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BIG CYPRESS

Seeds Of Trouble
GRETCHEN PARKER /Tampa Bay Tribune /Feb 27
In Big Cypress, managers also are shifting their strategy. Botanist James Burch, who manages removal of invasive plants from the preserve, plans to tackle the storm-ravaged areas of the preserve first, with the hope that chemically treating those places sooner will halt the spread of new, invasive hurricane babies.The 729,000-acre preserve that feeds the Everglades is known for its miles-wide stands of knobby-kneed cypress trees. Now safe from the lumbering that ravaged the area in the 1930s and 1940s, the gray spindles thrive in the standing waters of a swamp that would drown most other trees.It's the low islands of other trees and brush - called hammocks - that rangers worry about. Wilma had her way here, ravaging about a quarter of them. At least a hundred of these islands lost about 24 percent of their canopies, Burch found in preliminary estimates.With the fresh sunlight streaming i ...

Seven of about 80 Florida panthers have died within the past two months
Kate Spinner /Naples Daily News /March 06
NAPLES, Fla. -- Seven of about 80 Florida panthers left on Earth have died within the past two months _ including two this week _ .as dwindling territory, rampant development, and swift-moving traffic threaten the cat's survival as a species.The animal had rebounded from near extinction in recent years. But a 100-pound male panther, killed by a truck moving up Interstate 75 north of Fort Myers early Monday, became the fifth to die on south Florida roadways since the beginning of the year. Another died Monday of unknown causes on private property, said Gary Morse, a spokesman for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission."It's a bittersweet story, because we've been working for 20 years to increase the population," said Deb Jansen, wildlife biologist with the National Park Service at Big Cypress National Preserve. "We were successful. We've improved their health and their repr ...

A pumping problem
Jeremy Cox /Naples Daily News /March 5
This year, officials are planning even bigger steps forward in the Southern Golden Gate Estates project. If the plan holds, crews will fill in another two miles of the Prairie Canal, grind away miles of roads and start building the first of three giant pump stations. The project s goal is to spread water across the 55,000-acre area, allowing it to rehydrate cypress swamps and replenish parts of the Ten Thousand Islands that have grown too salty. A wetter Southern Golden Gate Estates would attract the right kinds of plants and trees, providing the setting for black bears, Florida panthers and wading birds to return. Or so the theory goes. In practice, officials disagree among themselves and activists have their own ideas about how the pumps should be designed and what they are being designed to do. Activists say the pumps, as proposed by the water management district, are far bigger than ...

Fiddler’s Creek residents enjoy their improved environmental surroundings
staff /Naples Daily News /March 5
Peter Blicher is a former real estate developer and is now a semi-retired resident of Fiddler s Creek. He s also writing a detailed book about the best lifestyle communities in the country and plans to include Fiddler s Creek as an example of what a lifestyle community should be. Not only do you have all of the amenities here, but also the natural beauty, said Blicher. I can walk just a few steps from my home and see wading birds and other wildlife along the creek and natural preserve areas. This is the way I ve always pictured Florida. It s like going back in time. Prior to purchasing a home at Fiddler s Creek, Blicher traveled extensively, looking for the perfect community. Some developments have natural areas thinly spread through the community, said Blicher. Here, it s one large area which is enhanced with new landscaping from one end of the community to the other which helps ...

Big Cypress Basin plots relocation to Estates
Jeremy Cox /Naples Daily News /March 7
The flooding comes once a year, it seems, at the Big Cypress Basin's main office, which is tucked among cement plants, warehouses and auto-repair shops in North Naples' industrial sector. After especially heavy rains, the parking lot drowns beneath a foot or more of water like the floor of an urban sea. Besides being an inconvenience, the flooding is an all-too-real lesson about the challenges of holding back water in Southwest Florida, said Clarence Tears, the basin's director. "It's a swamp trying to be a swamp," he said, referring to the poorly drained land that surrounds the 6089 Janes Lane headquarters. Basin officials are looking to leave their home of nearly 20 years for one that is more spacious, visible and closer to the core of their drainage system. And, of course, they would prefer one that's not quite so wet. An offshoot of the South Florida Water Management District, the ba ...

