Everglades might get millions — or billions
Eric Eikenberg, head of a group that advocates for Everglades restoration, has found himself in a fairly unusual situation.
“Anytime you have a debate or dialogue between the governor and the Legislature in Tallahassee about who’s trying to outspend the other on the Everglades is a good thing,” said Eikenberg, CEO of the nonprofit Everglades Foundation.
Republicans control the governor’s mansion and the Legislature, and the GOP has historically not been environmentalists’ preferred political party. But this year, Gov. Rick Scott is proposing spending more than $300 million on land buys, Everglades restoration, construction of reservoirs and programs to clean up the St. Lucie and Caloosahatchee rivers, sites of waves of green slime last summer.
And while that’s a considerable amount, it’s not going to get the job done, as far as Eikenberg is concerned. “The analogy I would use is you have a gaping wound on your body, blood is pouring out of the body and what you’re reaching for are Band-Aids for your toenails,” he said. “We’re putting Band-Aids on a problem that is going to continue to get worse year after year.”
He can afford to be blasé about Scott’s budget plans, because one of the top priorities of Florida Senate President Joe Negron, R-Stuart, is a bill that would spend $2.4 billion in state and federal money to buy 60,000 acres of land south of Lake Okeechobee to be used as a massive water storage area and natural filter for the polluted water of the lake.
Half that money would come from the state, to be paid for by bond issue. But getting the state further into debt is a nonstarter for budget hawks in the House, and that money isn’t provided for in Scott’s budget. Nevertheless, Scott has signaled some openness to the idea.
“I like the fact that I’ve got a Senate president that cares about [Lake] Okeechobee, cares about moving water south, cares about Indian River Lagoon and the Caloosahatchee,” Scott said at a news conference Tuesday.
The big price tag may cause sticker shock to lawmakers allergic to debt, but Negron maintains it’s an old idea whose time has come. “We’ve been talking about southern storage from Lake Okeechobee for 20 years. It’s not a new idea. It’s not a radical idea. It’s not an unusual idea. It’s an idea that at different points in time the agricultural industry has supported,” he said. “It’s just a matter of when and where. My view on when is now. And my view on where is, let’s have committee meetings and hearings, and get public input, and let’s make a decision and let the water management district select the best place.”
Unfortunately for Negron, the agricultural industry doesn’t support the idea. His bill requires the South Florida Water Management District to find a willing seller of 60,000 acres, and the top target for that land deal is U.S. Sugar, which owns huge tracts of land south of the lake. But U.S. Sugar isn’t interested in a sale.
If the district can’t find a seller, Negron’s plan could force U.S. Sugar into a deal that would pay the firm more than $1 billion for 153,000 acres under the terms of a deal first struck back in 2010. That high price tag could come down, though, because the state is allowed to swap land with U.S. Sugar to pull it off.