Governor orders county landfills to open for storm debris

In a news conference Monday morning, DeSantis said this when talking about Pinellas County:

“When we did the executive order, we said 24/7 debris pickup and being able to have these landfills be open. We did the executive order on Saturday and what happened over the night? It was closed. So what did we do? We cut the locks and we let people bring the debris. Overnight yesterday, what did we have? We had hundreds of cars, not just state vehicles, not just private contractors, we had private citizens loading up their F250s with debris to bring it — that’s helping, that’s a public service for them to do that and the gate was closed and there was no one manning it. So we opened it.”

DeSantis said they need all hands on deck and that the state has helped to make a huge dent in the debris. But there’s still more work to do.

“No bureaucracy, no more red tape, no more excuses about this debris,” DeSantis said.

Last week, Pinellas County leaders repeatedly told the I-Team its dump could not handle all of the storm debris — and they could not verify where the debris was coming from, before they shut down the site to storm debris on Tuesday, Oct. 1.

“The challenge has been as been that commercial haulers have been showing up at these locations with multiple households full of stuff and we can’t document where it came from,” Pinellas County Public Works Director Kelli Hammer Levy said on Thursday.