The Florida Activist Is 78. The Legal Judgment Against Her Is $4 Million.
Environmental activists fear that Maggy Hurchalla’s case against a rock-mining company could have First Amendment ramifications.
By Patricia Mazzei
Sept. 8, 2019, 5:00 a.m. ET
STUART, Fla. — Maggy Hurchalla’s piece of Florida heaven is a patch of pristine Atlantic shore accessible only by boat in St. Lucie Inlet Preserve State Park. She and her husband nicknamed it the “End of the World” when they first came upon it half a century ago, after paddling south along the barrier island to the water’s end. She still likes to skinny-dip at the beach.
Ms. Hurchalla, 78, could spend her remaining years kayaking here, readily outpacing paddlers less than half her age. Or traveling the country, giving speeches about the legacy of her sister, Janet Reno, the first female attorney general of the United States.
But instead of reveling in her retirement, Ms. Hurchalla, who has devoted her life to protecting the untamed Florida wilderness that she loved, has been fighting a public battle with a rock-mining company — and losing.
A jury decided last year that Ms. Hurchalla should pay $4.4 million in damages to Lake Point Restoration, a company that has a limestone mining operation in Martin County, along Florida’s Treasure Coast.
Lake Point sued her for interfering with a contract after she emailed Martin County commissioners, urging them to back out of a water deal with the company that had initially been approved as a public-private partnership that could keep polluted water out of a nearby estuary. Ms. Hurchalla argued that she had merely exercised her First Amendment rights.
The legal saga involved secret emails, the ownership of Florida’s fresh water, and the constitutional rights to free speech and to petition the government.
Three months ago, a state appeals court upheld the verdict, alarming environmental and free speech organizations that had implored the three-judge panel to consider how profoundly such a precedent could chill citizens’ ability to question their leaders.
Ms. Hurchalla appealed again, this time asking for a hearing before the full Fourth District Court of Appeal. On Friday, the court denied her request. She could still petition the Florida Supreme Court to consider her case.
She does not have the money to pay the judgment. But Ms. Hurchalla does not worry about that.
“What I worry about now,” she said, “is dying before we win.”
She is one of the few remaining voices of a generation that remembers hurricanes before they had names, the last surviving child of a mother who built the family homestead by hand. Her life has spanned much of the state’s modern history, a story of growth inextricable from development.
The sale of 650 acres on the southern tip of Hutchinson Island in 1972 first spurred Ms. Hurchalla into activism. She wanted the land protected for conservation. Instead, a developer bought it and built a gated residential community. Ms. Hurchalla became Martin County’s first female commissioner in 1974, a liberal Democrat in a town of Republicans.
The commission adopted strict protections for wetlands and a four-story height limit for buildings. Growth happened anyway, but slowly and “sanely,” Ms. Hurchalla said, keeping the county green and preserving an Old Florida way of life.
more:
http://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/08/us/maggy-hurchala-florida-mining.html?action=click&module=News&pgtype=Homepage
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