Florida water managers OK purchase Everglades sugar lands ... by gimleteye

Say what you will about the $536 million plus purchase of lands from US Sugar approved, yesterday, by water managers for the eventual purpose of Everglades restoration: the one thing it clearly does is repudiate more than a decade of planning around falsely advertised technology called aquifer storage and recovery. The original Everglades restoration plan, on which so much misguided confidence was placed, was for 333 wells sorted around Lake Okeechobee to store and then later retrieve water to spread into public lands. It was hooey from the first. There is plenty of blame to spread around -- especially former water managers like Henry Dean and the Jeb Bush 'my-way-or-the-highway' crew-- for misleading Floridians and Congress, too, about the chances of using this risky technology to "restore" the dying Everglades.

The plan was part was hubris and part politicking to protect billionaire sugar barons like Miami and Palm Beach's Fanjuls. The Fanjuls still hold high cards in the reckless gamble that the state economy can survive the wrecking of the Everglades, since property they own remains critical to providing contiguous land mass toward public lands that are either starved for water or inundated with pollution.

There is plenty of technological uncertainty with storing vast amounts of water on the surface, in engineered reservoirs. Still, taking so much land out of sugarcane production-- more than 72,000 acres eventually-- is the first step in correcting the terrible mistakes. But the public should strongly endorse whatever it takes to get restoration costs funded, now, despite the economic downturn.

Some environmental groups like Audubon of Florida bought these mistakes hook-line-and-sinker, to preserve their own political access -- of the restoration plan that included unworkable solutions like ASR. Why was so much critical time squandered?

Because the plan-- hatched by large Republican donors and party leaders-- was to employ industrialized water supply as a way to put spigots in pipelines for campaign cash. Democrats, too, bear their share of the blame. It was the Clinton administration that shoved aquifer storage and recovery into the mix that served sugar barons, engineering companies and well drillers so well. That Gov. Charlie Crist, a Republican, turned away from its ruinous logic is to his credit.