By John Nelander
January 10, 2017
Palm Beach Daily News
Credit: Steve Brooks
Organizations battling to keep the Arthur R. Marshall Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge in federal hands are turning to the Palm Beach Town Council today for support.
The council is being asked to weigh in on a skirmish between the South Florida Water Management District and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service over who will control the 144,000-acre wetlands in Palm Beach County – the last remaining northern piece of the Everglades.
Private environmental groups including Florida Audubon and the Everglades Law Center would like the council to approve a resolution urging Florida Gov. Rick Scott to keep both the water management district and the Fish and Wildlife Service working cooperatively on the refuge, which was established in 1951.
If the decades-long cooperative agreement between them is terminated, Loxahatchee would no longer be a National Wildlife Refuge, which could open it up for more public access, including private airboats.
A public hearing on the proposed agreement termination, held in December, attracted several Palm Beach residents who supported continued federal involvement in the refuge, said Lisa Interlandi, senior staff counsel for the Everglades Law Center. She helped draft the Loxahatchee resolution and will appear today at the Town Council to answer questions about it.
“It’s a timing issue,” she said. “There were some residents of the Town of Palm Beach who had an interest in this and wanted to bring it to the council. We’re planning on bringing it to other local governments as well.”
The Water Management District sent the Wildlife Service a “Notice of Default” on Aug. 11, saying that the service had “failed to meet … goals with respect to its control of invasive exotic plants and protection of tree islands. Additionally, FWS has failed to use best efforts to obtain a dedicated source of funds for exotic plant control.”
Lack of progress?
The two agencies have been working cooperatively to manage the refuge for 60 years, but the Water Management District has been critical of the federal agency’s progress in controlling melaleuca and Lygodium, which is also known as Old World climbing fern.
The latter is the bigger problem, said Rolf Olson, project leader of the Loxahatchee Wildlife Refuge. The climbing fern – native to Africa, Southeast Asia, and Australia — plants itself on many of the refuge’s 45,700 “tree islands” and smothers native vegetation vital to birds and other wildlife.
“It grows fast and spreads fast, and there are no ideal control methods,” Olson said.
“There are chemicals that kind of work, but they don’t totally do the job. It’s also treated with fire and biological controls, and all three of these have been introduced. They’ve been successful in other areas, but they haven’t really been successful in the refuge.”
Funding for eradication has been another issue, according to Olson. Since the climbing fern is so hard to reach, getting rid of it is extremely labor-intensive. This year’s funding “is all up in the air – nobody really knows what’s going to happen with the new Congress,” he said.
Interlandi, of the Everglades Law Center, and Celeste De Palma, Everglades policy associate with Audubon Florida, said it makes sense to keep both federal and state agencies involved with Loxahatchee, even though the U.S. Wildlife Service has fallen short of its goals.
“Let’s have a conversation about this, but we shouldn’t have this threat hanging over us that we might lose the refuge,” De Palma said.
“If this agreement is broken, it’s, ‘Thank you very much, but you’ll have to leave the premises.’ Basically, they get evicted. The land would go back to the Water Management District, and then it wouldn’t be wildlife refuge anymore. It would be a water conservation area.”
‘Major asset’
Private airboats aren’t currently allowed in the refuge but that could change if a new agreement between the two agencies isn’t reached, supporters of resolution say.
In addition to funding and jurisdictional matters, the issue of private air boating “is a big one,” Olson said. “Airboats create trails that allow the higher phosphorous water to reach farther into the refuge. They stir up the bottom, which brings up legacy phosphorous, and airboats are loud so they can disturb nesting birds.”
Interlandi argues that the Loxahatchee refuge is “a major asset to the community, which is why our group and other groups are very concerned about it.
“It’s naïve to think the Water Management District could do a better job of managing invasive species without the federal government than with them,” she said.
Palm Beach Town Manager Tom Bradford, who will present the resolution to the council, could not be reached for comment.
http://www.palmbeachdailynews.com/news/local/palm-beach-town-council-hear-about-loxahatchee-refuge-dispute/qNNeWxuhNZ3h76po5EMGgI/
