Piney Point, the Manatee County industrial site that put the region in the state and national spotlight last week, wasn’t a new name to the government officials representing this community. But don’t feel bad if live more than a couple miles away and never heard of it before. This abandoned mine, which has gone through multiple owners, stood for 20 years as a disaster waiting to happen— which begs the inevitable question of why nothing was done.

I’ll leave it to the environmental experts to lambaste the inaction and the elected officials to provide defensive soundbites. The practical truth? It just cost too much. It’s more than a local government can swallow on its own, and too big for a state or federal lawmaker to slip into a budget unnoticed. That certainly struck me as I watched the Florida Senate consider requests for $75,000 here and $500,000 there, but then got to Sen. Jim Boyd’s $3 million request for immediate cleanup funding. He had no problem winning approval, but that’s likely a matter of the headlines serving as co-sponsors. His request was by far the largest last-minute addition to the budget.

In other words, if Florida’s Department on Environmental Protection hasn’t just pumped 175 million gallons of nutrient-loaded industrial wastewater into Tampa Bay because it had no other choice, that type of appropriations request may have been more than a freshman Senator could lift on his own.

Of course, the money he just got into the budget (but which still needs to be approved by the House and Gov. Ron DeSantis) is a drop in the bucket as far as what it will actually take to fix the problem at Piney Point. There remain 600 million gallons of polluted water in three ponds on site. Not only does government need to find a way to drain that and a place to put it, but it needs to cap those ponds or flatten them to the ground.

These water stacks are something Florida would never allow to be opened at a mine today, and they are the only such stacks on property not owned by an active mining company. That makes them an enforcement nightmare for DEP, and when Manatee County Administrator Scott Hopes testified about how the county even found out about a potential breach from HRK Holdings, he left the distinct impression a notification likely could have happened much sooner.

Florida will exert all possible effort to make land owners pay a cost for this ecological dustup. That could be a lot, especially if this affair results in algal blooms anything like 2018.

The one bright light there, as was the silver lining of the breach, could be that it makes it much harder to just forget these filthy ponds are there. Interest didn’t last long after a spill in 2011 resulted in pollutants reaching Bishop Harbor. Don’t think this spill will remain top of mind for anybody whose home was not evacuated in the last eight days.

That’s why it’s incumbent on anyone who wants those stacks leveled, who want Tampa Bay and other water bodies protected from another nutrient dump, to keep the public pressure up. It’s actually an aid to lawmakers to keep on pestering them about this threat; it let’s them to Tallahassee and Washington, D.C. armed with genuine public outrage. The longer this story remains in the headlines, the more likely funding will materialize.

Jacob Ogles is contributing senior editor for SRQ MEDIA.