Wildlife leaders to determine threat panther poses in eastern Collier
Jeremy Cox /Naples Daily News /March 8
High-level wildlife officials today will examine the threat that a female Florida panther, one of the few left in existence, poses to Miccosukee Indians and park visitors along the eastern edge of Collier County. The two-day, closed-door meeting in Naples signals that government agencies are taking the tribe s complaints about the cat seriously, said Darrell Land, a Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission biologist. The talks are set to include Florida Fish and Wildlife s top boss, Ken Haddad; the director of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service s southeastern region, Sam Hamilton; and the National Park Service s regional director, Pat Hooks. That sort of tells you the level of attention this situation has generated, Land said. Last month, agency leaders got an earful about the panther, known as No. 124, when they met with the Miccosukee Tribe s lawyers and consultants. For two yea ...

Specialists panel leans toward central sewers for Marco
Billy Bruce /Naples Daily News /March 9
An eight-member panel of regional environmental specialists agreed late Wednesday that Marco Island s campaign to rid the island of septic tanks was the correct move to protect the future water quality on the low-lying barrier island. After a three-hour workshop at the Radisson Suite Resort on South Collier Boulevard, the members summarized their positions on whether the city had other suitable alternatives besides connecting properties on septic tanks to central sewers. More than 200 residents attended the forum that was moderated by WGUF 98.9 FM radio host Dave Elliott, who spent most of the evening posing questions to the panel handwritten on cards by audience participants. While the scientific jury is still out on whether Marco s gradually degrading water quality in its hundreds of miles of waterways is directly related to discharges from the more than 5,000 septic tanks still in use ...

Off-roaders fight for a muddy mecca to call their own
Jeremy Cox /Naples Daily News /March 10
For decades, all-terrain vehicles, swamp buggies and dirt bikes roamed freely across Southern Golden Gate Estates and its 55,000 acres of isolation. In the name of fixing the Everglades, the South Florida Water Management District took control of the failed subdivision s vast road network in 2003, ending the area s mud-splattered days. An agreement between the water management district and Collier County gave the district until October 2005 to replace the off-roading mecca with 640 acres somewhere else. With that deadline edging farther in their rearview mirrors and with the county s top administrator likening the leading alternative site to "something that came out of Love Canal," off-roading enthusiasts are fighting back. A group that could swell to as many as 500 on Saturday plans to protest the delay at the Collier County Government Center on U.S. 41 East. Organizers say they will ca ...

Developer gets OK to build in midst of Everglades restoration project
Jeremy Cox /Naples Daily News /March 12
A Miami developer wants to drop nearly 500 townhouses among live oaks and slash pine that are in the middle of a stalled Everglades restoration project in Collier County. The South Florida Water Management District is playing a big role in planning the resuscitation of Belle Meade, a sprawling collection of subdivisions east of Collier Boulevard. Its affliction: too many ditches and developments and not enough treatment of the polluted water they generate, experts say. So, when the state agency issued its blessing Wednesday for the Miami developer's proposal, it raised a few eyebrows. Brad Cornell, policy advocate for the Collier County Audubon Society, criticized the water management district, saying it is giving away land that might be critical to the planned restoration project. "They don't know if they don't need it because no one has done any planning," Cornell said. "That's why we ...

Hunt for 'surplus' land causes worries
Eric Staats /Naples Daily News /March 12
Affordable housing and dirt and rock for road construction are in short supply in Collier County these days, but the county s search for solutions has environmental advocates on high alert. Collier County commissioners gave Commissioner Tom Henning the go-ahead last month to work with County Manager Jim Mudd to find land owned by the county or that the county could buy from the state or federal government for affordable housing or earthmining. Environmental advocates see the search as a potential incursion into government-owned land that was purchased as preserve or is in some other conservation status and should stay that way, they say. I think it deserves to be vigorously opposed, said Brad Cornell, Big Cypress policy advocate for Audubon of Florida and the Collier County Audubon Society. It s not a very good idea and it should be opposed very vocally and publicly. ...

SOUTHWEST COAST

Caloosahatchee's new reservoir to test district's protection goals
Kevin Lollar /News Press /Feb 24
The idea sounds easy enough.To prevent flooding during extremely wet periods, water managers must release huge amounts of fresh water from Lake Okeechobee down the Caloosahatchee River.That nutrient-laden water causes massive algal blooms and other environmental problems in the river and estuary. So, to help protect these water bodies, water managers decided to create a reservoir that can store large amounts of river water.Thus we have the C-43 West Reservoir, scheduled to be completed in 2010 — "C-43" is the official water-management name for the Caloosahatchee. "The intent is to take water when we have too much, hold it and deliver it when we have too little," said Tommy Strowd, with the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan.But the project is more complicated than digging a hole and filling it with water. ...

Charley may have helped spawn Pine Island slime
Kevin Lollar /News Press /Feb 26
Hurricane Charley just keeps on giving.A local scientist thinks the Aug. 13, 2004, storm might be responsible for thick mats of algae that have begun to engulf the mangrove shorelines of northern Pine Island Sound.The tops of the mats resemble soggy carpeting. Below is a slippery, tangled, filamentous mess that looks like hair from a clogged bathtub drain, only green. Algae wash ashore in Bokeelia. A local scientist thinks the spread may have been caused when Hurricane Charley blew plant materials into the water in 2004. Commercial fisherman and fishing guide Capt. Shane Dooley noticed the algae in northern Pine Island Sound about two months ago."I've never seen anything like it up there," Dooley said. "It's like green moss. It looks so weird. I'm afraid that once the water warms up it'll really take off." Dooley said his father, commercial fisherman Mike Dooley, saw the algae in Matlach ...

SFWMD building test cells: C-43 Reservoir, piece of water puzzle
Patty Bryant /News Zap /March 06
Too much water is the problem; not enough water is the problem. It depends on the time of year in Florida just which is the case. A state-federal partnership known as Everglades Restoration is backtracking to undo the effects of flood control. The C-43 Reservoir under construction at Berry’s just west of LaBelle is one piece of the restoration puzzle.At least part of the solution, the South Florida Water Management District (SFWMD) believes, will be a 170,000 acre-feet reservoir on an 11,000-acre parcel just west of LaBelle off SR 80. The C-43 Reservoir is part of the Everglades Restoration Acceler8 projects n eight projects intended to restore 100,000 acres of wetlands, expand water treatment areas by close to 29,000 acres and provide 428,000 acre-feet of additional water storage for Everglades Restoration. At a cost of $338 million, the reservoir will be 12-16 feet deep and should be i ...

Environmental 'success' stuns area
Joel Moroney /News Press /March 2
The "unprecedented success" of environmental protection announced by the state in Wednesday's annual report on South Florida came as a shock locally."I believe it has been an unprecedented failure," said Lee County Commissioner Ray Judah of fresh water released from Lake Okeechobee into the Caloosahatchee River.The water releases, which lower water levels in the country's largest inland lake, are blamed for upsetting the river's freshwater balance, contributing to algae blooms, and plant and wildlife death. "The 2006 South Florida Environmental Report delivers a comprehensive snapshot of Florida's unprecedented success over the last past year," wrote Florida Department of Environmental Protection Secretary Colleen Castille, focusing on the reduction of fertilizer runoff into the Everglades. ...

Our point of view lost in report
Editorial /News Press /March 3
It all depends on where you're sitting, and whether you're sitting in a bunch of muck.From Tallahassee and West Palm Beach, the past year looks like a good one for the South Florida environment. From Lee County, it's been a disaster.That's why people here are upset about the self-congratulatory tone of the 2006 South Florida Environmental Report from the state Department of Environmental Protection and the West Palm Beach-based South Florida Water Management District. It's a reminder that the Caloosahatchee River and its estuary remain a small part of the huge water management agenda in South Florida, too small a part ever to command the attention it needs without some sort of special legal standing."No other government has taken on a mission as large and as important as Everglades restoration," crowed DEP Secretary Colleen M. Castille. "The 2006 South Florida Environmental Report delive ...

Corps may clean up our river
Editorial /News Press /March 4
It's only a first step, but it could eventually lead to a major improvement in water quality in the troubled Caloosahatchee River system — and we suspect it is the result of incessant badgering by Southwest Floridians upset over the battering our environment is taking.The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has agreed to study whether to add a water treatment component to the 11,000-acre "C-43" reservoir being built east of Fort Myers in Hendry County near the river. We hope — and we should keep insisting — that this leads to the addition of some sort of extra filtration or other technique for improving the quality of the water stored in the reservoir and then released into the river. Frankly, how could the Corps not clean this water and reduce the chances of pollution like we've seen these past two years.Good for Lee County officials and for many civilian activists who have included the reserv ...

City 'dialing 911' on water managers
Joel Moroney /News Press /March 8
Sanibel City Council took the South Florida Water Management District's money Tuesday and then spent the latter part of the day plotting against the agency in a battle that has reached the governor's office and the nation's capital."They are killing us, and it's deliberate," Mayor Carla Johnston said of the water management policies of the district and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.She was referring to millions of gallons of nutrient-rich fresh water that are released down the Caloosahatchee River and into the Gulf of Mexico to reduce the water level in Lake Okeechobee. "We're dialing 911," she said of the declining health of coastal waters, including algae blooms, dying sea grass and shrinking oyster beds.Water managers acknowledge that the releases, necessary to reduce pressure on the lake dike and prevent flooding during wet years, hurt the health of the river. Increased water stor ...

Expert warns red tide problem is getting worse
Kate Spinner /Naples Daily News /March 9
Red tide is nothing new, but scientists debate whether it’s getting more frequent and whether pollution, caused by population growth and intensive agriculture, is to blame. “State officials say it’s not getting worse,” said Larry Brand, marine biology professor with the University of Miami. “I’ve concluded there is evidence that it is getting worse.” A little more than a year ago, leaders in Lee County, Bonita Springs, Sanibel and Fort Myers Beach united to hire Brand to determine whether red tide outbreaks have been increasing. After evaluating 50 years of data collected by state agencies, Brand said the incidence of red tide is not only more frequent today, but also longer lasting. Last summer and fall red tide — an oceanic algae that produces toxins — infested Gulf waters from Sarasota to Naples, sending waves of dead fish onto area beaches and killing manatees and dolphins. Scientist ...

Health of rivers hinges on unproven technology
Kate Spinner /Naples Daily News /March 7
Reducing huge water flows from Lake Okeechobee to the Caloosahatchee and St. Lucie estuaries depends almost entirely on finding places other than the lake to store water. Faced with burgeoning land costs and limited space, scientists are looking 1,000 feet below the earth's surface in search of that storage. A yearly average of 584 billion gallons of water a year is flushed from the lake to the rivers because more than 100 years of drainage projects have virtually eliminated South Florida's natural ability to retain water in marshes and lakes. Everglades restoration projects intend to put the storage back into the ecosystem, but a large part of that storage depends on using a technology called Aquifer Storage and Recovery on an unprecedented scale. With Aquifer Storage and Recovery technology, fresh water is injected deep into the earth and stored there until drought conditions require i ...

LAKE OKEECHOBEE

Lake committee hears update
Audrey Blackwell /NewsZap /Feb 06
The status of Lake Okeechobee is on the mind of nearly everybody these days, and there is some comfort in knowing that groups of interested parties meet regularly to keep abreast of the steps being taken by South Florida Water Management (SFWMD) and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (COE).Twenty eight members of the Lake Okeechobee Committee (LOC) met Feb. 22 at the Okeechobee Civic Center from 9 a.m. until about 3 p.m. The committee is a subcommittee of SFWMD’s Water Resources Advisory Commission (WRAC). Later in the day, COE held a meeting at the same location.Malcolm “Bubba” Wade, LOC chairman, gave a brief overview of member issues and SFWMD staff provided new information to the group.Other speakers included Susan Sylvester, SFWMD deputy director of operations control; Calvin Neidrauer, SFWMD chief consulting engineer, operations control; Susan Gray, SFWMD director of Lake Okeechobee ...

Plans abound to fix the ooze of Okeechobee
Graig Pittman /StPete Time /Feb 26
FORT MYERS - One day last summer, 17-year-old Grayson Kyte waded into a lagoon to fish for mullet. The next day, he said, "my whole right leg swelled to twice its size."Doctors told the Jensen Beach teen he had a staph infection, probably from an algae bloom caused by pollution in the St. Lucie River.A similar algae bloom erupted in the Caloosahatchee River on the gulf coast. It, too, was blamed on pollution, which last month spread into the J.N. "Ding" Darling National Wildlife Refuge on Sanibel Island."It's an ecological disaster for both estuaries," said Kevin Henderson of the St. Lucie River Initiative.The culprits: the state and federal officials in charge of managing Lake Okeechobee.When heavy rains push the water level in Lake Okeechobee too high, state and federal officials dump millions of gallons of lake water into the rivers.But that water is full of pollutants, especially nut ...

Board says Lake O model needs major retooling
Julio Ochoa /Naples Daily News /Feb 27
After years of trusting the model that regulates water releases from Lake Okeechobee, Lee County commissioners have had enough. The model is flawed, commissioners said last week, and they will hire their own scientist to prove it. The board will pay a private consultant up to $25,000 to evaluate the model and recommend a way to incorporate valid scientific data to update and correct it, said Commissioner Ray Judah. "It is evident that the South Florida Water Management District underestimated the strategy that is necessary to maintain the maximum flows from Lake Okeechobee," Judah said. The model has been in place for a couple of decades, but its flaws only recently have come to light, he said. When commissioners learned that the district needs another 1 million acre feet of storage for the lake's water, it was obvious something was amiss, Judah said. The main problem with the current mo ...

Water treatment for river releases to be studied
Jamie Page /News Press /March 3
After intense lobbying by Lee County, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has agreed to study adding a way to treat water when building a west coast water storage reservoir.The Corps plans to build the 11,000-acre C-43 reservoir along the Caloosahatchee River to take some of the excessive discharges from Lake Okeechobee that are blamed for damaging the Caloosahatchee estuary. Lee County commissioners have complained to the Corps and the South Florida Water Management District, which manages the lake, that the reservoir lacks a way of treating the water before it's put back into the river.U.S. Army Colonel Robert Carpenter wrote in a Feb. 28 letter to Commissioner Tammy Hall that the Corps will consider looking at adding a water-quality component to the $300 million project. That means first considering whether to do a study of it, said Nanci Regalado, spokeswoman for the Corps. Several comm ...

Foam blobs float from canal to St. Lucie River
staff /Sun Sentinel /March 4
Federal water managers announced this week that discharges from Lake Okeechobee to the St. Lucie River will continue, but that isn't the estuary's only problem. Thick blobs of foam floated from the C-23 canal, with the wind pushing them into small coves along the riverbank and reminding residents of the pollution plaguing the waterway.The foam could be caused by the mixing of freshwater that is draining from nearby farms and homes with more salty water, the state Department of Environmental Protection said. But it is also possible that pollution, like nutrients from fertilizers, is adding to the froth. ...

Restoration vs. Development
Kate Spinner /Naples Daily News /March 7
When sugar cane is no longer profitable and when the population of Florida starts expanding toward the center of the peninsula, homes could pop up as the newest crop in the Everglades Agricultural Area. Developers are already looking to three areas within the Everglades Agricultural Area, or EAA, for future housing projects, and that pressure is making environmental groups nervous. For all the criticism the sugar industry gets for its presence in the Everglades, homes would create a much bigger barrier to restoring healthy water flow and habitat within Lake Okeechobee and the coastal estuaries, said Eric Draper, policy director for Audubon of Florida. "The problem is that the EAA is uniquely located right in the middle of the Everglades system in the historic flowway between Lake Okeechobee and the rest of the Everglades. It was historically the River of Grass there, so if you put a lot ...

No quick fix to Lake Okeechobee's water problems
Kate Spinner /Naples Daily News /March 7
Managing water in South Florida is like trying to make all sides of a Rubik's Cube match. That's how Col. Robert Carpenter, head of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Jacksonville District, describes the problem with water flow and pollution in Lake Okeechobee, the Everglades, the Kissimmee River and the Caloosahatchee and St. Lucie estuaries. People flock to South Florida because of the climate, but without the artificial controls woven into the landscape over the past 100 years, this Eden would be swamped in the summer and raging with fire in the winter. Taming the environment made modern settlement in South Florida possible, but it exacerbated the extremes for the plants and animals that had adapted to the fluctuations. Creating a system that works for flood control and restoring the habitat of the ecosystem will take a balancing act that will feature birds and fish, dairy cows and suga ...

Environment and public deserve focus on facts cocerning Lake Okeechobee
Karl Wickstrom /TCPalm /March 9
Little wonder that Malcolm S. Wade Jr., who, strangely, is both a Big Sugar executive and an appointed member of the public's Water Management District, wants "finger-pointing" stopped. As a main pointee, his private company and public district increasingly find themselves at the wrong end of the pointed finger. For good reason. Wade's chest-thumping analysis of great achievements supposedly accomplished for Everglades restoration cover the same array of generalizations that have allowed so much damage to Lake Okeechobee and the estuaries for these many decades. It's especially disheartening to consider that the sugar propaganda mill is financed by the public through the district's $1.1 billion budget and Big Sugar's record-depth pockets. The spin mill likes to perpetuate the notion that nearly all of the lake's water comes from the north. Using finger-pointing of its own, the "Drainage ...

Water under the bridge
Kate Spinner /Naples Daily News /March 6
Wayne Nelson anchored in the shallows and hopped out to wade fish in the knee-deep water, about a mile from Boy Scout Cut on Lake Okeechobee. He took a couple steps and promptly tripped over a mesh of stringy green algae. That was 20 years ago. "I scooped up a handful of (the algae), threw it in the bottom of my boat, and put it in a plastic bag when I got home," said Nelson, who now heads Fishermen Against Destruction of the Environment. The next day, he visited Johnny Jones, then executive director of the Florida Wildlife Federation. "I threw this bag of algae on his desk and said, 'What have you been doing to clean up Lake Okeechobee lately?'" Now a similar type of algae blankets the tidal marshes of Sanibel Island's J.N. Ding Darling National Wildlife Refuge, which has been on the receiving end of the lake's dirty water for decades. Ralph Woodring, a shrimp fisherman and bait shop ow ...

Dike Along Huge Florida Lake Is Leaking
Willie Drye /National Geographic /March 10
About 2,500 people died in 1928 when water from Florida's Lake Okeechobee inundated their communities during a hurricane, making it one of the worst natural disasters in United States history. Today the earthen barrier of Herbert Hoover Dike—140 miles (225 kilometers) long, 35 to 50 feet (10 to 15 meters) high—stands between area residents and the nearly Rhode Island-size lake. Hurricanes have crossed or passed near the lake since the 1928 disaster. None of the storms have penetrated the massive dike or pushed water over its top. But the dike has begun to leak. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers first noticed the problem when inspectors found evidence of "seepages" in the 1980s, according to Jacob Davis, a civilian engineer in charge of repairs. The leaks are caused by water under constant pressure pushing against the dike, loosening soil, and gradually seeping through. As the water level ...

Lake Okeechobee Timeline
staff /Naples Daily News /March 6
2001 billions of gallons of lake water flushed to the estuaries to bring the lake level down, followed by record drought that dropped the lake to about 9 feet. 2004 Hurricane rains muddy lake water and raise the water level to about 18 feet. 2005 more hurricanes churn up the lake and keep water levels too high. More than 965 billion gallons of water flushed from lake to Caloosahatchee River. 2006 estimated cost of the restoration climbs to $10.8 billion. Half the land needed for the project has been acquired. ...

For better or worse
Kate Spinner /Naples Daily News /March 6
Controlling water in South Florida is an expensive and complicated endeavor, but it's essential for the modern towns and farms that have sprung up in the region over the last century. The South Florida Water Management District spends $1.2 billion a year to keep water in check. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers spends another $3.6 million a year to operate the locks, dams and spillways on the Okeechobee Waterway. Boats navigate the waterway from the Gulf of Mexico to the Atlantic Ocean via the Caloosahatchee River, Lake Okeechobee and the St. Lucie River. The intricate system of canals, levees, and locks provides water in the dry season and prevents flooding in the rainy season. "Anybody that lives in South Florida, in the past two years the only reason they didn't get flooded was because of the canals," said Dennis Duke, Army Corps program manager for ecosystem restoration. "The system i ...

EVERGLADES RESTORATION

State sent strong growth-management message
David Anderson /Miami Herald /Feb 25
Miami-Dade County received a strong message from the state last week: Curb your appetite for urban sprawl, and fund programs to balance growth pressures with environmental sustainability. County commissioners should pay attention and act upon this signal.Our state is full of natural treasures recognized throughout the world. With Florida Bay to our south, Everglades National Park to our west and Biscayne National Park to our east, Miami-Dade is a paradise that would be degraded by new development without the infrastructure or water to support it.The Department of Community Affairs recognized this in its report to the county recommending that commissioners deny all development proposals outside of the Urban Development Boundary. Citing water supply, traffic congestion and impacts on schools as reasons to deny new development, the state was clear: Urban vitality must be balanced with envir ...

Scientists try rebuilding St. Lucie River's oyster population
Suzanne Wentley /TCPalm /Feb 28
With salty conditions returning to the St. Lucie Estuary, local scientists are renewing efforts to rebuild an oyster population decimated by months of freshwater discharges from Lake Okeechobee. The project — which involved growing 100,000 oysters in a Hutchinson Island facility and spreading them around the river — was put on hold last June when the waterway's salinity levels dropped near zero and stayed there for most of the year. This month, water managers only released a small amount of lake water into the estuary, so oysters — which cannot tolerate too much or too little salt — might be able to grow in the normally brackish St. Lucie River. Although the project could be the first step toward improving the estuary's health, the university students, oyster growers and river advocates involved in the effort said the currently high lake levels and a wet forecast could prove challenging ...

Speakers argue water act is needed
Amie Parnes /Naples Daily News /March 3
WASHINGTON — They were probably preaching to the choir. But the two speakers from the Associated General Contractors and the American Society of Engineers on Thursday said what the coastal and beach leaders wanted to hear: The Water Resources Development Act is needed. And needed now. Hurricane Katrina, they said, taught the nation that lesson. The speakers told members of the American Shore and Beach Preservation Association gathered in Washington for an annual summit that the water legislation is a “critical” initiative that will benefit all Americans. “It’s a drop in the bucket for what the return supplies,” said Marco A. Giamberardino, of the Associated General Contractors. “The thought that the American people won’t pay for the infrastructure is absolutely false,” added Brian Pallasch, of the American Society of Engineers. The legislation is considered a major part of the 30-year, $ ...

Agencies issue lake report
Pete Gawda /News Zap /March 06
A detailed report recently issued jointly by the South Florida Water Management District (SFWMD) and the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) details the efforts of those agencies over the last year to preserve our area’s environment.The 2006 South Florida Environmental Report provides a detailed summary of Everglades’s restoration efforts and provides updates on the progress of other environmental programs in the Kissimmee Basin, Lake Okeechobee, estuaries and other coastal areas.“No other government has taken on a mission as large and important as Everglades restoration,” said DEP secretary Colleen M. Castille.The report consolidates material from over 50 different separate reports, coverswater year 2005 (May 1, 2004, through April 30, 2005) and provides extensive research summaries, data analyses, financial updates and a searchable database of environmental projections ...

A reporter explores the plight of the Everglades from the pioneer days to the p resent
Larry Lebowitz /Miami Herald /March 5
Michael Grunwald, an award-winning national reporter for The Washington Post, provides a lot of the context in this ambitious, deeply researched blend of environmental, social and political history of the Manifest Destiny forces that built Florida. The Swamp grew out of a four-part series reported by Grunwald in 2002 that took an in-depth look at the highly touted, but deeply compromised, $8 billion plan to restore the Everglades.Grunwald proves to be a surprisingly deft historian, interweaving the natural history of the last American frontier through the massive cast of characters who struggled to conquer, drain, farm and develop the once impenetrable Everglades. The hubris and greed of drainage boosters, land speculators, engineers, railroad and sugar barons and developers oozes from the pages.The Swamp also charts the emergence of the modern environmental and conservation movement and ...

Trouble in the Swamplands
Bret Shulte /US News /March 13
As a reporter covering the environment for the Washington Post, Michael Grunwald spent a year slogging through the Florida Everglades while also wading into the region's rich natural and political history. His goal: to understand and document the unprecedented $8 billion effort to restore the dying 3 million-acre ecosystem,which once blanketed the peninsula south of Lake Okeechobee. What he found was a man vs. nature tale that predates the arrival of Europeans. Today, half the Everglades is gone, thanks to a massive mid-20th-century flood-control and drainage project by theArmy Corps of Engineers and a booming agricultural economy, which together with other changes brought 7 million residents to south Florida. As the state's restoration projectcontinues--and Louisiana struggles with its own plans to restore wetlands--Grunwald's new book, The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politi ...

