Everglades reservoir bill heads to governor

TALLAHASSEE – An ambitious plan to build a massive reservoir south of Lake Okeechobee was approved by the Florida Legislature on Tuesday.

It next goes to Gov. Rick Scott who hasn’t said whether he’ll sign it.

Last summer, slimy bluegreen algae flowed from the lake to the coastal communities around the St. Lucie Inlet and the Caloosahatchee River when the Army Corps of Engineers opened floodgates to lower the lake’s water level.

The plan, a top priority of Senate President Joe Negron, R-Stuart, involves spending $1.5 billion to build a 78.2-billion-gallon reservoir to hold overflow water from Lake Okeechobee.

Once the reservoir is in place, which will take years, water can flow south of the lake into the reservoir, where it will be cleaned before continuing southward into the Everglades.

The money to build the reservoir will be made up half of federal dollars — assuming the feds agree — and half of state money, much of which will be paid for through bonds.

That had been a major issue for the House earlier in the session. House Speaker Richard Corcoran, R-Land O’Lakes, has said he had no intention of putting the state further into debt with bond sales.

But passage of the reservoir plan became tied up in the horse-trading around the budget. Negron got his higher education funding and reservoir. Corcoran got his K-12 education priorities and the zeroing-out of funding for Enterprise Florida.

The project’s passage out of the Legislature was widely praised by environmentalists.

“Today is a momentous event,” said Everglades Foundation CEO Eric Eikenberg. “We thank the Senate and House for working together to create a solution that all parties could unite behind.”

The original plan had called for purchase of farmland to build the reservoir. But after outcry from both farm workers and the sugar industry, focus of the plan shifted to 31,000 acres of state-owned land south of the lake.

Some land swaps may be necessary to get the space needed for the reservoir, but the plan calls for swapping strips of public land already being used for agricultural purposes with farmland near the proposed reservoir site.

The amount of privately held farmland in the area would remain the same.