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"Florida this Week" is made possible in part by support from the "Tampa Bay Times".

- Coming up next to who will pay for the cleanup in the aftermath of the wastewater dump from the Piney Point phosphate processing plant.

Advocates for the working poor, make the case for Medicaid expansion.

The state prepares to redraw legislative districts.

And the governor versus 60 minutes over vaccine favoritism.

Political insights next on "Florida this week."

(dramatic music) Welcome back.

The worst case disaster luckily did not happen this week, along the South shores of Tampa Bay.

- [Male Reporter] The Piney Point processing plant reservoir at the South end of Tampa Bay did not collapse this week, despite fears that one of three holding ponds containing hundreds of millions of gallons of wastewater would burst impacting homes, the major road, nearby businesses, the County jail and Tampa Bay.

Scientists and environmentalists are now monitoring the area to see how much damage is being done, even as more water loaded with nutrients is pumped into the Bay.

- And the close Piney Point reservoir has now stopped releasing the contaminated water into the channel at Port Manatee on Tampa Bay.

Manatee County plant has been a ticking environmental time bomb for decades and there have been numerous warnings that a disaster could happen.

One of the environmental groups that's been warning about the dangerous Manasota-88.

Glenn Compton is the group's chair.

And Glenn Compton, welcome to "Florida this Week."

- Hello.

- So Glenn, I'm wondering how bad is the damage right now?

What do we know about the extent of the damage that this has caused?

- What we know is that 200 million gallons of wastewater has been discharged into Tampa Bay and this is the amount of water that would never have been permitted to be discharged.

The real concern now is what happens next.

Even if there is no more discharge, we are seeing a significant amount of nitrogen and phosphorus entering into a bay that should never have received it in the first place.

So now we have to look and wait and see how bad the damage is going to be.

The concern obviously is algae blooms, which could rob oxygen out of the water, once the algae dies and locally, we would expect to see fish kills.

So we're in a wait and see situation right now.

So we didn't dodge any bullet here, we just didn't have the worst case scenario play out but we're not over yet.

We've got a long way to go.

- How many years ago was this foreseen?

I mean, did it environmentalist foresee that something like this could happen?

- In 1968 is when our organization formed.

And one of the reasons we formed was because of Piney Point and by 1970, we were saying that Bishop's Harbor which is adjacent to Piney Point was terminally ill.

It had already received more pollution than it ever should in its entire existence.

So here we are 50 years later and we're still dealing with the problem of Piney Point.

And as much as I'd like to think that this is going to go in a direction better than what it has been in the past, I believe 50 years from now, we're still gonna be dealing with Piney Point.

- Can the damage, I mean, if there's all this nitrogen and phosphorus has been released into the Harbor and ultimately into the Bay, can the damage be cleaned up and how much is it likely to cost and who's gonna pay for it?

- That's gonna be a really big question because we see that there's a company that's been in bankruptcy for quite some time that is managing it.

So that falls to the taxpayers of the State of Florida.

Ultimately, I think the State of Florida is gonna end up owning the site and having to have management and oversight of it.

So the $3 million that they're talking about now that's been allegated is probably just a drop in the bucket.

There's been talk about $20 million being or to $200 million being dedicated to the cleanup of this site.

And really nobody knows exactly how much it's going to cost.

This has never been done before, but we have three phosphogypsum stacks that are onsite and they need to be closed.

They need to be cleaned up.

And the cost of doing that is going to be a lot.

We just don't know exactly how much at this point - Shouldn't the owners of the property bear the cost of the cleanup and not the taxpayers?

- It's gonna be difficult to get a blood out of a rock.

I mean, that's always the same that this company goes bankrupt and walks away, which they already are in bankruptcy.

I mean, how do you get money out of such a company, that'll be a difficult thing to do, but ultimately you have to take a look at what did the state permit that allowed for this company to not only get ownership of it but to allow the dredging of the material from Port Manatee to be put into a stack that it was never designed to hold a dredged material for.

So there's a lot of accountability that needs to be looked at and addressed, whether it's on the state level or it's on the local level or it's the owners of the site.

So we're, again, just at the very beginning of trying to understand what's happened, but this is a problem that we can go back 50 years and take a look at this site.

And there's just been mismanagement after mismanagement.

And this is just the latest occurrence of what's happened at Piney Point - The Manatee County commission voted this week to say, "We're gonna take some of this wastewater that's in these reservoirs and pump it deep into wells."

And they've begun the process of applying for a permit to do that.

What do you think of the idea of deep well injection of the water in these reservoirs?

- This was something that was proposed previously and there was tremendous outcry from the surrounding owners, adjacent owners and also the public in general.

