Miami Herald editorial on Everglades: correction, please... by gimleteye

For the Herald editorial board it was a long piece, the entire left hand column of the paper yesterday ("Progress at last on Everglades. Our Opinion: Everglades clean-up looking more positive than ever.") The Herald begins by noting the positive influence of a former Miami-based federal bureaucrat, Rock Salt, appointed by the Obama administration as deputy assistant secretary of the Army "to oversee the Corps of Engineers".

Salt is the key government official who endorsed the original conception of Everglades restoration, including 333 aquifer storage and recovery wells that looked, even a decade ago, like the biggest fool's errand since Rube Goldberg. The missing common sense in the past decade, on the Everglades, fell to a large extent through holes in the pockets of the US Army Corps of Engineers. (Read "Paving Paradise" by St. Pete Times writers Craig Pitman and Matthew Wald for detail.) The Herald emphasizes that it has taken 20 years to get the lynchpin project of Everglades Restoration moving: that would be the elevation of Tamiami Trail and components of the Mod Waters Project, as it is known. During most of this time, 18 years the Herald notes, Mr. Salt was familiar with all the permitting processes that largely failed to protect the Everglades-- especially the buffer lands outside the boundaries of Everglades National Park. This was a time in which political meddling, especially at the local level, ran over the most simple measures to protect the Everglades: stopping rock mines and wetlands destruction that benefited suburban sprawl and all the pollution that runs off it.

The Herald alludes to this meddling by citing the massive pollution of Lake Okeechobee by farmers and communities to the north of the Lake, in Orange County mainly, and also Big Sugar. What the Herald fails to do is to note the performance of local county government in Miami-Dade whose zoning, permitting and pollution control issues significantly contribute to polluting the East Everglades and Biscayne National Park. Of course any criticism of local government leads directly to local land speculators, big downtown law firms with "environmental land use practices", and lobbyists for production homebuilders. Perhaps that is an editorial for later?

Here is what the Editorial Board writes: "More needs to be done, though, especially to reduce suburban runoff from the growing Orlando area. There is also the looming threat of even more development as citrus growers convert groves struck by disease into subdivisions. The district needs to work very closely with local governments on the lake's north side to better control growth to limit future pollution sources."

Not a word about the reckless growth of rock mining, of crappy housing subdivisions, or a hint of major developments planned by Miami Dade lobbyists well known to Mr. Salt: from Rodney Barreto, to Sergio Pino, and the various players who hoarded cash during the building boom and are just biding their time until the glue guns can be fired up for more sprawl in farmland, wetlands, and open space edging the Everglades.

This netherworld of political influence and corruption is the strong undercurrent pushing the cost of restoring the Everglades from its original price tag in 2000, $7.8 billion, to more than $22 billion today. I am all for being optimistic where optimism is due: the first shovel of dirt to elevate Tamiami Trail, even if the elevation is way to short, is progress. The Herald is right: the water is still too dirty. But it is so transparent that the Herald cast blame northward-- and even gave Sugar a little pat on the head-- but failed to take a good hard whack at the unreformable majority of the Miami-Dade County Commission, lead by Natacha Seijas, Joe Martinez, and Pepe Diaz, whose decisions to permit rock mines and suburban development outside the Urban Development Boundary have lead to more and more pollution and environmental failure.

The condition of the Everglades, it turns out, reflects both the miscalculation of risk in the economy that lead to our current crisis and the worst shortcomings of our democracy. It may not be optimistic to editorialize how the rule of law is constantly eroded by powerful lobbyists, speculators, and the revolving door between government regulators and the regulated, but this point of view-- if it had been forcefully argued by the mainstream media-- would have helped avoid the worst crisis since the Great Depression. These big gears connect up to the little gears -- the local players, the local county and city commissioners and their lobbyists. If local media casts blame elsewhere but won't hold our own examples up for public scrutiny and well deserved criticism, who will?