In the early 1980s, a newish environmental regulatory department created by Miami-Dade County to protect air, water and wildlife amid a development boom gripping South Florida faced a defining challenge: keep thousands of acres of privately owned wetlands in the eastern Everglades from being paved over.
The wetlands had been sold decades earlier as useless swamp, mostly to unsuspecting northerners with little regard for the powerful benefits wetlands provide humans.
Like now, times were fraught. So the county’s Department of Environmental Resources Management (DERM) headed to the county’s rural fringe to hold community meetings and win support. Instead, staff mostly got screamed at by irate property owners.
“If you go out on a piece of property that you own and you pay taxes on,” one property owner shouted over a cheering crowd at a 1981 meeting in Homestead, “these jerks come over on your property and harass you. I pay my goddamn taxes and these communist bastards don’t!”
Marjory Stoneman Douglas, then in her 90s, a be-pearled celebrity among environmentalists, also addressed the room.
”The problems of this end of the state of Florida,” Douglas said, “are greater than any of the individuals here present.”
The ‘individuals,’ said Doug Yoder, then a county staffer assigned to help organize the meetings, reacted swiftly.
“People in the back started booing,” he recalled in an interview with WLRN. Unfazed, Douglas faced the crowd and in her precise elocution told them: “I have been booed by better people than you.”
The department, known widely as DERM, ultimately won that battle. Two years later, Miami-Dade adopted a comprehensive growth plan with strict zoning in the area to protect the wetlands that recharge drinking water supplies and stanch flooding. (Part of the land was later annexed into Everglades National Park.) The county also formalized an urban development boundary, one of the nation’s earliest, to prevent sprawl and safeguard wetlands, farms and water supplies.
For the next four decades, DERM would survive budget cuts, changing politics and the scorn of developers. But now environmental advocates worry its storied tenure might finally be coming to an end under plans to reorganize a department already handicapped by staff shortages and strip it of environmental permitting authority.
"The real job of DERM is to look out for our water wetlands, wildlife, public health. Full stop," said Lauren Jonaitis, executive director of Tropical Audubon. "So really our concern is that when environmental permitting is moved into a department whose primary focus is development and economic activity, it's really going to be a lot more difficult to maintain clear checks and balances."
A last-minute rewrite
In August, at the urging of Mayor Daniella Levine Cava, county commissioners voted to reinstate DERM as its own department, something environmentalists had championed. But at the last minute, the ordinance to accomplish that was rewritten to also strip DERM of its permitting authority. With little public notice of the change, commissioners voted at about 3 a.m. after a drawn-out budget hearing.
Environmentalists were stunned and wondered if it was even legal: In the middle of the night, with only a few days' notice, the mayor and commissioners had agreed to hand DERM’s chief environmental job duty over to the department created to drive economic development.
Builders applauded the move. In a letter just three days before the vote, the powerful Builders Association of South Florida reminded commissioners it had agreed to support a recent hike in permit fees only if the county stripped DERM of permitting authority. “Otherwise, BASF’s position could have been quite different,” BASF vice president Truly Burton wrote.
Environmentalists were aghast.
“Removing permitting authority would represent the final unraveling of DERM’s regulatory role,” five environmental groups, including Miami Waterkeeper, Friends of the Everglades, Tropical Audubon and Friends of Biscayne wrote to Levine Cava before the hearing.
Levine Cava said she was left with little choice.
“ Many don't see the need for DERM,” she said in an interview. “I wanted to be sure that we could keep DERM and protect it. And this was the way that I determined to do that.”
Without DERM, the county would be forced to surrender much of the enforcement oversight it has for federal and state environmental laws. In addition, Levine Cava said, a flood of pre-emptive laws from the state — in particular a hurricane relief bill last year that banned local governments from enforcing stricter building rules even in counties far from hurricane damage — are making it harder to fend off attacks on environmental protections. Lawmakers are also pushing to review development boundaries, like Miami-Dade’s, to determine if they’re justified.
The housing crisis has also put pressure on speeding up more development, even though studies have argued that no evidence exists that such moves make housing more equitable.
”We need to be able to defend ourselves,” Levine Cava said. “We need to be able to show that we are responsible when it comes to permitting. And I think that's what we've shown. We're not looking for ideology at the expense of results.”
Environmentalists also worry that Levine Cava is politicizing the department by choosing her former communications chief as the department’s director rather picking from career staff with technical expertise and years of experience, as past administrations did.
”This is a long-term strategy,” Levine Cava said, explaining that the director needed to do a better job winning public support for environmental initiatives. “I get it that people want status quo, but they're not reading the tea leaves. The tea leaves require us to build a broader base of support. That's what we're doing.”
To supporters who backed a mayor who campaigned as the 'water warrior,' such a clash was once unthinkable. Repeatedly, they wondered: instead of doing the work for opponents, why not stand up to state lawmakers and county commissioners, especially when such protections nationwide are under assault.
“ Everyone loves to hate the environmental regulators. That is until there is sewage running down the streets. There's toxic waste in the water. There's dead fish on the shores,” Waterkeeper executive director Rachel Silverstein told commissioners at the hearing.
