This is such an exciting time of year for us Florida columnists! The 2026 Legislative Session begins next Tuesday, and we’re all waiting to see which piece of legislation will win the coveted title of the Worst Bill of the Year. I’ve already chosen my nominee.

There are sooooo many possibilities. There’s a bill to block the removal of Confederate monuments, because nobody deserves honor more than traitors who took up arms against the United States. I assume we’ll soon begin building monuments to the Jan. 6 insurrectionists, too.

Another bill would require teachers to take loyalty oaths, because it’s always a great idea to copy U.S. Sen. Joe McCarthy. In fact, why not require teachers to swear their loyalty to Mr. Red Scare, too?

There’s also a bill that would ban the display of pride flags at any government office in the allegedly “Free” State of Florida. Sorry, “freedom” is available only to people who vote the government-approved way.

But my pick for the worst of the worst is HB 479. This bill would ban cities and counties from imposing “laws, regulations, rules, or policies” to protect wetlands and prevent water pollution.

How bad is it? “The impacts of it are incredibly broad,” said Matt Singer of the Florida League of Cities. “This is a world-ender.”

Local government needs to be involved in regulating these water and wetland issues because they’re better able to tailor their actions to fit local circumstances, said Gil Smart of VoteWater.org.

“This bill would just blow that up,” Smart told me.

The bill is titled “Land and Water Management,” but I think that’s misleading. In the interest of accuracy, it should be called “Lack of Any Land and Water Management.”

Cragin Mosteller of the Florida Association of Counties suggested an even better name: the “I Hate Water Bill.”

Do expect pollution

Mosteller pointed out that clean water “is very important to our quality of life in Florida. It should be protected.”

Instead, this bill orders local governments to leave the job of controlling pollution and saving wetlands to a state agency, the Florida Department of Environmental Pro –  HA HA HA HA HA!

Sorry, I can never get through that word “Protection” without cracking up.

Why do I react that way to the DEP? Because this is the agency that’s been dragging its feet since 2017 on cleaning up the state’s outstanding springs, despite clear orders from the Legislature.

Florida is ranked No. 1 in the U.S for polluted lakes — in fact, our largest, Lake Okeechobee, has been named the most polluted lake in the nation. Florida’s longest river, the St. Johns, is coping with steadily increasing pollution from septic waste.

Perhaps most telling of all is what happened when a pollution-fueled algae bloom killed off so much seagrass in the Indian River Lagoon that 2,000 manatees starved to death. A federal judge ruled that by failing to stop the pollution, the DEP had violated the Endangered Species Act.

As for wetlands, Florida developers tried for years to get the DEP to be put in charge of issuing federal wetland permits. They finally got their wish at the tail end of the first Donald Trump administration, when the feds handed over their authority to the DEP.

Four years later, a federal Judge ruled the DEP was so intent on cranking out wetlands destruction permits as fast as possible that it had done an illegal end run around the Endangered Species Act. The decision is being appealed, but his ruling calling out the DEP for failing to protect manatees is hard to ignore.

In other words, in Florida the initials “DEP” actually stand for “Do Expect Pollution.”

Passing this bill to put every bit of wetlands and pollution protection in the hands of the DEP would be about as smart as assigning the Cookie Monster to guard the Publix bakery.

The nest and the nephew

“This bill doesn’t make any sense,” Kim Dinkins of the smart-growth group 1000 Friends of Florida told me. “We stand to lose a lot more than we might gain if it passes.”

But the bill makes perfect sense if you know its origin story.

HB 479 is sponsored by Rep. Randy Maggard, who comes from a politically well-connected family in Pasco County. His brother is a business partner of Agriculture Commissioner Wilton Simpson and is married to the sister of a Pasco Commissioner.

I mention this because this new bill is nearly identical to one that Maggard filed in 2023 after his nephew, Zach Maggard, had a problem with Pasco County.

Soon after Zach Maggard bought a lot in a subdivision called Lake Jovita Golf & Country Club, his neighbors noticed something disturbing. As I reported at the time, a large eagle nest on that property, one that had been there for 27 years, suddenly disappeared — and no, it wasn’t knocked down by a storm. The tree was still there, but there was no trace of the nest.

Upset neighbors and outraged bird advocates called officials from Pasco County, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to figure out who illegally destroyed the nest.

The investigators were unable to pin the crime on anyone, but they noticed that the wetlands shown on Zach Maggard’s building plans did not match the wetlands on the ground.

A county building official ordered a new wetlands map and further scrutinized the situation. The big fight turned out to be over a 12-foot “walkway” down to the lake — one that clearly wasn’t going to be a walkway but a concrete driveway for a boat ramp.

