Water District, US Sugar were once on same side

You’d never know it, but just a few years ago, both U.S. Sugar and the South Florida Water Management District heartily supported above ground water storage in the Everglades Agriculture Area. This is the same objective that U.S. Sugar is now spending money to oppose, and which the District has spurned in an endless barrage of “news” releases and propaganda. Both sang a different song from 2008 to 2010, after U.S. Sugar offered to sell all its 187,000 acres to the state for Everglades restoration.

The District engaged teams of its finest engineers and scientists to evaluate water storage alternatives. Their goal was to find the best alternative to reduce the algae-causing discharges from Lake Okeechobee to the St. Lucie and Caloosahatchee rivers and to improve the delivery of cleaner water to the Everglades and Florida Bay.

The District used all the technical and scientific tools at their disposal to assure that the land purchase was in the public interest and would be our best path forward to restore the Everglades, improve the estuaries and meet the water supply needs of a growing population.

“Using a computer-modeling tool called “Reservoir Sizing and Operations Screening” — RESOPS — the District’s experts tested 250,000 storage alternatives, examining various combinations of reservoir locations and sizes. For 60 days, they pored over 41 years of rainfall and hydrological data from throughout South Florida.

What emerged is the proposal now being advanced by Senate President Joe Negron and his allies in Tallahassee: increased above ground water storage south of Lake Okeechobee, to be located within the Everglades Agricultural Area.

Greater southern storage, the District’s experts concluded, will “reduce harmful freshwater discharges from Lake Okeechobee to the St. Lucie and Caloosahatchee rivers.” Its implementation “improves the delivery of cleaner water to the Everglades” and “prevents tons of phosphorus from entering the Everglades” in the first place.

Today, U.S. Sugar deploys squads of Tallahassee lobbyists to oppose the EAA Reservoir, but nine years ago, the company’s executives were downright lavish in their praise for the project.

“It’s dollars and cents and the right thing to do,” the company’s president and CEO, Robert Buker, told Florida Trend.

The company’s senior vice president, Malcolm S. (“Bubba”) Wade, wrote in the Fort Myers News-Press that “any solution without a significant EAA component won’t solve the problem.”

“The benefit to the entire system” from using the company’s land for water storage, he opined, “is that our land is located next to the lake and in the natural flow path of the Everglades.”

Why not store the water to the north of the Lake, as the company now recommends?

“Agricultural land south of the lake sells for a fraction of the cost of land north, east or west of Lake Okeechobee,” Wade wrote.

In full-page ads and news releases, the company now urges that the EAA Reservoir be put off until other projects in the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan are completed.

In 2010, though, company president Buker took a far different view. The benefit of “massive water storage and treatment” south of the lake is that it will benefit “not only the Everglades — it will also help prevent damaging releases to the St. Lucie and Caloosahatchee rivers and estuaries.”

“That makes this a higher priority than projects with more limited benefits,” he concluded. I could not have said it better myself. A decade is a long time, and the Water Management District these days seems more focused on the political winds blowing from Tallahassee than it is on solving the water problems of South Florida.

Meanwhile, the perspective of the once-willing sellers at U.S. Sugar seems more influenced by their own balance sheet than by science.

Either way, both the District and U.S. Sugar had it right the first time: the one thing that hasn’t changed is that Florida desperately needs the EAA Reservoir.

We needed it in 2008, and we need it even more today.

Eric Eikenberg is CEO of the Everglades Foundation.