show me the 24-acre site where the city wanted to build this plant. The Mitchells contend it should be built somewhere else.

The city’s own engineering report said the elevation of the site drops from 90 feet at the southeast corner to about 15 feet at the northwest corner. That’s a drop roughly equivalent to the one the “agony of defeat” skier falls down in the “ABC Wide World of Sports” opening credits.

Much of the site is covered in clay that has a tendency to erode in stormy weather. Roughly a quarter of the property consists of wetlands that feed into the river. And the sewer site is just 4,000 feet from where the sturgeon breed.

The Mitchells fear that during a heavy rainfall, the clay will erode and the sewer plant will fail. It will wind up dumping its entire untreated load straight into the river, killing both tourism and the rare fish.

The Mitchells have set to work trying to convince everyone to move the proposed plant, despite serious resistance from a majority of the council.

When I met them in 2022, I kept hearing the “Mission: Impossible” theme every time the Mitchells talked about stopping the sewer plant. They were facing powerful opponents who held every advantage.

Two years later, though, the new plant still hasn’t been built. In fact, the city lost a couple of crucial federal grants worth $9 million that were supposed to help pay for the project.

What went wrong? City officials blamed “unavoidable delays.” But a letter sent by the feds said the city had failed to provide a legally sufficient environmental assessment.

The feds were n-n-nervous about some crucial things, such as running a sewer line through sensitive wetlands and under the Blackwater River. They based that judgment on expert witness submissions sent in by Milton’s Concerned Citizens. The feds did so because, they said, the city had failed to submit anything of its own.

Turns out the Mitchells’ crusade to save the river has been aided quite a bit by the city council’s own chaos.

“We’ve got a real mess here,” Mitchell told me this week.

Small town strife

Right now, Milton’s City Attorney is suing Milton’s Mayor, Heather Lindsay. He’s also filed a pair of complaints about her with the Florida Commission on Ethics.

The City Council approved his suit by a 6-2 vote. In the suit, the Attorney “asked for all cell phone, text messages and email communications from Lindsay’s private email address between the mayor and a list of 13 people, 11 of whom do not hold city positions,” the News Journal reported.

The city’s attorney, by the way, is state Rep. Alex Andrade, R-ChipOnShoulde.

If that name rings a bell like the one Pavlov used, it’s because he’s been in the news a lot for fighting with people. For instance, he made news when he called a Republican Congressman “an imbecile” with a “little midget mind.” He’s twice filed a bill to change Florida’s law on defamation, supposedly to target that darn ol’ lib’rul media, but instead it upset conservative outlets even more.

Why, you may wonder, would Andrade sue the Mayor, who until recently was an Assistant City Attorney for Pensacola?

He was demanding she turn over drafts of a Florida Bar complaint that she’d filed against him for being “obstructive and misleading” during Milton’s recent effort to hire a City Manager.

The Manager in question, by the way, finally accepted the job, then quit five months later. Can you blame him?

There’s more, but you get the idea. This ain’t the peaceful kind of small town John Cougar Mellencamp sang about.

“I’ve heard some people watch our council meetings strictly for the entertainment value,” Mitchell told me.

This is why the eight-member Council had trouble pulling together to finish the city’s biggest and most expensive public works project. Thank heavens for infighting and incompetence.

One big dysfunctional family

One day a retired postal supervisor named Larry McKee dropped in at City Hall to watch the antics of his elected representatives.

He was there because Milton’s Concerned Citizens “had convinced me to pay attention,” he told me. He didn’t like what he saw.

“I saw the dysfunctional family environment,” he said. “I knew we needed a change. … I don’t believe in fighting. I believe in figuring out what’s needed and getting it done.”

McKee had never run for office before, but Mitchell promised her group would help him, so he became a candidate.

They recruited other candidates to take on the incumbents. One of them, veteran nurse Ashley Fretwell, told me a story similar to McKee’s. Her family and friends had been urging her to think about running for office. Milton’s Concerned Citizens encouraged her to see the Council for herself. She didn’t like what she saw.

“The public was not being heard,” she told me. “Nobody would listen to each other.” That convinced her to jump into the race.

McKee, Fretwell, and the other two challengers benefited from one unusual election strategy from Mitchell’s group.

Every weekend, they would set up a tent in a different neighborhood and serve lemonade and cookies. One of the four candidates would stop by and talk to voters for an hour. Then they would move on to serve lemonade and cookies in another neighborhood.

“We’d go neighborhood to neighborhood and blanket each neighborhood,” Mitchell told me. “We held four parties every Saturday.”

The incumbents tried to campaign together too, but it wasn’t the same.

The four “frequently appeared together in campaign videos and were even featured in political action committee flyers as almost a one for all and all for one vote,” the News Journal noted in its post-election piece.

The challengers were the ones out connecting with the voters, and that paid off come election day. Fretwell, for instance, beat her opponent by 1,500 votes, which is just under 70% of the total.

“We are not here to be a laughingstock,” Fretwell told WEAR-TV. “We are not here to argue and fight with one another. We are here to work together.”

Now comes the hard part: figuring out what to do with the sewer plant.

A smart delay

Milton’s new Council members will be sworn in on Dec. 10. The first order of business afterward: Vote on whether to sign a $16 million contract with a local company to create spray fields for redirecting the effluent that’s now going into the river.

It’s a thorny question. The location the city’s engineers picked for the spray fields is — as Mitchell warned the old Council — smack dab on top of the city’s drinking water source. Nobody listened to her, of course.

“I told them, ‘You know, that’s in the wellfield,’ and they said, ‘Oh, you must think you know more than the city’s engineers,’” she recalled.

But then the DEP confirmed that she was right and warned the Council that the sprayed effluent could put some harmful chemicals into the town’s water supply. Oopsie.

The old Council was supposed to sign the contract last week, but then they decided to put off the vote until their replacements arrived. As the News Journal put it: “Milton City Council sidesteps tough wastewater treatment decision, leaves for new members.”

That delay may be the smartest thing they could possibly do.

I hope the new Council is able to live up to Mitchell’s expectations and save both the Blackwater River and the spawning sturgeon in it. If, after all that hard work and free lemonade, they wind up making the same mistakes as the old Council, I think Milton’s Concerned Citizens will really feel the agony of defeat.

But if they pull this off, it could inspire similar groups all over the state to follow suit. Their mission, should they choose to accept it, turns out to be quite possible after all.

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Craig Pittman reporting. Florida Phoenix is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Diane Rado for questions: [email protected]. Follow Florida Phoenix on Facebook and Twitter.