By Maggy Hurchalla
December 29, 2016
Florida Today
A statewide campaign to discredit Sen. Joe Negron’s effort to “Buy the land to send the water south” is now underway.
Opponents quote U.S. Sugar’s full-page ads that say we don’t need to send water south because 90 percent of the dirty water flowing into Lake Okeechobee comes from the north.
Besides attacking the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan and Negron, personally, because his law firm represents U.S. Sugar, opponents have attacked river advocates for wanting to send dirty water south to the Everglades.
For those who don’t understand Florida’s complex water system and CERP, which is supposed to fix it, the arguments sound plausible.
In what was supposed to be a news story, the Palm Beach Post asserted that it was unfair to blame sugar because “the hundreds of thousands of septic tanks draining into the St Lucie Estuary” were the real problem.
There are hundreds of thousands of septic tanks from Palm Beach County through Brevard County. Most of them are in Brevard and Volusia counties. There are 25,000 septic tanks in all of Martin County. In the area that surrounds the estuary, which is served by Martin County Utilities, there are 16,000 septic systems.
Last summer, Negron — after considerable study of the problem and listening to all sides — suggested the only reasonable solution. He accepted the information from CERP, the U.S. Department of the Interior, 200 Everglades scientists and the University of Florida Water Institute that said CERP can’t work unless we have land south of Lake Okeechobee to store, treat and move water south.
CERP is about getting enough clean water going south from the lake to restore Florida Bay, protect Miami’s water supply and save the coastal estuaries from destruction by massive dumping of water from Lake Okeechobee.
It’s about the Everglades, Stupid!
If Florida wasn’t promising to restore the Everglades, the federal government would not be involved in providing 50 percent of the funding.
Stopping pollution from the north is a good idea, but it won’t send clean water south and it shouldn’t be financed by taxpayers. If Negron’s opponents were serious about their alternative, they would have introduced legislation for immediate, mandatory water-quality standards for all of the watersheds draining into the lake.
Storing water north of the lake will provide water supply for agriculture in that area. It won’t send water south and it won’t significantly help our estuary. As long as the system depends on keeping the lake full to meet sugar’s dry season irrigation needs, it won’t work for the rest of us.
Every time they increase discharges, they insist it’s because of the weather. It is and it isn’t. Florida weather varies from drought to flood on a regular basis. If you keep the lake full for sugar and we have above-average rainfall, massive dumping has to occur. If sugar doesn’t need the water at the end of the dry season, two feet of water on a 600,000 acre-lake needs to go somewhere fast to get ready for hurricane season.
It can’t go south because sugar fields are in the way and the stormwater treatment areas taxpayers have built are all filled with runoff from sugar fields.
CERP is designed to fix the flawed system. It has always depended on purchasing land south of the lake to store, treat and move clean water south throughout the year so we don’t have the dumping dilemma.
Negron asked for time to negotiate a fair deal that didn’t favor one sugar company over the other and didn’t put sugar out of business. It’s an attempt at peaceful coexistence.
In Martin County, there are still a few folks at the Economic Council who don’t think we need to send water south. There are still cynics among river advocates who don’t believe Negron is serious. There are still a few who believe that if dirty water gets dumped on us, it ought to get dumped equally on everyone else.
At this point, I would urge everyone in Martin County to get together and give Joe a chance.
If we don’t, besides what will happen to the rest of South Florida, our estuary will be irrevocably destroyed.
Maggy Hurchalla was a Martin County commissioner for 20 years and is a member of the Everglades Hall of Fame.