Agricultural interests are very much opposed to this, because if you pollute the groundwater then they certainly will not have water that's gonna be safe to irrigate their crops.

It would be disastrous quite frankly.

It's not an option that I think is a viable option.

And the reason for that is that if you do it here at Piney Point, then we're probably looking at doing it at the other stacks that we have throughout the state of Florida.

So once the groundwater is polluted then it's polluted forever.

There's really no good way to clean it up.

And the only reason that water is discharged into a deep well is because it's not clean enough to discharge into surface waters.

So you end up discharging the worst water quality that you have to get rid of.

And that's not something that I think is a viable option at Piney Point, but apparently that's the way that the County commission in the state and even the owners want to go.

And I think they're gonna face quite a significant amount of opposition if they move forward on this proposal.

- And Glenn, we just have a few seconds left, but are there other phosphate tailing or gypsum stacks in Florida around us that might be in a similar position where the walls could collapse and the water pours out?

- There's no such thing as a phosphate gypsum stack that's going to last a long period of time for generations.

So this is the first of many failures that we're going to see and we're gonna see many bankruptcies as a result of having to get rid of this radioactive waste.

There's no good use for it.

There's not much financial incentive to do anything with the phosphogypsum.

So this is one of many to come.

And unfortunately, I think it's the taxpayers of the state of Florida that will ultimately bear the burden as well as the environmental impact that comes from this.

Glenn Compton, thanks for coming on "Florida this Week."

- Thank you very much.

(dramatic music) - Nearly half of new Corona virus infections in the U.S are in just five States, including Florida.

The other four States are New York, Michigan, Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

Dr. Jay Wolfson is a professor of public health at the University of South Florida, as well as a senior associate Dean for health policy and practice at the Morsani College of Medicine and Dr. Jay Wolfson, welcome back.

Great to see you.

- Thank you, Rob.

It's good to be back.

- Okay.

We do have a high number of cases here, but at the same time, the number of deaths in Florida and elsewhere is falling.

With all the vaccinations going on.

Do you think we're out of the woods?

- We're out of the deep woods, but we're still in the woods.

The high number of cases is being registered principally among the younger population, the 15 to 40 population and as has been the case all along, you know, about 60% of the positive cases of this disease are asymptomatic.

So many people don't even know they haven't until and unless they're tested.

So there are a whole lot of people out there going around with not knowing that they have the disease.

The second thing is we are a large state and we're a destination state for vacations and tourism.

So we've got lots of folks coming in and going out, which means there's an opportunity to import some cases from other places and spread it here.

Young people are going to have what we call generational spread.

If your grandkids and my grandkids are playing on the beach together and having a good time in a crowd, where they may be exposed to others, they may get it.

They may or may not know it.

And then they're going to possibly spread it to some of their young friends next week or so.

And then it might take a few more weeks of groups spreading it to other groups.

And then when our grandchildren or our kids come to visit us once a month or something and if we happen to be at high risk and we are not vaccinated, we might then get it.

So the death rate has gone down dramatically for a couple of reasons.

One is because we've been so successful in vaccinating the highest risk populations and we're doing more of that.

And the other reason which is terribly important, we've gotten much better at treating the disease early on, so that it doesn't require hospitalization as much as it did.

It doesn't require the ICU as much as it did.

So we don't have as many people getting as sick and having to spend that much time with a risk of dying.

So we've made tremendous progress, but there are several things we have to remember.

The vaccine does not prevent you from getting the disease.

It only reduces the likelihood that you will get sick, all vaccines, do that.

You may still get a mild case or no case and you may still be able to get it and pass it on to others.

So for the time being, we're saying, "Play safe especially during the summer months."

And let's make sure that we do get out of the woods in time to celebrate Thanksgiving together.

- And you're concerned too, about the long haul implications of this vaccine that you might see in the first infection.

- Yeah, there are two forms of long haulers, if you will.

That's a term being used for people.

Who've had the disease, had some symptoms and they can't quite shake the symptoms.

They've got a brain fuzziness, or they have some scarring in their lung tissue or their heart tissue or their kidneys and they can't quite get over what those symptoms were.

But even as people have not had symptoms, they've been asymptomatic.

We're finding that if they have gotten the disease, if they've tested positive, they still have a risk of having a post chronic infection, post-infection chronic disease that will erupt later on.

The virus attaches to organ tissue.

So it attaches to your lungs, to your heart, to your kidneys, to your brain.

And if it doesn't be erupt right away, it can sit and wait for awhile, we think.

Northwestern and Mayo have done some really good studies on this and it can erupt months later into mild myocarditis or kidney disease or lung disease or brain disease.

And we're still learning how that happens.

So we have to watch very carefully and monitor because those are long-term potentially chronic diseases that will continue to affect many people in our population and our healthcare system.

