TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — The carpeted halls of the Capitol filled with the quiet rustle of notes and test results as families, nurses, and environmental scientists sat shoulder to shoulder with state budget officials this week, pressing Florida to reckon with what they describe as a slow-moving public health crisis: polluted water and the cancers that shadow it.
For longtime advocate Cheryl Joza, the stakes are personal. Fifteen years after losing her sister, Terri Jewell, to cancer linked by family to toxic exposure at Bayshore High School, Joza has become a fixture at meetings like this, showing up with timelines, maps, and names. When classmates began reporting their own diagnoses, she went beyond grief. She called an epidemiologist, a toxicologist, a biostatistician, and a geologist. Their independent reads of the data raised alarms. Joza’s own digging led her to industrial operations a mile north of the school, where she says contaminants were documented in the water.
“I’m here for the families from all over the state,” Joza told officials. “Beaches we loved are now littered with dead marine life. The water we swam in is murky and unsafe. Even the air feels different. We need our leaders to stop treating pollution as abstract and start treating it as cause and consequence, and to hold polluters to account.”
Across the table sat Emerald Cromwell, a nurse from Pinellas County who knows the clinical language of illness, and the rawer vocabulary of loss. Cromwell was diagnosed with adrenocortical carcinoma, a rare cancer. Two people she knew in St. Petersburg were treated for the same disease. Her best friend since kindergarten, Shannon Jagger, did not survive. Cromwell has turned her grief into organizing, fundraising for research, talking with neighbors about environmental health, and pushing for safer water. “Awareness isn’t the finish line,” she said. “Policy is.”
If the families brought testimony, the scientists brought specificity. David Woodhouse, a hydrogeology expert, joined nurses, environmental scientists, and community leaders to outline how industrial corridors and aging infrastructure can funnel contaminants into aquifers and neighborhoods. Their focus repeatedly returned to PFAS, a sprawling class of “forever chemicals” used in firefighting foams, manufacturing, and consumer products that persist in the environment and accumulate in the body.
The group urged Florida to move beyond piecemeal responses. Their proposals included:
- A prohibition on introducing new PFAS variants or chemical subclasses into commerce without rigorous safety proof.
- Health-protective statewide drinking water standards for all PFAS, rather than a short list of individual compounds.
- Mandatory reporting of PFAS releases across sectors, with public, searchable disclosure.
- Comprehensive testing and cleanup of drinking water near military installations and industrial sites where PFAS use is documented or suspected.
“If the cost of doing business is paid by kids and caregivers, the math is wrong. Florida can choose stronger protections and choose them now.” - Stel Bailey
What played out around the conference table was less a press event than a civic inventory: names of neighbors who got sick; latitudes and longitudes of outfalls; the chronology of blooms and fish kills along once-clear shores. The families and experts were not asking the Governor’s Office of Policy and Budget to become an environmental agency. They were asking it to see what inaction already costs—through emergency room visits, missed school days, lost wages, and the uncountable price of funerals that should have been decades away.
The conversation also surfaced a path forward. Participants described a citizen–government task force with real authority to track cancer clusters, verify exposure routes, and recommend enforceable standards, paired with a public health reporting program modeled on earlier grassroots efforts that helped residents navigate testing, medical referrals, and agency paperwork. The vision is simple: communities and experts collaborating with state officials not just to respond to crises, but to prevent them.
The advocates’ narrative is not anti-growth; it is anti-neglect. They argue that Florida’s economic future is inseparable from the health of its water. Tourists don’t flock to closed beaches. Employers don’t thrive in places where workers are sick. And families don’t feel safe when the tap runs clear, but the lab results don’t.
By the meeting’s end, the asks were on record, the names were spelled correctly, and the urgency was unmistakable. Whether Florida answers with stronger standards and transparent data, or with more studies and deferrals, will shape not only policy memos, but kitchens and classrooms from Manatee County to Pinellas and beyond.
For Joza, Cromwell, Dubitsky, Woodhouse, and the nurses and scientists beside them, the work continues after the microphones click off. They will keep showing up, not to advertise any organization, but to insist that public health is a public obligation, and that clean water, in Florida, is not a luxury. It’s home.
