Florida Senate leader wants Everglades restoration money shifted north
(The Center Square) – Florida is halfway through Gov. Ron DeSantis’ four-year, $2.5 billion water quality initiative that includes the $1.6 billion Everglades Agricultural Area (EAA) reservoir project.
In his $96.6 billion Florida Leads budget request, the governor is requesting its third year, $625 million allocation, which includes $473 million for EAA, $50 million for springs restoration, $145 million for “targeted” projects and $25 million to combat algal blooms and red tide.
But Senate President Wilton Simpson, R-Trilby, wants to reassess the state’s EAA commitment and determine if some of that money can be shifted into drilling injection wells north of Lake Okeechobee.
Simpson said in December it was a “mistake” to adopt 2017’s Senate Bill 10, a suite of Everglades projects, including the 240,000-acre-foot EEA reservoir the state “probably should stop building” and three stormwater treatment area (STA) impoundments either already under construction or in final planning stages.
In a Feb. 4 letter to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Simpson criticized the “disproportionate amount of time and funding” spent on water projects south instead of north of Lake Okeechobee. He said 92 percent of the phosphorus and 89 percent of the nitrogen that flow into the lake comes from north of the lake.
“The aggressive timeline for southern storage has been at the expense of very important interventions north of the lake,” Simpson told the Corps. “Unfortunately, this timeline and the policy and funding priorities associated with it have unnecessarily pitted north against south and perpetuated the false narrative that a southern reservoir alone will solve the problem. I reject that narrative, and it is for this reason I have advocated that a concurrent focus on problems north of the lake – where the Everglades begin – is key to an efficient, effective, and complete restoration.”
In August, Congress approved the Water Resources Development Act (WRDA) of 2020, greenlighting the EEA, a key component in the 40-year, $8 billion Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP) approved by Congress in 2000.
It marked only the second time in 20 years the federal government anted up its full annual $200 million CERP commitment, dovetailing with DeSantis’ plan to complete the EEA in seven rather than 10 years.
Simpson wrote he was “pleased to see” WRDA “authorize federal funding for the Corps to carry out the reservoir project” and suggested the state direct much of the EEA $473 million allocation to the Lake Okeechobee Watershed Restoration Project (LOWRP).
“The 494,000-acre-feet of northern storage the LOWRP provides will be used to keep lake levels from rising too high in the wet season and make water available for release in the dry season,” he wrote.
U.S. Rep. Brian Mast, a Republican from Palm City, whose congressional district spans parts of Palm Beach, Martin and St. Lucie counties, blasted Simpson’s call to redirect EEA funding to LOWRP.
“The point of [Simpson’s] letter is very specific. It’s to undo something that there’s been extensive work done on,” Mast argued in a Facebook video. “It’s about taking dollars from that EAA reservoir project – dollars that have already been sent there to help prevent toxic discharges into our community – and move it to another project.”
Mast chastised Simpson – a central Florida egg farmer – and agricultural interests for not addressing the problem at it source: their fields.
“Write a law that says, ‘You cannot have toxic water dumped into Lake Okeechobee that has 89 percent of the nitrogen and 92 percent of the phosphorus flowing in there.’ You’re the state Senate President,” Mast said. “That’s something you can do, as you are acknowledging this problem, instead of pitting north versus south and trying to take dollars away from an incredible project.”
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