Bullets are made of metal. You probably knew that. Often, that metal includes lead. You probably knew that, too. When the lead in bullets or shots fired from shotguns ends up in lakes and streams, that lead is about as friendly to fish, birds, and other critters as the infrastructure of Flint is to kids. So lots of states try to limit the use of lead in shotgun shells, and they try to clean up the lead that’s already blanketing wetlands around shooting areas and popular hunting spots.
For nearly 60 years, visitors to the Skyway Trap & Skeet Club in St. Petersburg fired at targets using shells filled with lead pellets. Often, their ammunition traveled into neighboring Sawgrass Lake Park, a public wetland. Over the decades, it accumulated there in prodigious quantities.
Prodigious barely does the situation justice. An estimated one million pounds of lead was fired into the marshland, where it polluted not just the local lakes, but a delicate marine estuary downstream.
In this case, Skyway struck what seemed to be a sweet deal: the state of Florida would pay for a cleanup, so long as the skeet club erected a wall to keep still more lead from joining the small mountain of the stuff already leaching into the water. The problem was, Skyway Trap & Skeet never built the wall. Instead it argued that it was immune to environmental laws. The state sued. And then the state stopped suing. It dropped the lawsuit, letting Skyway off the hook for the wall and for the pollution. Because a NRA lobbyist brought in a congressman to make it go away.
The fight drew the notice of Marion Hammer, the National Rifle Association’s most prominent and effective lobbyist. …
Skyway tried to get the case thrown out, arguing that it violated a decade-old law, championed by Hammer, that gives gun ranges broad immunity from environmental lawsuits
Sure. Gun ranges should get out of environmental lawsuits because … wait. I’m sure there’s a good reason that starts or ends (or starts and ends) with Freedom! Other business might not be allowed to literally fling heavy metals into a public park, but hey, a gun club. That’s different.
But in this case a judge ruled that the agency was within its power and the case could proceed. The state was winning. Until it suddenly withdrew the suit.
The question of why [Florida’s water management agency] walked away when it was winning puzzled Florida’s political class. But emails and text messages obtained by The Trace may solve the mystery. Hammer, who had attacked the lawsuit, wanted the case to go away. So she enlisted a prominent Florida Republican lawmaker to make that happen.
Specifically, Hammer put in a call to Representative Ben Albritton. Albritton chairs a natural resources appropriations subcommittee that controls the water management agency’s budget. Albritton then turned around and sent this cheery email to Colleen Thayer, the head of public affairs at the agency.
“Colleen,” the note stated, “Rep. Albritton wanted me to forward this to you. He said he wants thoughts sooner rather than later.”
Albritton discussed the lawsuit as if it had already been dropped. He expressed the same thoughts to another congressman whose district overlapped the area of concern. One day later, the lawsuit was dropped.
In an interview, Hammer acknowledges that an NRA lawyer wrote the document that spelled out the terms of the lawsuit dismissal. She says that in addition to Albritton and Grant, she had also sent it to the office of Governor Rick Scott…
But then, of course, the lobbyist for the environment struck back and called … and called. Who am I kidding? There is no such lobbyist.