News is up! by gimleteye

An interesting Miami Herald day.

First, all news reports published on A1 were written by actual Miami Herald reporters. No news feed. No clipping service.

The business page reports Florida Rock and Sand sells to Vulcan Materials for $4.6 billion. Looks to us like Florida's wealthiest hit a major league home run.

In the short-term, Florida Rock faces significant disruptions in its West Dade mining, where the industry has violated several federal laws and put the drinking water aquifer for 2.4 million Miami-Dade county residents at risk.

A ruling by federal judge William Hoeveler is expected soon. Who will pay for violating laws, destroying Everglades habitat, and $500 million to build a new industrial water treatment plant to ensure that cancer-causing chemicals don’t filter into your tap water?

Not the executives of Florida Rock and Sand who walked away with a premium of 45 percent from its Feb 16th closing price.

Nice work if you can get it!

The Miami Herald editorializes in favor of an elevated roadway across the Everglades to replace the Tamiami Trail roadbed, “Build skyway bridge right the first time”. The question as always, is money, and the Herald rightly cautions the US Army Corps of Engineers against being “penny wise and pound foolish” in opting to a smaller, lower cost alternative.

It also suggests that Miami-Dade should pony up and shoulder more of the cost. We agree.

Provided that water quality for the Everglades is not befouled by Big Sugar to the north and cities to the east, the single biggest bang for the buck in restoring the Everglades would be to elevate Tamiami Trail and let the water flow through to Florida Bay.

The total cost for Everglades restoration is $10 billion and counting. The biggest slice of that money has been directed to poking lots of holes into Florida’s aquifers: the kind of stupidity you’d expect from big engineering firms who make profit by pound of turned earth.

We’re in favor of letting water flow by the slow force of gravity right from where it starts, above Lake Okeechobee. But there are very big pollution issues and political issues, that the Miami Herald once covered with a determined focus on its editorial pages.

Right now, on the Everglades the Miami Herald is getting its butt kicked by the Palm Beach Post, the Orlando Sentinel, the St. Pete Times, and –yikes!—the Stuart News and the NAPLES DAILY NEWS.

But in today’s edition, the Herald put ink where it belongs.

And after Matt Haggman’s report on Miami real estate on Sunday, we have reason to be happy—though not happy as shareholders of Florida Rock and Sand.