Peace Corps Online: July 2, 2003 - Palm Beach Post: Tunisia RPCV Kevin Stinnette gives the Indian River a voice

July 2, 2003 - Palm Beach Post: Tunisia RPCV Kevin Stinnette gives the Indian River a voice

Peace Corps Online: Peace Corps News: Headlines: Peace Corps Headlines - 2003: July 2003 Peace Corps Headlines: July 2, 2003 - Palm Beach Post: Tunisia RPCV Kevin Stinnette gives the Indian River a voice

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Tunisia RPCV Kevin Stinnette gives the Indian River a voice

Caption: Tunisia RPCV Kevin Stinnette (right) shown here with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at the Waterkeeper Alliance National Conference in June of 2002

Read and comment on this story from the Palm Beach Post on Tunisia RPCV Kevin Stinnette who is the riverkeeper for the Indian River. Elected officials are supposed to speak for our waters, Mr. Stinnette said, but many have been elected because they put the special interests of their campaign contributors ahead of their constituents who want clean water. "Big money colors our whole political system in terrible way." The keepers -- there are lakekeepers and coastkeepers as well as riverkeepers -- all are part of the international Waterkeeper Alliance, founded by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who also is the chief prosecuting attorney for New York's Hudson Riverkeeper. The alliance includes more than 100 keepers, or advocates, for waterways around the world, including four others in North Florida. Read the story at:

He gives the Indian River a voice*

* This link was active on the date it was posted. PCOL is not responsible for broken links which may have changed.

He gives the Indian River a voice

By Sally Swartz, Palm Beach Post Editorial Writer
Wednesday, July 2, 2003

The white T-shirts, pinned up at the donated Sewall's Point office of the Indian Riverkeeper, carry a message: Demand Clean Water!

That is riverkeeper Kevin Stinnette's mission. "I speak for the river. The river doesn't have a voice," he said. "I go where the future of the water is being discussed and negotiate for the river. I speak for the people who own the river. Us."

Elected officials are supposed to speak for our waters, Mr. Stinnette said, but many have been elected because they put the special interests of their campaign contributors ahead of their constituents who want clean water. "Big money colors our whole political system in terrible way."

The keepers -- there are lakekeepers and coastkeepers as well as riverkeepers -- all are part of the international Waterkeeper Alliance, founded by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who also is the chief prosecuting attorney for New York's Hudson Riverkeeper. The alliance includes more than 100 keepers, or advocates, for waterways around the world, including four others in North Florida.

Mr. Stinnette is known to Treasure Coast residents as one of the "St. Lucie Four" who successfully fought a proposed bridge across the Indian River at Walton Road -- in spite of a nuisance lawsuit filed against them by Figg Bridge Engineers. Known as a "strategic lawsuit against public participation" or SLAPP suit, it later was dropped.

The Treasure Coast Environmental Defense Fund, which raised money for the bridge opposition, helps pay the riverkeeper's $43,000 salary. He also has grants from private foundations -- carefully chosen to avoid conflicts of interest -- along with donations from fishing groups and local Riverkeeper members.

The "keeper" idea privatizes environmental protection, giving citizens an option when government fails to enforce environmental laws. The Hudson River, where the movement began, has gone "from a cesspool to recovered fish stocks of shad and striped bass," Mr. Stinnette said.

Keepers also protest when government agencies are the polluters. "If terrorists did the damage to the St. Lucie (River) Estuary that the Army Corps of Engineers is doing," he said, "we'd put them before a military tribunal."

The corps and the South Florida Water Management District jointly manage Lake Okeechobee, periodically dumping huge quantities of polluted fresh water from the lake into the brackish river. Outbreaks of sores and lesions on fish, damage to sea grass and oyster beds followed past dumping.

Mr. Stinnette is organizing people to help deal with the spread of an invasive seaweed fed by nutrients from treated sewage, which some scientists say seeps onto reefs from deep-injection wells. Research in Hawaii has linked injection-well seepage to tumors on sea turtles, and sea turtles in the Indian River lagoon have the same kinds of virus-caused tumors, Mr. Stinnette said.