“Do not do this,” she warned. “We can fix DERM. But not like this. This is too much.”
Levine-Cava’s staff is now drafting an administrative order spelling out DERM’s new responsibilities. She promises any concerns will be addressed in the guidelines.
“ I did this to protect DERM’s role,” she insisted. “I didn't do it to diminish DERM’s role.”
'DERM was a hero'
To understand what’s at stake, it’s important to consider DERM’s 52-year history. It’s been a tough five decades protecting water supplies and cleaning up pollution in a county perched between the Everglades' wide open marshes and the gin clear waters of Biscayne Bay.
That history started in the 1960s, when a reclusive shipping magnate imagined something else in the bay: an oil refinery with a 15-mile channel gouged into the shallow bottom.
“Today, it's hard to imagine anybody coming up with an idea like that,” said Yoder, who retired after working for the county for 50 years, including three decades at DERM.
The fear of a refinery spewing sulfur-dioxide soot and unleashing acid rain, Yoder said, was enough to prompt the county health department to create a pollution control office to enforce air quality regulations and end the refinery plans.
Around the same time, a federal investigation into water quality in Biscayne Bay turned up alarming levels of pollution, likely fed by small sewer treatment plants that at the time served the county. When they were replaced by a central system in the 1970s, the county created DERM to replace the pollution control office, giving it broad authority to enforce regulations that now included new national pollution laws under the Clean Water Act.
Among DERM’s early achievements was the notorious Munisport dump, which would become one of the nation’s largest superfund clean-up sites.
The bayside dump near North Miami had been mostly wetlands. But a developer hoping to build a golf course and sports complex convinced the county let it use the site as a temporary dump to build up high, dry ground.
”It was unregulated. It was not a sanitary landfill. It was never lined — ever," said Maureen Harwitz, an attorney who led a community group opposed to the plan. ”They were dumping garbage and hospital waste and dead horses from Hialeah. Everything in the world was going in.”
In 1978, DERM staffers confirmed toxic pollution, including heavy metals, benzenes and PCBs, leaching from the site and issued a citation to shut down the site.
“So DERM was a hero there,” Harwitz said. ”What's really tragic right now is that we used to think we had a backstop with the feds, like with EPA Region Four [which covers the Southeast from Kentucky to Florida]. We don't even have that backstop anymore.”
DERM was also often on the cutting edge of recognizing hazards and devising fixes ahead of the state, which created its own environmental regulatory agency a year after DERM.
“Environmental problems became clearer at the local level,” Yoder said. ”The county would do things and then the state would pick it up and then the feds would pick it up.”
In the 1980s, when Christo wanted to wrap nearly a dozen islands in Biscayne Bay in more than 6 million square feet of floating pink plastic fabric, the renowned artist known for his massive installations had to get through DERM first.
"The environmental people were saying there was going to be wholesale deaths of manatees and all kinds of things," Yoder said. "The arts people, of course, thought this would be just a terrific thing."
DERM helped ensure everybody got what they wanted, including Christo, who later included his correspondence with DERM in a museum exhibition on the project.
"This was the only occasion where regulatory permitting became sort of an art form unto itself," Yoder said.
Early on, Yoder and other managers realized to protect DERM’s mission, they needed to find a way to make it independent of annual budgeting that put it in competition with more popular police and fire services. So they came up with a small utility fee to cover water resources. They also convinced state lawmakers to tack a fee onto license plates to cover air quality monitoring.
“If you spread the costs thin enough, people don’t get upset,” he said.
Over the years, the department’s list of victories would grow. DERM helped rid county parks of old coal ash pollution and revive water flows to the transverse glades — the sliver of wetlands between urban Miami and Biscayne Bay. Its decades-long monitoring in the bay documented seagrass loss that helped restart flagging efforts to stop pollution flowing from stormwater and leaky septics in 2019. An endangered lands program has acquired and manages more than 23,000 acres.
In one of its most contentious battles, DERM issued pollutions violations that forced Florida Power & Light to clean up cooling canals at Turkey Point. Years of increasingly salty water had fed an underground plume, threatening to contaminate drinking water supplies with saltwater.
When Yoder started at DERM in 1977, the fledgling department had just 75 employees. When he left in 2006, it had grown to about 450.
Contempt as well as praise
But those efforts drew contempt as often as praise. DERM worked too slow, had to be egged on by activists or, developers complained, overshot its authority.
“DERM’s history has always been precariously perched between protecting the region’s environment and kowtowing to the county commissioners and the political landscape,” Michael Chenoweth, president of the Florida Keys chapter of the Izaak Walton League of America, wrote in an email.
In 2012, Mayor Carlos Gimenez seemed to nudge that perch when he suggested demoting DERM to a division and merging it with a new, sprawling super department that gobbled up more than two dozen departments.
“It is clear that a real vision for Economic Enhancement on both the permitting and land development fronts is to house these functions in one entity,” Gimenez wrote to commissioners at the time.
