Feds to announce plan to restore Everglades quickly

October 27, 2011
Feds to announce plan to restore Everglades quickly
By Erika Bolstad | Miami Herald

WASHINGTON — An Everglades restoration task force that meets Thursday in West Palm Beach, Fla., is expected to announce a fast-track planning effort, that if approved by Congress, will put more fresh and clean water into the central and southern portions of Florida’s River of Grass.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the South Florida Water Management District are expected to announce the start of a central Everglades planning process that will look at alternatives to reduce the discharge the agencies say is damaging the Caloosahatchee and St. Lucie estuaries.

The process also is expected to provide more natural flow and depths of clean new water through the Central Everglades and Everglades National Park.

The fast-track planning process, a pilot program of the Army Corps of Engineers, is designed to speed up restoration efforts, officials with the South Florida Ecosystem Restoration Task Force say.

Cleaning up the pollution flowing into the Everglades requires reducing the flow of phosphorus to 10 parts of phosphorus per billion in the water. Anything higher won’t do enough to stop changes in plant and animal life of the Everglades, a delicate ecosystem of marshlands and forests that form the home for a variety of threatened species.

Because of high levels of phosphorus, cattails have for decades been taking over the sawgrass in the Everglades. The pollutant has flowed from sugar and vegetable farms and the sprawling suburbs of South Florida.

The state was supposed to get to its phosphorus reduction goal by 2012, but the Florida legislature pushed the deadline back to 2016. Earlier this month, Florida Gov. Rick Scott met with Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, and offered up some alternative plans for resolving some of the legal disputes over Everglades restoration _ but also said they’d need another six years.

The state's plans call for downsizing some construction projects and relying more on water storage on public and private lands. The plan, Scott said, puts to use land already in public ownership so that projects can be authorized and built promptly "at a reasonable cost to the taxpayers." Specifically, they’ll be looking for opportunities to use publicly owned lands to store and treat water in the Everglades Agricultural Area and move the water south to water conservation areas and Everglades National Park.

That’s expected to achieve a more natural hydrology _ and will tie together the state’s work north of the conservation areas and the Interior Department’s Tamiami Trail bridging project, along the highway that runs from Tampa to Miami.

Last week, Salazar visited the Tamiami Trial project in Miami-Dade County. It’s one of the first bridges in a series of planned spans that would raise parts of the highway above the wetlands and could eventually restore the historic freshwater flow of the River of Grass to levels not seen in 80 years.

The federal government eventually would like to see 5.5 miles of bridges on Tamiami Trail, which would cost an estimated $324 million and be built over a period of four years. So far, it’s unclear whether the money will be budgeted for the bridges.

Friday, officials will break ground on a separate project: a 12,000-acre reservoir in western Martin County, Fla., designed to improve the water quality of the St. Lucie Estuary and the southern portion of the Indian River Lagoon.

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