Florida Everglades get a helping hand
WASHINGTON – In an ambitious maneuver to help restore the Everglades, the state of Florida has struck a tentative deal to buy the U.S. Sugar Corp. for $1.75 billion and turn many of its 187,000 acres of farmland into reservoirs.
The plan, described by Gov. Charlie Crist as the largest conservation purchase in Florida’s history, envisions restoring some of the natural flow of water to the Everglades from Lake Okeechobee.
Crist made the announcement Tuesday after months of secret negotiations with the sugar company. He called the purchase “as monumental” as the founding of Yellowstone National Park. The patchwork of farmland totals 292 square miles.
The surprise effort is aimed at halting the degradation of the Everglades, which at 1.5 million acres is the third largest national park in the lower 48 states, behind Death Valley and Yellowstone. Over the years, water from areas north of the massive marsh has been diverted to the fast-growing cities of South Florida and for agriculture, and pollutants from sewage and farming have flowed in.
Restoration has been a state and federal priority for years, and is the goal of a troubled $11 billion program that, until now, had envisioned the construction of hundreds of high-tech wells and huge aquifers in an elaborate re-engineering of South Florida’s hydrology. Critics have called the plan impractical with little relationship to the pre-development ecosystem. The project has fallen behind schedule since it was approved eight years ago.
The sugar company buyout puts a new and simpler option on the table: Water can flow from the lake into filtering marshes. The cleaner water could eventually be sent onward into the “sea of grass” at the southern end of the peninsula. A direct lake-glades connection, even one comprising levee-lined retention areas, has long been a dream of environmentalists.
Under the deal, which still has to be negotiated, the South Florida Water Management District, an independent state agency with its own taxing authority, will make the purchase in part with property taxes earmarked for Everglades restoration. Some company assets could be sold to other sugar companies, leaving some cane fields and orange groves still under cultivation. Because the U.S. Sugar holdings are scattered, the state will try to swap land with other sugar cane companies to create a single corridor for water to flow into the reservoirs and on to the Everglades.
“Acquiring this large swath south of Lake Okeechobee will be an historic turning point for the largest watershed project in the world,” Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne said.
Environmentalists, who only days earlier had been infuriated by Crist’s reversal of his longtime opposition to offshore oil drilling, were thrilled and surprised by the pact.