"Everglades Summit" in DC draws attention for Congress: no time, for one at a time ... by gimleteye

It has taken 40 years for the US government to approve the priority of elevating Tamiami Trail that crosses the Everglades. Last year Congress approved funding for the first mile and yesterday, the Department of Interior announced its commitment to elevate more than 5 miles of the Trail; it is a critical step forward.
The Trail is the first highway built across the Everglades, linking the east and west coasts of Florida. The road bed and adjacent canal act like a solid barrier to water flow from north to south. Unless the Trail is elevated at a sufficient length, it is impossible to re-establish adequate water flow from water conservation areas to the north with Everglades National Park and tribal lands of the Miccosukee.

There is a glacial slowness to pace of restoration that has deeply frustrated and angered federal judges who have taken to task both state and federal agencies for foot dragging on Everglades restoration. It did not help that former Governor Jeb Bush "spun" his own version of restoration, blindly endorsed by the Florida legislature bedazzled by an army of lobbyists from Big Sugar, that did not meet even the most cursory "smell test". The Bush plan has been thoroughly discredited in federal court proceedings. So there is movement, finally, on the Everglades. The interconnectedness of this ecosystem is matched by jurisdictional conflict of agencies and budgets and then, there is the problem of political will. Credit the Obama administration for approving the elevation of Tamiami Trail; scientists agree that the one mile span was insufficient to this critical public purpose.

But elevating the Trail without assuring clean water for the Everglades is wrong. Raising the Trail is a separate matter from assuring that polluted water from the north won't further degrade public and tribal lands to the south. This is where the acquisition of lands currently in agriculture comes in. By purchasing more than 130,000 acres of private property-- belonging to US Sugar and to Fanjul billionaires-- it will be possible to provide the surface area for cleaning up water to put back in the right quality and right quantities at the right times of year. But this land is not contiguous in the right places: the US Sugar parcels represent pieces of a puzzle that still must be put together. The missing pieces belong to Fanjul billionaires.

Credit Gov. Charlie Crist for opening up the potential for land swaps and outright purchases of uplands that are desperately needed to complement the elevation of Tamiami Trail. It escapes no one's attention that Big Agriculture and the cities, too, are piling highly polluted water into public lands. And it escapes no one's attention that the Fanjuls are heavily investing to kill the plan supported by environmentalists.

Right now, there is a struggle in the prioritization of investment for the Everglades, manifested in at least three federal courtrooms. Hydrologists like Tom Van Lent of the Everglades Foundation believe that a lot has to happen at once, from land acquisition to the creation of vast, engineered cleansing marshes that also act as reservoirs. The Foundation's vision is leading the way in Congress this week. Others, including the Miccosuckee Tribe, have argued that the federal government has done so much wrong in the past, it must be compelled to do ONE thing right-- building the promised EAA Reservoir.

Until recently, the Tribe's anger and frustration had been strongly expressed by former US Attorney Dexter Lehtinen. For reasons unrelated to the Everglades, Mr. Lehtinen is no longer counsel to the Tribe. If the federal government lived up to its commitments to the Everglades, and if the State of Florida took the necessary steps to acquire sugar lands from willing and the federal government, from unwilling sellers like the Fanjuls in the Everglades Agricultural Area, then it would be possible to do what is necessary to give a fighting chance for the faded River of Grass during the reasonable life span of our readers.

The problem with Everglades restoration today is not a lack of understanding, it is a lack of imagination. Yes, we live in very difficult economic times. But the nation's leaders acted with alacrity to provide hundreds of billions to financial institutions who were, themselves, largely responsible for plunging the United States into the worst crisis since the Great Depression. We cannot put off massive investment in land and infrastructure to protect the Everglades and other degraded ecosystems any longer.

We need to raise the Trail. We need to buy US Sugar lands through the purchase initiated by Governor Crist and supported by the state water management district. We need to do land swaps necessary to take this quilt patchwork of ownership and put it back together in a way that serves both the economy and the nation's hope for the environment. Congress and the White House must get this point: in the Everglades we don't have time, for one at a time.