The former Peace Corps volunteer and schoolteacher is frustrated dealing with government officials who have decided deep-well injection is safe, despite mounting evidence to the contrary. "Instead of them proving it's safe, we are expected to prove it isn't," he said. "There should be a moratorium on deep-well injection until they can prove there's no connection to the invasive algae and sea-turtle mortality."

He wants more from Great Lakes Dredge & Dock Co., a dredging firm the Department of Environmental Protection already has fined $28,000 for spilling oil and plastic foam when it dredged the St. Lucie Inlet last summer. DEP did not require the company to clean up the plastic foam, and much of it still is lodged in mangroves near the Crossroads, where the Indian and St. Lucie rivers and the Intracoastal Waterway meet at the St. Lucie Inlet.

Volunteers have picked up thousands of pieces of the foam, but Mr. Stinnette believes DEP should have levied a higher fine and that the Coast Guard, in charge of enforcing marine plastics pollution, should take action. "We're trying to make sure," he said, "that a person can't litter the river with plastic and walk away."

Mr. Stinnette also will examine who has permits to dump pollutants into the Indian River and its watershed, which includes the St. Lucie River, and will seek grant money for an environmental education program at St. Lucie's Mariposa Elementary.

He hopes more people will join the Waterkeeper Alliance. He wants to see keepers for the St. Lucie River, the Lake Worth Lagoon, Florida Bay, Lake Okeechobee and "a whole ring of keeper programs around the Everglades."

It's too bad they're needed. But government not only has failed to protect our waters; it has become one of the polluters. The Indian River is lucky to have Mr. Stinnette.

In last week's column, I incorrectly described a test in Miami-Dade, in which officials used dye to test the amount of time water would take to travel to a well from which drinking water is drawn. The dye was placed in a quarry lake, rather than a wastewater injection site, and took four hours to appear in drinking water rather than the 100 hours expected.

sally_swartz@pbpost.com

More about Indian Riverkeeper Kevin Stinnette.

Read more about Indian Riverkeeper Kevin Stinnette at:

Indian Riverkeeper Kevin Stinnette

Indian Riverkeeper Kevin Stinnette

Kevin Stinnette has served as president of the Treasure Coast Environmental Defense Fund and on the Board of Directors of the St. Lucie County Conservation Alliance. He is one of the "St. Lucie Four" written about by Florida columnist Carl Hiaasen.

Kevin has served on the boards of not for profit organizations ranging from Self Reliance, a Tampa organization with a $1 Million+ budget, (providing housing and transportation services to the disabled), to The Conservation Alliance, St. Lucie County's anchor environmental organization. Kevin was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Tunisia North Africa in 1990 and has great appreciation of the cultural diversity on the Treasure Coast. He has experience in agriculture and the construction industry. He is certified to teach middle/high school English, speech and special education (Physically challenged) Kevin was most recently Technology Coordinator at Forest Grove Middle School in St. Lucie County.

The Coast Guard licensed Kevin as a captain in 1983. He has a lifetime of experience on the water, including years of offshore yacht racing, work as an excursion, charter and delivery captain across the Bahamas and the Gulf of Mexico. His degree in Speech Communication from University of South Florida is central to his comfort and ability in speaking at public meetings. He has spoken at state meetings of Audubon and Sierra Club, The National Green Scissors Conference in Washington and countless county commission, expressway authority, and city council meetings. His three-year participation on the Comprehensive Plan Study Group for St. Lucie County has given him a thorough understanding of growth management in Florida.

Kevin has a positive relationship with local environmental agencies. He arranged sea grass surveys that identified federally protected Johnson's sea grass in the path of the proposed Walton Road Toll Bridge and joined with Department of Environmental Protection divers in transects that quantified the presence of that sea grass where previous surveys had not been done. He has earned the respect of South Florida Water Management District staff as well as National Marine Fisheries Service employees. Kevin's input contributed to thorough and negative responses to the Expressway Authority's Advanced Notification from the above mentioned agencies and the St. Lucie County Community Development Agency.

Kevin grew up near Tampa Bay in St. Petersburg. He has lived in Florida since he was 3 years old and has a deep love of the state. He is happily married to Florida native Marilyn Waugh-Stinnette and they live on the Indian River Lagoon in St. Lucie County.

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