$1B Everglades reservoir plan struggles

MIAMI — Last spring, Florida lawmakers approved plans for a massive reservoir near Lake Okeechobee, touting the billion-dollar project as a breakthrough in the decades-old effort to save the Everglades.

Less than a year later, South Florida water managers are struggling to make the ambitious project a reality. Environmental groups have begun to raise concerns that the plan is based on flawed data and that it may be used to challenge long-standing water quality standards for the Everglades ecosystem.

Hatched in the final days of the last legislative session after months of intense lobbying and championed by powerful Senate President Joe Negron, the plan called for construction of a large reservoir in western Palm Beach County aiming to do two things: Stop flushing foul water from Lake Okeechobee to the coasts and fix the flawed re-engineering of South Florida’s tropical wetlands by sending water south to wilting marshes and Florida Bay.

Initially, a grander version pitched by environmentalists envisioned 60,000 acres. It included a portion of sugar fields long blamed for pollution and jump-started construction on a sprawling shallow reservoir south of the lake intended to clean water before it reached Everglades National Park — a project approved in a landmark Everglades restoration plan in 2000.

The massive footprint allowed plenty of shallow storage to clean the water, a strict requirement worked out out through years of litigation that forced the state to stop polluting the Everglades. What landed on the drafting table of South Florida water managers was substantially different.

Lawmakers, pushed by powerful sugar and agriculture interests, instead called for a reservoir on stateowned land below the lake. That meant squeezing a deeper reservoir onto a smaller footprint, with less land for cleaning water. They also rejected the option to buy sugar land, requiring the South Florida Water Management District to relinquish the state’s only leverage to acquire more property — long before anyone knows for sure whether the down-sized reservoir and treatment marshes will work.

“They’re giving up something big here for something that might not work,” said William Mitsch, director of the Everglades Wetlands Research Park, who worried that without more treatment, “they’re just going to have another Lake O belching into the Everglades.”

The project comes down to competing interests, opposing goals, and a Legislature that has shortchanged Everglades restoration. Water district planners have been left to sort it out and strike a balance, while working on an impossibly short deadline.

Over the past several months, they’ve insisted they can get the job done, but as they race to meet a January deadline to present a report to lawmakers, skeptics are wondering if it's really possible to dig a reservoir deeper than Lake Okeechobee in the middle of farm fields and not wind up with even more polluted water fouling the state.

“This will probably benefit the estuaries at the expense of water quality in the Everglades,” said Gene Duncan, water resources director for the Miccosukee Tribe. “I hope I’m wrong. But that’s what I think is happening.”

There’s also concern that the state will try to get around strict water quality rules it has fought through years of litigation. In December, a district governing board member, who has repeatedly complained about onerous rules, argued that it’s time to head back to court.

“What the state is angling to do, and it hasn’t been shy about saying so, is basically wipe the slate clean on nearly 30 years of ongoing federal and state litigation,” said Alan Farago, president of Friends of the Everglades, which joined the Tribe to successfully sue the state to stop pollution.

The reservoir lawmakers approved is supposed to hold at least 240,000 acre feet of water, and can go as high as 360,000 acre feet. Planners have essentially designed two concepts: a 10,000-acre reservoir with about 6,000 acres of treatment marshes and a 22,000-acre reservoir with 9,000 acres of treatment.

So far, planners say both alternatives will cut polluted discharges by just over half and increase water flow by about a third. Combined with other projects, the amount of water moving south could nearly reach restoration goals for reviving marshes and Florida Bay.

But both would need reservoirs deeper than 18 feet, meaning they would need to meet costly new dam safety rules — with towering berms — developed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans.

The district has not said how high a dike would be, but on Dec. 21, staff estimated the total cost for the project at between $1.4 and $1.9 billion.