For nearly 60 years, visitors to the Skyway Trap & Skeet Club in St.Pete fired at targets using shells filled with lead pellets. Often, their ammunition traveled into neighboring Sawgrass Lake Park. Over the decades, it accumulated there in prodigious quantities. Lead shot is toxic, and can leach into water and soil. An estimated one million pounds of the hazardous stuff fell on the property, polluting a lake that feeds into Tampa Bay, a fragile marine estuary. Under a legal deal struck in 2004, Swiftmud agreed to pay for removing the lead from the park, and Skyway said it would build a barrier to stop spent ammunition from falling on state property. That wall never went up. So last year, the water management agency sued the gun range. Then the NRA got involved. They brought in Florida GOP Ben Albritton. This guy is a powerful GOP lawmaker involved in setting the agency's budget. In February, Swiftmud abruptly dropped the lawsuit without explanation. here
"We want to be very careful of course in providing speculation or personal opinion on something that may be out 5, 10, 15 or 30 years from now," he cautioned, "and not building concrete ideas or concrete decisions around this table on something that might be speculation." here
Wauchula we got your back!
