From tcpalm.com: Guest Column from Mark Perry, Executive Director of Florida Oceanographic Society
Mark Perry, Executive Director
Florida Oceanographic Society
If you are getting perfect drainage and the perfect amount of water for irrigation, of course you want to keep the status quo.
When the dam was built around Lake Okeechobee in 1930, it stopped the flow of water from the lake to the Everglades. Now the Everglades only gets 13 percent of the lake water while the Everglades Agricultural Area — 700,000 acres south of the lake, mostly sugar cane — gets the perfect “water supply” of 23 percent of the lake’s water.
The Army Corps of Engineers and the South Florida Water Management District, which control the inflows and outflows, dump the majority of the lake water (64 percent) to the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico, polluting the coastal estuaries on the way. In a typical year, the estuaries get a discharge of 488 billion gallons from the lake. That’s water that used to flow south to the Everglades and is enough drinking water for Miami-Dade County for 3.5 years. The Biscayne Aquifer is recharged from the surface water that flows south through the Everglades.
U.S. Sugar Corp. likes to tell us it doesn’t contribute to the pollution of the coastal estuaries because it all comes from north of the lake. Its executives don’t point out that the lake can’t flow south because the sugar company controls the outflows from the lake to their farms for “water supply” and discharge their polluted stormwater to the Everglades to maintain perfect “flood protection” for their crops.
In 1993, the state settled a federal lawsuit to clean up this polluted runoff from the Everglades Agricultural Area and we, the state taxpayers, built 55,000 acres of stormwater treatment areas at a cost of $ 1.2 billion. The water going from the Everglades Agricultural Area into the Everglades is still not clean enough and a court settlement in 2011 requires the state’s “Restoration Strategies” cleanup plan for the Everglades Agricultural Area at a cost of $880 million.
Since the sugar industry is getting perfect water supply and drainage for its profitable harvest while we, the state taxpayers, clean up its stormwater runoff to protect the Everglades, why would it want anything to change?
It is time to restore a portion of the “River of Grass” and allow the water to be stored, treated and moved south from the lake to the Everglades while stopping the insanity of discharging billions of gallons of freshwater to the ocean and Gulf of Mexico. We need to add the storage capacity of about 60,000 acres to the stormwater treatment areas the state owns and operates in the Everglades Agricultural Area.
This won’t put the sugar industry out of business, as it owns more than 480,000 acres in the Everglades Agricultural Area and can continue farming with best management practices. The Amendment 1 Land Acquisition Trust Fund provides the state with the ability to purchase land needed south of the lake. It can use about $45 million of the $746 million a year to bond an estimated $500 million for land acquisition. This should be part of Gov. Rick Scott’s plan for spending $5 billion over 20 years for restoration.
Some former and current officials say we should just complete the existing or planned Everglades projects and that would solve the problems — but it won’t. While these current projects will have some regional benefits, there is nothing there that will stop the discharges to the coastal estuaries and allow the water from Lake Okeechobee to flow south to the Everglades.
The Water Management District and the Corps of Engineers must plan and design a project south of the lake that can store, treat and convey enough water to save the estuaries and restore the Everglades. We will need the land for this project, and that’s why we have a Land Acquisition Trust Fund for the next 20 years.