Reservoir runs into dispute over size

Everglades restoration project too big, some say

The reservoir will be a sight, rising over the pancake-flat farmland of western Palm Beach County.

Walls of rock and earth up to 35 feet high will enclose a water-storage pit that could be as big around as the city of Boca Raton. Massive pumps will deliver water from Lake Okeechobee and distribute it south to the Everglades, bringing desperately needed moisture to marshes that have been parched for decades, as well as to Florida Bay.

While construction of the reservoir once appeared to represent a rare example of consensus on an Everglades restoration project, a contentious meeting last week at the South Florida Water Management District exposed growing rifts among environmentalists, the sugar industry, farming communities and the state government over the reservoir’s size.

Environmentalists want to see a broader, shallower reservoir, which they said would clean water more effectively. Some environ-

mental groups, such as Bullsugar.org, accuse the district of caving to the sugar industry in proposing reservoir footprints that would be too small, allowing the sugar growers to retain as much land as possible. Residents of the Glades, as the towns on the southern rim of the lake are known, see calls for expansion of the reservoir as an attempt to wipe out farms and their communities.

“It’s extremely disheartening to hear that there is talk about additional lands being used for the reservoir,” said Tammy JacksonMoore, of South Bay, cofounder of Guardians of the Glades. “Just know that the Guardians and several people in the Glades community have always known that this particular issue was merely about a land grab. We haven’t been fooled.”

Environmentalists who support a bigger reservoir say they have nothing against farming and certainly nothing against those who work on the farms. But they say the reservoir needs to be sufficiently large to slash the discharges of fresh water that have fouled fishing grounds on both coasts, driving away tourists and hammering coastal economies.

“There’s a lot of talk about killing economies and killing communities,” said Josh Greer, a fishing guide in the Gulf coast town of Port Charlotte. “Those discharges are killing my economy, my communities on the west coast.”

Long considered a key component of the state-federal plan for restoring the Everglades, the reservoir was fast-tracked this year by state Senate President Joe Negron, R-Stuart, after coastal waters in his Martin County district were fouled by reeking mats of green algae, blamed on lake discharges, that gave Florida the worst kind of international publicity.

The reservoir would provide a place to store rainwater during the summer, rather than flushing it out to the Gulf and Atlantic coasts, where the huge pulses of fresh water into a saltwater habitat kill oysters, ruin seagrass beds and threaten a return of last year’s algae. The stored water would be cleaned in treatment marshes and sent south through the Everglades during the dry season.

The South Florida Water Management District has released a series of possible footprints for the reservoir, ranging from 16 to 31 square miles. Estimates of the cost, which would be split with the federal government, range from $1.4 billion to nearly $2 billion.

At the meeting Thursday at the water management district’s West Palm Beach headquarters, no one from the sugar industry spoke. But environmentalists said they didn’t need to.

They said the district’s reservoir proposals appeared to take the industry’s concerns into account, avoiding forcing Florida Crystals Corp., one of the state’s biggest growers, off any more than the minimum amount of leased land needed to meet the state Legislature’s requirements. And the industry’s interest in keeping crops on the land was represented by its allies among Glades residents, who made more sympathetic figures than would representatives of “Big Sugar.”

“When the coastal elites and radical environmentalists tell us their building a reservoir to store water south of Lake Okeechobee was not about taking our land, we knew it was about taking our land,” said Janet Taylor, of Clewiston, a former Hendry County commissioner and leader of the group Glades Lives Matter. “We here in the Glades want clean water and healthy, thriving communities. This reservoir re-do is about taking more land, destroying our communities, displacing families and ruining local economies by ending farming on the most fertile soil on the face of the earth.”

Kimberly Mitchell, executive director of Everglades Trust, said environmentalists simply want to see the reservoir made large enough to do its job effectively, with the district trading land it needs for the work for other land that it doesn’t.

“We are not anti-folks from the Glades,” she said. “We are not anti-farmer. We are not even anti-sugar, although they are really irritating. We’re not trying to put them out of business. We don’t need them to be out of business. We just need them to move out of the way a little bit. And if we work together, there is existing land over there that can be swapped.”

Gaston Cantens, spokesman for Florida Crystals, declined comment. Randy Smith, spokesman for the water management district, declined to respond directly to questions on the sugar industry’s influence over the reservoir planning process, saying, “The legislature gave clear direction for the location of the project and all parties have had a series of SFWMD public forums to offer their comments.”

Senate President Negron wrote a letter to the district echoing the environmentalists’ objections, saying the law that authorized the reservoir allows the district to terminate leases and engage in land swaps to acquire additional land west of the current footprint proposals. “I have a concern that the initial modeling may be unnecessarily constrained by using a limited footprint,” he wrote.

The district’s executive director, Ernie Marks, responded that the district contacted landowners about selling and none have been interested, although some responses still haven’t been received. Rather than assuming the possession of land it may not be able to acquire, he said, the district’s officials thought it would make more sense to model footprints on land that it did have.

All proposed footprints would deliver impressive environmental benefits, he said, reducing harmful discharges of water to the Gulf and Atlantic coasts by an estimated 54 percent and sending an additional 98 billion gallons of clean water south through the Everglades.

Construction will take years. The district is required to submit a status report to the Legislature by Jan. 9, with Congress expected to act on funding by the end of 2019.