13 Dec 01 Clean-water activists ask officials to buy land

December 13, 2001

Clean-water activists ask officials to buy land

By Suzanne Wentley

Local water-quality advocates met with water managers this week to encourage the state to buy the agricultural land south of Lake Okeechobee as a natural way to restore Florida's water flow. The idea of a public purchase of the 450,000-acre Everglades Agricultural Area is not new, but has failed to gain widespread support because of political and economic pressure from agricultural interests. Still, supporters hope, the concept will gain momentum with grass-roots lobbying spurred by the $7.8 billion Everglades restoration plan. "We've realized a lot of things we messed up over the years," said Mark Perry, executive director of the Florida Oceanographic Society. "Now we've got to make some changes, and that has to happen south of the lake too. We need to change it back to the saw grass communities." Perry and Ed Fielding, a member of the Martin County Conservation Alliance, met with five staff members of the South Florida Water Management District on Tuesday to ask them to consider buying the land as a supplement to the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Project.

If the state owned the land, Perry said, water managers could restore the cleansing water flow from the southern end of Lake Okeechobee into the Everglades. Nathaniel Reed, former undersecretary of the interior and prominent Jupiter Island resident, also advocated such a move. "The best use of the southern half of the EAA is to be returned to the Everglades," he said. "The taxpayers and the state of Florida will have to acquire the land at a fair price. We'll never allow them to be golf club communities." Early environmentalists, such as author Marjory Stoneman Douglas, argued in the 1940s that the agricultural land, drained by the Army Corps of Engineers in the 1920s, was integrally connected to Florida's water flow from north of the Kissimmee River to the Everglades.

The idea re-emerged during preliminary talks on the state's Everglades restoration project, but again slowly faded away, Perry said, because of political and economic influences. "There's a lot of pressure from people who make a lot of money off this land," he said. "But we need to go back to a natural system if we really want to talk about restoration of the Everglades. Nature will do a better job managing the Everglades than we will." The purchase would be important to the Treasure Coast, Fielding said, because water managers would be able to push excess water from the lake south to the Everglades instead of sending it west down the Caloosahatchee or east into the St. Lucie Estuary and Indian River Lagoon.

"It would take a tremendous load off the estuary," Fielding said. "Ecologically, it would be desirable. The politics and reality makes it almost impossible." All parties agreed buying the land isn't a simple prospect. The state bought nearly 60,000 acres of the Everglades Agricultural Area from Talisman sugar growers, but there's more to it than just buying the land, said David Unsell, an engineer with the South Florida Water Management District. "Just owning it is not the end of the restoration process. It's just a place to start," said Unsell, who is working on the Treasure Coast's part of the overall Everglades plan.

"You'd own infrastructure, and restoring that to nature is not that simple." Although Talisman was a willing seller, three other major sugar growing businesses and cooperatives in the agricultural area might not be so quick to agree. Judy Sanchez, the spokeswoman for U.S. Sugar Corp. - which bought 165,000 acres closest to the lake in the 1930s - called the latest lobbying efforts "utterly impractical." "They think they can turn back the clock," she said. "They would like to see agriculture gone. That's the end goal of all the environmental groups." Sanchez said doing away with the agricultural areas places too much blame for polluted waters on farmers and not enough on suburban and urban dwellers.

She said U.S. Sugar Corp. also wasn't interested in selling its land for $2,600 an acre, about what the state paid for the Talisman property. The selling price would be more like $80,000 per eighth of an acre, as in Wellington, she said. Reed said the wisest move would be to wait until Cuban dictator Fidel Castro dies. Then the federal government would be more likely to allow importing from Cuba, making sugar production in Florida economically unproductive and the value of the land will decrease.

"The moment Castro goes to his just reward, the U.S. will start importing sugar from Cuba and the domination of the Florida sugar growers will end," he said. "The meeting (Tuesday) was extremely important in that the state and the federal government will have a major obligation to acquire much of the EAA lands." Until then, Sanchez said, the agricultural area is productive - and more than a collection of farms. "The EAA is a community," she said. "You can't close down cities." But Perry said it wouldn't be necessary to "close down cities." There's no reason engineers couldn't find a way to allow the lake water to flow around Belle Glade and Clewiston, he said.

Fielding added he's not interested in being an enemy of the farmers. "I'm not against agriculture," said Fielding, whose family owned farms. "But I believe we have to have some long-term plans." Perry said water managers gave him other numbers to further investigate the proposal. "Politics and economics are not stumbling blocks in my mind. They're just obstacles," he said. "Let's pursue this until we are shown it just can't happen."