Everglades restoration stalling again
At current pace, plan will take 100 years to complete.
FLORIDA CITY — Zooming over the vast Everglades in a helicopter, it’s easy to see how much work is being done to revive the wilted watershed:
Newly restored bends in the Kissimmee River are resurrecting floodplains and wetlands to clean and slow the flow of dirty water running from farms and cities into Lake Okeechobee. Reservoirs are underway east and west of the lake to hold more water. To the south, sprawling treatment areas to scrub pollution from farm runoff water were expanded last year. Of 26 massive culverts needed to shore up the lake’s aging dike, 21 are under contract. And new and reconfigured canals began delivering more water in 2016 than ever before to Everglades National Park. To name a few.
But at ground level, the view is far different, with sides squared off in a bitter fight over just how much remains to be done, and at what pace.
For the second year in a row, a proposed $2.4 billion reservoir included in original plans and envisioned somewhere in the sugar fields that now dominate the landscape south of the lake is taking center stage.
St ate Senate President Joe Negron, R-Stuart, his Treasure Coast constituents repeatedly hammered by dirt y water from Lake Okeechobee, and environmentalists want to speed up its construction by years. Gov. Rick Scott and farmers, however, see the reservoir as a job-killing land grab and say efforts should focus north of the lake, where water storage projects are already underway.
The National Academies of Sciences also issued a dismal assessment earlier this year, citing problems that have dogged the $16.4 billion state-federal restoration project almost since its inception in 2000: bureaucratic creep and chronic underfunding.
Of the 68 projects originally envisioned, only six are under construction. None are fully done. At the current pace, the academy reported, fixing the Everglades will take another 100 years.
“We’re now at 16 years and we’re having a difficult time walking and chewing gum at the same time,” said Stephen Davis, a wetlands ecologist with the Everglades Foundation.
So why are the Everglades, once encompassing 3 million acres connected by a shallow river snaking across sawgrass prairies, such an intractable problem? From high in a helicopter, it’s easy to see: 500,000 acres of sugar cane fields and western suburbs now sit bet ween the lake and marshes to the south. Restoration projects happen on a landscape-altering scale, consuming thousands of acres and involving some of the toughest issues in government: property rights, environmental protection and endangered species.
The slow pace of restoration also means projects almost always undergo tinkering from shifting political leadership or changes in science, often provoking new skirmishes.
Over the years, the academy scientists say revisions have shorted water storage — a central feature in the original plan and expected to have the biggest price tag. To work, original plans called about 1 million acre feet more of storage, which represents about two feet of water in Lake Okeechobee. Current plans only provide 364,000 acre feet.
But i n t h i s ye a r ’s NAS report, scientists say those original estimates might be vastly underestimated and cited other reasons that the storage estimates might be inadequate. The high level of pollution in Lake O will likely require more capacit y to clean water than previously thought. And a sprawling network of wells to store water in the aquifer was downsized by more than half after an 11-year study. Water storage calculations also need to accommodate changing sea levels triggered by climate change.
To be f ai r, even c r i t i c s acknowledge that work by the district has picked up considerably in recent years in part because of a 2012 settlement Scott signed with the federal government to resolve long-running pollution lawsuits. Now dubbed “Restoration Strategies,” the project calls for the cleanup work to be finished by 2026.
L a s t y e a r, C o n g r e s s approved another major c omponent , t he C e nt r a l Everglades Planning Project, drafted by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers