Floridians looking for "hope and change" aren't necessarily getting what they expected from the Obama administration's Environmental Protection Agency.

Under the leadership of Lisa Jackson, the EPA has alternately antagonized and disappointed business leaders and environmentalists.

Barney Bishop, president and CEO of Associated Industries of Florida, lit into Jackson on Fox News last week, declaring that her agency is "killing" the economy.

"I think that the face of the 2012 election is going to be EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson. She is killing jobs quicker than the president can create them," said Bishop, who describes himself as a "lifelong Democrat."

AIF and other Florida business groups have waged a water war with the EPA over proposed numeric nutrient criteria that could saddle the state with hundreds of millions of dollars in compliance costs.

"[Lisa Jackson] thinks she talks to God and she’s the only one who knows exactly what is the right thing to do about our environment," Bishop said last month.

Jackson, who formerly served as commissioner of New Jersey's Department of Environmental Protection under then-Gov. Jon Corzine, has become a lightning rod of controversy on a host of other issues.

New and proposed EPA regulations are crippling the energy industry, says U.S. Rep. Sandy Adams, R-Orlando. The freshman congresswoman blamed Jackson's agency for "red tape and bureaucratic obstacles that have served as barriers to job creation and energy production."

Adams has joined other House lawmakers in pushing HR 2021, which she says will "eliminate unnecessary permitting delays that have stalled American energy production and the creation of thousands of American jobs."


EPA LEAKING IN FLORIDA WATER FIGHT

Heading toward the 2012 election, President Obama has begun touting an effort to shed or streamline onerous regulations. Apparently, Jackson hasn't gotten the memo.

Though promising in her official biography posted on the EPA site to "follow the best science," Jackson's water-quality fight with Florida has split the scientific community.

Testifying at a House committee hearing on Friday, Rich Budell, director of the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services’ Office of Agriculture Water Policy, pointed out:

“In the preamble to their rule, EPA admits that they were unable to find a cause-and-effect relationship between nutrient concentration and biological response for flowing waters like streams and rivers.

"In the absence of that cause-and-effect relationship, there can be no certainty that the money and human resources devoted to reduce nutrient content in a stream or river will result in any measurable improvement in the biological condition of that stream or river."

Budell went on to challenge Jackson's pledge of "transparency" in the EPA rule-making process.

"While Florida’s sunshine laws make all data available to the public, EPA restricted public access to this information and did not make all relevant analyses available for comment throughout the rule-making process," he testified.

Budell also said the methods used by Jackson's agency to construct its rules were inconsistent with the agency's own guidance documents and the advice of EPA’s Science Advisory Board.

On Thursday, a letter to Jackson from 50 government agencies and private industry associations around the country condemned the EPA's handling of water-quality issues.

"The EPA’s insistence that states must ultimately develop independently applicable [numeric nutrient criteria] for all water bodies, even in the absence of a cause-and-effect relationship between the nutrient level and achievement of designated uses, is not scientifically defensible and is undermining innovative state approaches to reducing nutrient pollution.