Fight over Lake O levels rages on with proposed changes to water bill
Conservationists have stepped up the fight against the sugar industry’s effort to maintain high Lake Okeechobee water levels — a move they say would favor farms over the Everglades during Florida’s dry season.
The Everglades Foundation, Friends of the Everglades, Everglades Trust and Audubon Florida, among other conservation groups, said this week that a lobbying effort is underway in Congress to lock in a distribution scheme that would prioritize water to agriculture industry irrigation over public water use and the environment.
High levels in the lake, they argue, only increase the risk of harmful algae blooms that have fouled rivers and killed fish in recent years.
“This language is an attempt to guarantee the sugar industry a level of service that no other water user in the country is given,” Eric Eikenberg, CEO of the Everglades Foundation, wrote in a letter earlier this week urging Congress to reject the industry’s effort. “It seriously jeopardizes continued progress toward managing toxic discharges from Lake Okeechobee and greater ecosystem restoration.”
The move is happening as the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is receiving public comment on how it should operate the lake once it completes a massive $1.8 billion program to update its aging Herbert Hoover dike. The Corps is developing the new operating system also to take into account Everglades restoration projects that will soon come online, such as stormwater treatment areas and reservoirs.
Environmentalists, with the support of Rep. Brian Mast, said U.S. Sugar Corp. is lobbying for a provision in proposed 2020 water legislation that would force the Corps to manage Lake O at higher levels, and under the same rules as it did back in 2000, when a sweeping Everglades restoration plan — the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan, or CERP — was approved by Congress.
The multibillion-dollar program seeks to “restore, preserve, and protect the south Florida ecosystem while providing for other water-related needs of the region, including water supply and flood protection” and is the largest hydrologic restoration project ever undertaken in the U.S.
Because of its scale, CERP contains a provision called the “savings clause” to protect water users including the agriculture industry. It’s essentially a promise to protect water supply for uses other than Everglades projects.
Conservationists say the sugar industry, supported by Rep. Alcee Hastings, is trying to apply that 20-year-old clause to the new lake operations, when the provision should only be used in the context of Everglades restoration projects.
While higher levels benefit farmers that have for decades relied on lake water for their fields, environmentalists and coastal communities say Lake O should be kept at about 12 feet in the wet season and 15 feet in the dry season, to prevent discharges of polluted water to the St. Lucie estuary in the east and the Caloosahatchee river to the west.
To prevent a breach on the aging dike when there’s too much water in Lake O, the Corps discharges the excess to coastal estuaries. But the lake water is polluted with fertilizer from surrounding farms and communities, and those nutrients feed algae blooms that have done a lot of damage to both coasts in recent years.
Hastings, a Democrat whose district extends from Fort Lauderdale to West Palm Beach, and U.S. Sugar Corp. didn’t reply to requests for comment. WLRN said Hastings’ staff sent an email to members of Congress asking them to support inserting the old higher-lake baseline and savings clause in the 2020 waterworks bill. Hastings’ office told WLRN he represents utilities, farmers and other industries that disagree with the Corps.
Environmentalists also said that locking in a regulation schedule from twenty years ago also ignores climate change and population growth, key factors leading to water scarcity in the region.
One of the goals of Everglades restoration is to get water flowing through the marshes all the way south to Florida Bay while it soaks through the limestone rock underground into aquifers. A healthy Everglades is crucial for recharging these reservoirs that supply drinking water to much of Miami-Dade and Broward.
This story was originally published May 8, 2020 at 6:00 AM.
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