By Martha Musgrove
Florida Gov. Rick Scott staged a Tallahassee tantrum this month aimed at the South Florida Water Management District.
In short order and with no public explanations, Scott shredded any notion that appointed governing boards are independent, forced the resignation of the district’s Executive Director Blake Guillory, whom he once recruited from a national engineering firm, and demanded Peter Antonacci, his lawyer, replace Guillory.
Why? Because the board briefly considered maintaining the district’s current tax rate? (For five consecutive years the South Florida board has been cutting the district’s budget, eliminating 525 jobs.) And because the governor is still mad he couldn’t get the money or water-policy support he wanted from the Legislature this year, and is trying to shift the blame?
\What’s important to those of us living in South Florida is that the district retains the staff and capacity to maintain the region’s flood-control system, protect our water supplies and capably continue implementing the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan. Bob Graham, former Florida governor and U.S. senator, famously compares implementing CERP to open-heart surgery warning: “Once you start, you can’t just quit halfway through.”
Officially CERP is a “modification” of the Central and Southern Florida Flood Control Project, the network of drainage canals, pumps, gates and dikes built by the Army Corps of Engineers after widespread flooding in 1947 put downtown Fort Lauderdale waist-deep in water. The modifications aim to store water in the rainy season for use in the dry season, re-establish natural water regimes to sustain the sawgrass marshes of Everglades National Park and the state’s conservation areas and reduce destructive drainage discharges into South Florida’s estuaries.
Getting things “just right” isn’t easy and it isn’t cheap. The CERP plan detailed 68 projects to be built over 30 years at a projected cost of $7.8 billion. Costs are shared 50/50 by the state and federal governments. Fifteen years after starting, costs are projected at $17.5 billion. So, it’s fair to ask: Are we halfway through yet?
The quick and short answer is “no,” but it’s a trick question because the answer depends on what’s counted.
For example, under Gov. Jeb Bush the state moved quickly to buy land; 63 percent of what’s needed has been bought. CERP also presumed “foundation projects” would be completed. These include Kissimmee River and Picayune Strand restorations and a series of projects to improve freshwater deliveries to Everglades National Park.
All are scheduled to be complete in the next four years, but they’re not CERP projects and won’t be counted on that ledger. Lastly, CERP presumed an annual construction revenue stream of $400 million ($200 million from Congress, another $200 million from the state) that hasn’t been sustained.
“The start was slow,” concedes Shannon Estenoz, director of the U.S. Department of Interior’s Everglades Restoration Initiatives office in Davie, “We didn’t have a problem solving capacity … now that we’ve figured out how to bundle projects, we’re moving at a faster clip. I think we can get it done in 15 years.”
In the last three weeks, the Army Corps of Engineers sped up, issuing a $197 million construction contract to build a CERP reservoir in the Treasure Coast and asking Congress to authorize the Central Everglades Project. That project bundles six CERP projects to improve the flow of water through Conservation Area 3 in western Broward County. Next year contracts will be let to design the Broward County Water Preserves, a buffer to prevent flooding in the county’s western suburbs as water levels increase in the conservation area.
“We’re going to have more ribbon-cuttings and ground-breakings in the next year than ever before,” Guillory had told the district governing board last month. Ironically on the day he announced his resignation, restoration-water discharges began in the Picayune Strand and, in the Everglades Agricultural Area, water was finally filling the A-1 Flow Equalization Basin. The FEB is a key feature of the governor’s “Restoration Strategies” program to meet state water-quality standards and settle a pending lawsuit.
I don’t know how long it will take to check off 68 projects, but there’s no magic in establishing 2030 as the goal. The magic is in the very concept of Everglades Restoration — the recognition that South Florida’s water is a vital natural resource to be preserved and protected, used but not abused — survives the politics du jour.
Martha Musgrove, a retired journalist, is an Everglades advocate and director of the Florida Wildlife Federation.
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/opinion/columnists/fl-mmcol-oped0923-20150924-column.html