By Tyler Treadway
March 2, 2017
TC Palm
In a memo to fellow senators Thursday, Senate President Joe Negron dismissed a proposal to curb Lake Okeechobee discharges by holding more water in the lake.
Negron is sticking by his own plan to buy farmland south of Lake O and build a reservoir to hold, treat and send the excess water south.
After discussing remedies to the discharges in Washington this week with Florida’s U.S. senators, members of Congress and officials with the Army Corps of Engineers, Negron said the issue “is not if we will have additional southern storage; it is when and where.”
State Sen. David Simmons has filed a bill calling for the Corps, with help from the state, to speed up repairs to the Herbert Hoover Dike around Lake O so it can hold 2 feet more of water to reduce the need for discharging it east to the St. Lucie River and west to the Caloosahatchee River.
Simmons is sticking to his guns, too.
“I applaud and commend the Senate President for being proactive and bringing debate on this issue to the forefront,” Simmons said Thursday. But he added the top priority should be to “fix the damn dike.”
Citing a report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, Simmons said that as the dike is repaired, the Corps can determine how much extra water it can hold. If it’s a lot of water, less land — and possibly none at all — would have to be bought south of the lake.
Negron, a Republican from Stuart, reiterated the Corps’ longstanding statement that repairing the dike won’t necessarily mean the lake will be able to hold more water.
In fact, he said the Corps is “predicting only negligible modifications” to discharges after the dike is repaired.
To continue reading the article: http://www.tcpalm.com/story/news/local/indian-river-lagoon/health/2017/03/02/negron-plan-curb-discharges-speeding-up-dike-repairs-wont-work/98638026/