The Pasco building official suggested making the “walkway” out of some permeable material, so water could continue to flow through it. Zach Maggard didn’t like the idea.

I was told that Maggard went over the building official’s head. The project got approved — although not by the building official who’d actually been on the scene.

The bottom line: Rep. Maggard told me in 2023 that he filed this bill because his nephew did some things that Pasco officials objected to, yet paid no penalty for them. He seemed intent on punishing the regulators for trying to interfere with his nephew’s plans.

Maggard’s original bill crashed and burned, and the eagles rebuilt their Lake Jovita nest.

“This beautiful eagle pair is currently raising two very young eaglets,” Kim Rexroat, Audubon Florida’s eagle watch coordinator for Pasco, told me this week.

Maggard’s awful bill is back too, just like a bad penny.

The sponsor

I tried several times to talk to Rep. Maggard about him filing the worst bill of the 2026 Session. Alas, he never called me back. Perhaps he was too busy dancing in delight after hearing about his nomination for Worst Bill.

But he did acknowledge to me in 2023 about how he had turned the Lake Jovita situation involving his nephew into a legislative attack on all 67 counties and 400 or so cities across the state.

That interview lingers in my memory as both the funniest and most painful conversation (I actually bit my tongue) I’ve ever had with a Florida politician.

At first, our discussion was confusing. Rep. Maggard kept saying the word “duplicitous” but after a while I figured out he was using it to mean something other than “deceptive.” When I finally asked him if he meant people were lying about his bill, he said no.

“To me, ‘duplicitous’ means you’re duplicating something,” he said, explaining he thought all the local water and wetland regulations were just duplicates of the state ones (they’re not).

Maggard also told me he was in favor of protecting our clean water from pollution, but “why do the customers, the consumers, the citizens have to go through all these hurdles?” He didn’t see the role that regulation plays in preventing pollution from tainting our water supply.

And now he’s trying to end all the non-DEP regulations.

Sprawl on steroids

Rep. Maggard is far from alone in this ill-considered pursuit.

There’s a companion bill in the other chamber, SB 718, just as there was in 2023. The 2023 bill was sponsored by Sen. Danny Burgess, whose law partner was another of Maggard’s nephews. This year, the Senate version of the bill this year is sponsored by Ocala’s Sen. Stan McClain.

If that name sounds familiar, it’s because he’s behind quite a few pro-development bills. One is the bill creating “Blue Ribbon” developments that don’t have to obey local zoning rules or pay attention to what the public wants.

Smart of the VoteWater organization suggested that that’s why McCain is supporting Maggard’s bill, too. By shutting local governments out of water pollution and wetlands regulation, he said, the public gets silenced as well. The DEP rarely holds public hearings on individual permits.

“A lot of this is to cut the public out of the process,” Smart said.

McClain, by the way, happens to be a homebuilder in Marion County. In fact, his legislative website says he’s executive officer of the Marion County Building Industry Association.

Environmental advocates dubbed the legislative session a couple of years back as “The Year of Sprawl.” Thanks to McClain, Smart said, “This is the Year of Sprawl on Steroids.”

Drink up

The Legislature has spent a lot of energy over the past few years trying to handcuff local governments to prevent them from doing things that upset major campaign contrib– er, I mean, fine, upstanding citizens who just happen to sit on very big wallets.

But this goes beyond that. This is a bill designed to let polluters run amok, even if the result threatens all our health.

If anyone tries to resist, Maggard’s bill contains a strong penalty to stop them. If any city or county persists in trying to protect its citizens from pollution, the DEP is ordered to notify the state’s Chief Financial Officer.

Then, per the bill, the CFO is supposed to withhold state funds from those local governments, effectively killing their ability to pay for police, fire departments, solid waste, libraries and so forth.

Both have been referred to not one, not two, but THREE committees.

Perhaps, as happened in 2023, the process of wading through multiple committees will slow them down too much to pass.

I’d like to make sure Rep. Maggard really understands the importance of Florida water quality.

Here’s my plan: We hire a fancy calligrapher to draft a lovely invitation to notify Rep. Maggard that he’s been chosen for a major award.

We invite him to the Worst Bill awards ceremony at the Governor’s Inn in Tallahassee, which I hear is quite the hot venue for political shindigs in our state capital.

Then, when Rep. Maggard shows up, ready to accept his award, we hand him a large glass of ugly, nasty, polluted water and say, “You made that. It’s yours. Now drink it all.”

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Reporting by Craig Pittman. 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 Michael Moline for questions: [email protected].