- Jay, one last question.

We only have a minute.

There was a dust up this week between the governor and CBS's program, "60 Minutes."

"60 Minutes," says, "Look, you gave special attention to wealthy people in Palm Beach."

The governor says, "That wasn't a fair characterization of what he did."

I don't want to ask you about the specifics of the story, I wanna ask you is this an argument to have like a vaccine czar?

So instead of the governor traveling around the state, handing out vaccines, you have one person who does it fairly and looks over the whole state to make sure that it's distributed equally.

- I think it's an argument to beef up our public health system and infrastructure.

We have destroyed our public health system over the last 30 years has been decimated.

It's been underfunded, defunded, service has been taken away, as a consequence we didn't have infrastructure.

We didn't have sufficient staff, we didn't have the software.

We were unprepared for this unexpected invasion.

And now we're trying to catch up, you know, public health is not as sexy as fancy new hospitals and expensive drugs the shiny technology.

It's a long-term preventative approach.

And the idea of having a czar is a nice idea but you still have to have in place a functioning, well-structured, supported public health system and that's a long-term investment that we need to make, and that will help an awful lot plus deep politicizing it, which is always a challenge.

- Dr. Wolfson, thanks again.

Good to see you - Rob.

Thanks so much.

Be safe and be well (dramatic music) - The state legislature will be responsible for drawing state legislative and congressional districts in time for next year's elections.

The League of Women Voters of Florida is a non-partisan grassroots organization that works to among other things, ensure that districts are drawn fairly.

Patricia Brigham is the president and she joins us now.

And Patricia, thanks for coming on "Florida this Week".

- It's a pleasure to be here.

Thank you.

- So your group in other groups this week called on the state legislators to sign a pledge that they will draw districts fairly and compactly and in line with the two amendments that we have on the Florida constitution, the fair voting amendments, tell us why you felt the need to do that.

- Well, the process years ago was not handled well at wound up in court, and it was not done accurately.

It was not done fairly.

It was not done transparently.

So ultimately we did get fair districts in Florida after a very long battle.

But as we enter a new series of redistricting we want to ensure the public that this process will be done in the sunshine.

So we asked our legislators to sign a pledge that they would support the transparency of fair districts as these maps are drawn.

And we were very pleased to have Senator Annette Taddeo be the first legislature to sign that pledge at our press conference.

And we hope all of the legislators will do so.

And we will follow up with them to make sure that they have.

And we just want to promise the people of Florida that these districts will be drawn fairly.

And the people of Florida deserve nothing less than fairness and transparency.

- So what tools to good government groups like yours have to make sure that the legislature does draw districts fairly?

I mean, what can you do to make sure that this happens?

- Well, the League sits on the executive committee of the fair districts coalition and we are working with them.

And of course there's a broader coalition that that executive committee sort of oversees, I'll put it that way.

So there are going to be many, many organizations involved in making sure that we get fair districts.

Some of the most important leaders from the previous go round, Ellen (indistinct) for example is co-chair of that coalition.

And she is an expert on this issue and she will be helping and leading the fight again.

And we will be with her every step of the way.

The League, as you know was involved in the fight for fair districts before along with Common Cause and some other groups.

But we're hoping this time that it goes much more smoothly than it did before.

- Last time it went into federal court, are you prepared if they don't draw these districts fairly?

And in accordance with the state constitution, are you prepared to take this issue to court?

- We will do everything we can to make sure that we once again get fair districts.

- Patricia, I wanna ask you about the voting of legislation that is making its way through Tallahassee.

Tallahassee wants to, at least the majority party, wants to limit bail and voting.

It's also, there had been some talk until yesterday about barring people from handing out food and water in long voting lines.

But what's your take on the legislation making its way through Tallahassee?

- Well, there are two bills which we consider to be anti voter bills, because they really are an attack on our voting rights.

And this is so unnecessary because, even Governor Ron DeSantis said, "We had a great election last year," but then almost in the same sentence turned around and said, "But we need election reform."

That doesn't make any sense.

Why change a winning game?

So we have seen Senate bill 90 and that bill in many ways is worse than Senate or then house bill 7041 was just amended.

Senate bill 90 would require voters to re-up their vote by mail registration every year.

That's currently not the case.

That would mean that all 67 of Florida supervisors of elections would have to spend a lot of money to reach out to voters, to tell them, "Hey, your vote by mail status is going to have to be addressed each and every year."

Senate bill 90 would also eliminate all ballot drop boxes and 1.5 million Floridians use those drop boxes last year for two reasons.

Well, they're really three, number one, they're very convenient.

Number two, we were in the midst, as we still are of a global pandemic.

