Gov. Ron DeSantis’s decision to veto the first major overhaul of a management plan for state waters in the Florida Keys Marine Sanctuary will complicate how regulations are enforced across a preserve bigger than the state of Delaware.
At a committee meeting Wednesday, Sanctuary officials said they’re taking a closer at the effect of implementing regulations in a divided sanctuary.
“ NOAA is currently evaluating how this will impact the restoration blueprint and how we will implement this in state and federal waters,” said Beth Dieveney, a policy analyst with the Sanctuary, which is overseen by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
READ MORE: DeSantis rejects management plan for Keys marine sanctuary
DeSantis rejected the new management blueprint last week after more than a dozen years of planning that not only expanded the Sanctuary’s boundaries, but added more wildlife management areas and new rules to better protect fish, wading birds and critical habitat in busy waters around the Keys. Updating the plan followed a 2011 report that found conditions in the Sanctuary, from water quality to reefs and seagrass, continuing to decline more than two decades after the preserve was created.
DeSantis’ said the new plan limited the state’s rights. His veto means existing rules remain for about 65% of the Sanctuary in state waters closer to shore.
That could significantly weaken some new rules, including a ban to prevent cruise ships from flushing greywater — waste water from cooking, laundering, cleaning and other uses — into the Sanctuary. With the veto, cruise ships can continue to dump the water in state waters.
”They could purge their greywater and wash water right at the reef or right at the dock,” said Chris Bergh, the Keys field director for the Nature Conservancy and a member of the Sanctuary’s water quality committee and former member of the advisory council.
”That is an example of an unintended consequence of the comprehensive veto of everything. I don't think that's what the state intends,” he said. ”That is as an example of why the state and the National Marine Sanctuary need to get this figured out.”
A new wildlife management area near the Marquesas to protect green turtles will also straddle state and federal water, he said. Part of a coral nursery near Marathon, where rules were changed to protect it from anchoring, also sit in state waters.
Conditions in the Sanctuary, he said, have become too dire to wait.
”These are things we all agreed need to happen and they need to happen yesterday,” Bergh said.
Up until this month, the Sanctuary was battling three toxic algae blooms, Tom Matthews, a biologist with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Research Institute, said at Wednesday’s meeting.
A bottom-dwelling algae that began killing sawfish and causing dozens of other species to become sick in 2023 remains (although at lower levels), with 62 endangered sawfish now confirmed dead.
“We’re cautiously optimistic that it won’t be the scale of last year,” he said.
A red tide that appeared in January in the Gulf of Mexico gradually spread east and triggered fish kills, including six major kills, before it dissipated this month. And cyanobacteria blooms in Florida Bay that had been sporadic have now become persistent. That’s lead to sponges dying across Florida Bay, he said.
In addition, reefs are still recovering from a record-breaking heat wave that hit in August 2024 and stony coral disease, which first appeared in 2014 but now regularly afflicts mounding coral needed to build reefs.
The Sanctuary did not respond to follow-up requests for more information.
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