Cash floods water plans

Leaders focus on ’Glades but add millions to others

TALLAHASSEE — A massive plan to fight polluted water flowing from Lake Okeechobee grew even larger Wednesday as a state Senate panel amended it to include millions of dollars for water projects around Florida.

The project central to the bill is a $2.4 billion plan to create a reservoir south of Lake Okeechobee. The idea is to send water south of the lake where it will be naturally cleaned in the wetlands, rather than sending it east and west from the lake, where the polluted water has been blamed for the guacamole-like green algae that inundated areas around the St. Lucie River last summer.

“This is something that was not an act of God. We did this to ourselves,” said state Sen. Rob Bradley, R-

Fleming Island, the chairman of the Appropriations Subcommittee on the Environment and Natural Resources that approved the bill 5-1. “And this in a state that brags about its beaches and its water.”

The bill now adds $35 million in funding for cleaning up the St. Johns River in northeast Florida and $2 million for clean-water projects in the Florida Keys. It also includes a proposal in Gov. Rick Scott’s budget that would spend $20 million on cleaning up the pollution that has already settled in the Indian River Lagoon and St. Lucie and Caloosahatchee river estuaries.

The amended bill would offer grants for wastewater utilities to reuse wastewater rather than dumping treated wastewater into groundwater, lakes or the ocean.

The Lake Okeechobee plan, backed by Senate President Joe Negron, RStuart, has been controversial not just for its cost but because buying the land to build the reservoir means taking over agricultural property, which could put hundreds of farmworkers out of their jobs.

While it approved the bill, the panel also changed it to give displaced farmworkers first preference in hiring for the construction jobs that would come if the reservoir project is approved. This was derided by critics as substituting temporary jobs for permanent ones and caused the committee’s lone no vote from state Sen. Oscar Braynon, D-Miami Gardens.

Braynon called the change “a step in the right direction,” but it was not enough to get his vote. He compared some Glades communities with the squalid living conditions in parts of Haiti, while cautioning “the current economic situation” would only be compounded by further job losses.

Bradley said the changes would address “water issues that face the state as a whole,” such as sewage discharges in Tampa and other wastewater projects around the state.

Last summer’s greenslime issue was not a selfcontained one. Instead, Bradley argued, Lake Okeechobee “was a tinderbox waiting for a match to strike.”

The bill now goes to the Senate Appropriations Committee, its final stop before heading to the Senate floor for a vote. A similar bill has not yet had a hearing in the House.