And number three, there was deep distrust of the U.S postal service.

So eliminating these ballot boxes when so many Floridians turned to them to drop in their ballot, which is inside of an envelope signed and sealed, why would you do such a thing?

We want to make voting easier, not harder.

And many of our Floridians we're tourism state, work in the industry of tourism.

They work odd hours and they need to be able to vote conveniently.

So why are you going to take away a method of voting that is so easy to utilize.

- Patricia, I wish we had more time but Patricia Brigham of the Florida League of Women Voters, thanks for coming on "Florida this Week."

- Thank you.

It's been my pleasure.

(dramatic music) - The State of Florida was facing a $2 billion budget deficit this year.

And as a way to ease the shortfall, lawmakers were considering hundreds of millions of dollars of cuts to Medicaid.

At the same time in Washington, Congress is increasing incentives to States, like Florida to expand Medicaid.

Scott Darius is this executive director of Florida Voices for Health.

That's a coalition working to improve healthcare for all Florida residents and for expanded Medicaid.

Scott, welcome to "Florida this week."

- Thank you for having me.

So Scott, by not expanding Medicaid, who's left out?

Who are these folks that aren't eligible for Medicaid?

Where did they get their health insurance?

- So right now we have 1.1 million Floridians who are earning below 138% of the poverty level.

A lot of these folks have to rely on our emergency rooms and their community clinics to get access to healthcare.

I don't think people understand really, how hard it is to qualify for help with health care here in the state.

The most you can make to qualify for Medicaid is 31% poverty level.

So for example, a family of three, the most you can make is $7,000 for the year.

And that's only if you have a child, if you're a single adult and you're making $10,000 each year you don't qualify for tax credits in the ACA Marketplace and you don't qualify for Medicaid.

And it leaves a hundreds of thousands of people in what we call the coverage gap.

- So the working poor really affected the people at the very low end of the scale.

In Tallahassee, what they say is, they say, "Look if we expand this, it's gonna cost the state money."

So the federal government may help us for a few years but in the out years, it's gonna cost a lot of money for the state to provide those services."

What do you say back to people in Tallahassee who say that?

- Well, first I've come to the fact that Florida right now has a budget deficit.

There's $1.2 billion, a shortfall in the Medicaid budget specifically.

What I would counter with is that right now the federal government is offering $3 billion for Florida.

If we were to go ahead and expand Medicaid, now that $3 billion would apply to our traditional Medicaid budget.

So it would cover both the influx of people who have come on since the pandemic, but also those who would be eligible in a Medicaid expansion.

Now, if you forgot about that cherry on top, I'm worried just about, you know, let's say in two years after the $3 billion runs out, who's gonna pay for Medicaid expansion then.

Well, it turns out Medicaid expansion actually is a cost savings for our state budget, nearly $200 million a year we would save.

If we expanded, you wonder how you can cover more people and it costs less.

And it's really, right now, the way we provide healthcare is the most inefficient patchwork system you possibly can.

We pay for those who get care in our emergency rooms, that's uncompensated care, but it's not like those folks have kind of the comprehensive treatment that allows them to get healthy and stay healthy over time.

You have our prison services program.

You have our Ryan White programs.

There are a lot of different pockets of money that we pay out to take care of acute needs.

When you know, the solution could be providing comprehensive coverage that keeps people healthy over time.

That ends up saving our budget a significant amount each year and that's money that can be allocated for other priorities.

- Scott Darius thanks for coming on "Florida this Week."

- Thanks so much for having me.

(dramatic music) - Well, finally, the Holderness Family has a popular YouTube channel that creates clever parodies of daily domestic life.

After a year of COVID-19, the family's ready for vaccination day.

Enjoy, stay safe.

We'll see you next week.

It's vaccination day.

It's vaccination day.

It's vaccination day.

♪ Appointments are open, I'm group four ♪ ♪ I don't have to stay here anymore ♪ ♪ I'm sick of eating take out on these plates ♪ ♪ The time indoors has got me stressed ♪ ♪ But I just checked on CVS ♪ ♪ Finally they're lead giving me dates ♪ ♪ I'll see actual real life people ♪ ♪ It'll be totally strange ♪ ♪ I might even get to go see a game ♪ ♪ For the first time in forever ♪ ♪ I'll hang out with someone else ♪ Love you.

♪ But for the first time in forever ♪ ♪ I won't watch sports by myself ♪ 'Cause you don't like sports, you know?

♪ I could go to a bar with buddies ♪ You're the best.

♪ I don't have to live in fear ♪ Love you.

♪ For the first time in forever ♪ ♪ I won't be right here ♪ (dramatic music) - [Announcer] Florida this week is a production of WEDU who is solely responsible for its content.