In reality, DERM maintained its autonomy under the new Department of Regulatory and Economic Resources (RER), because it held onto its environmental permitting authority, the department's former director said. A 2012 flow chart included in Gimenez’s memo to county commissioners listed permitting as DERM’s first duty.
“I told my children you’re not going to read about me in the paper when I retire,” said Lee Hefty, who retired in 2022 after a 30-year career with the department and 11 years as director. “I’m always going to make the right decisions that I can defend with good science.”
Even when he was reporting to the RER director, Hefty said he controlled decisions on environmental permitting, as spelled out in the county code, which grants broad authority to the department’s director. That includes ensuring that federal and state water and air pollution regulations are followed, legal orders are enforced and a host of other duties that can cover protected mangroves, wetlands or wildlife habitat.
“The fact that the mayor or manager can’t change the decisions of the DERM director... you can’t imagine the weight on your shoulders,” Hefty said.
Since his retirement, current and former staff say the department has been plagued by a thinning workforce, fanning complaints further. Positions have either not been filled or re-assigned to other departments, they say. Records show since Hefty left, vacant positions have climbed, averaging just above 80 out of 450 positions this year.
The chain of command
The mayor first announced she was reinstating DERM as a department in late June, nearly three months before that early morning vote. The newly reinstated department would “double down” on streamlining permitting, she wrote. But when the mayor released a proposed budget in July, environmentalists were surprised to see that nearly 140 jobs were being moved from DERM to the Department of Regulatory and Economic Resources to oversee permitting.
A flurry of emails and letters followed. Waterkeeper emailed with questions in August and again raised concerns at DERM’s quarterly meeting.
But in four public notices about the hearing, none mentioned the matter. Details didn’t emerge until the ordinance was included in the agenda for the first budget hearing. The next day, seven environmental groups, including the one started by Marjory Stoneman Douglas, sent a letter sounding the alarm and asking for a meeting. They never got one.
At the budget hearing in September, confusion over that chain of command clouded the debate.
When Commissioner Eileen Higgins proposed the ordinance to commissioners, she said the reorganization was merely a matter of clarifying duties. She skipped reading the full text.
”It's pretty simple. It's clarification,” she said.
“I think it’s nothing. It does nothing," Commission Chair Anthony Rodriguez answered when Commissioner Micky Steinberg asked for an explanation “in layman’s terms.”
One of the county's attorney said, "permitting today is in RER."
But Hefty said that blurs the oversight executed by DERM.
“Keep in mind when it says [environmental permitting] was in RER, it wasn’t in RER,” Hefty said. “It was in DERM and of course DERM was in RER.”
Since the 1990s, DERM staff that handle permitting have been located in the building department, to make things easier for applicants driving to the Coral Way offices, he said. The staff reported to supervisors in DERM. After the 2012 reorganization, because DERM was still responsible for any appeals to decisions, technically permitting remained its responsibility, as indicated by the flow chart.
And there was a reason for that, he said. Environmental permitting has to take into account far more variables than just building specs that call for certain beam sizes and whether a structure can withstand hurricane winds. Depending on the site, there can be questions about wellfield protections and soil contamination, or whether wetlands and specimen trees have to be protected. Land use also has to be considered. A garage using antifreeze would need annual operating inspections.
If DERM moved slowly, as critics complain, Hefty said, it was because staff were often working to get projects into compliance with changes before they reached commissioners. For that, they relied on accurate information from the applicant, or the permit runners who handle many of the applications.
For anyone who thinks DERM focuses on saving trees and bees alone to the exclusion of growth, Hefty has a different conclusion.
“This is about protecting our investment in the community. People who live here want to know they made a worthwhile investment in their community and that their water and air will be protected,” he said. “I love birding, but I’m a customer of this county and I want my water clean and quality of life to be good.”
In January, the newly reorganized department faced one of its first challenges, even as it continues to operate without clear marching orders. A heavy equipment dealer, Kelly Tractor, had an application pending to build new headquarters outside the urban development boundary on more than 240 acres that contain mostly wetlands, including about 60 that had been previously restored with a legal covenant that prevented future development.
Planning staff opposed the project. But commissioners approved it. Levine Cava vetoed the commission approval, which commissioners will reconsider March 19.
An even bigger battle may also be looming over the county's urban development boundary that has protected wetlands and farms for the last 50 years.
”There is no other urban development boundary,” Juan Carlos “JC” Bermudez said before the Kelly Tractor vote.
A proposed bill calling for a study on whether to ban the boundaries statewide passed the House this month but failed to be included in a companion bill in the Senate.
Meanwhile, DERM continues to operate without having its duties and responsibilities clearly spelled out. Back in September, Levine Cava promised an administrative order crafting new guidelines by October. But by January, draft copies of the order obtained in a records request by WLRN indicate recommendations from environmentalists have yet to be incorporated.
"Miami-Dade's environmental regulatory department used to be the model for the nation," Rachel Silverstein, of Waterkeeper, said in a statement to WLRN. She also warned that changes over the years had eroded the department's authority. "With this latest restructuring — the stakes are high — the relative success or failure of every project will depend on getting it right this time."