Keep eye on Everglades
Editorial /Palm Beach Post /March 6
Florida's cleanup of the Everglades looks so good to state officials, including Gov.Bush, that they hope to get out from under federal oversight of the $1.1 billion project. But congressional leaders aren't convinced, and they were correct to questionU.S. Interior Secretary Gale Norton closely last week about the potential end to a court order overseeing the project.Gov. Bush has lobbied leaders at Interior and other agencies to end the 1992 order, which allows a federal judge in Miami to oversee the cleanup. The state insists it has met the court order's requirements and that strict permits would ensure that the cleanup will continue. But coming less than a year after the judge ruled that Florida has violatedsome of the order's pollution limits, the state's effort to wiggle out of federal supervisionis suspect. As Rep. Norm Dicks, D-Wash., put it, "I don't see how we could possibly agre ...

Suburbanization of ag land could compromise Indian River
Grosso and Interlandi /TC Palm /March 6
Martin County is different than many other places in Florida, in that residents and the comprehensive plan long have recognized that the local economy, property values, and the ability to attract business and smart economic development are better served with strong planning and development standards. And while Martin County has always "gotten it," the planning, economic and legal professionals around the country finally are catching up. Over the past decade, many studies have shown what Martin County has always known, that there are many social, economic and cultural costs to existing businesses and residents when too much new development is approved or approved in the wrong places. There is, however, major economic value in the functions of natural resources and open space, including flood control, water supply, hunting and fishing, food production, and increases to property value and q ...

River pioneer and environmentalist Luna Leopold has died at 90
Robert Sanders /Berkely News /March 7
He also was consulted on disputes over Colorado River water allocations and plans for a south Florida jetport."In 1969, he practically invented the Environmental Impact Statement through its design and early application to problems such as the proposed Trans-Alaska Pipeline and Everglades Jetport," wrote Thomas Dunne, a colleague of Leopold's who is a professorof environmental science and management and of earth science at UC Santa Barbara. "It can be fairly said that Luna Leopold has changed the way this society approaches environmental problems and conducts environmental science in the service of people and the natural environment." ...

Water quality in the Everglades
Jessica Stilwell /NBC2 /March 8
COLLIER COUNTY — The expansion of storm water treatment areas to Florida’s Everglades is designed to improve water quality, levels and flow capability in the state’s southern cities.In 2004, Jeb Bush designated $1.5 billion for the Acceler8 Program which was designed to complete eight Everglades restoration projects by 2022.The Department of Environmental Protection Secretary Colleen Castille joined water managers, environmentalists, and other officials from around the state to break ground on the latest project designed to improve water quality in the Everglades."Over the years that we did not have storm, water treatment areas we saw the degradation of beautiful saw grass areas by cattails. Cattails are not the dominant species here, and they take over with high levels of fertilizer and phosphorus. So it's important that we take the phosphorus out and return these areas to the natural s ...

City eyes new water source
Samuel Nitze /Miami Herald /March 8
Fort Lauderdale's demand for drinking water is nearing limits set by regional water managers, prompting city leaders to hunt for alternate supplies to avoid fines or a potential building moratorium.The city presently receives all of its drinking water from the Biscayne Aquifer, an underground collection of porous rock that holds large volumes of freshwater. But the South Florida Water Management District imposes limits to protect the Everglades and other natural systems.City leaders emphasized that no crisis is imminent, adding that they have joined other major water users like Sunrise and Broward and Miami-Dade counties in the search for new sources. The Biscayne Aquifer is the primary source of drinking water for the region. ...

Martin County approves a consultant's plan to finish study of western land grow th rules
Jason Schultz /Palm Beach Post /March 8
STUART — The Martin County Commission on Tuesday approved a consultant's plan for finishing a controversial study of development rules in western Martin County.Environmentalists asked commissioners to ban the consultants from proposing anything in the study that would increase the price of 32,000 environmentally sensitive acres the county wants to buy for Everglades restoration.But the commission voted 4-1 against that idea, saying the county could not limit the value of a property owner's land.The study will examine the county's current minimum lot size of 20 acres per house west of the urban services line and suggest four possible alternative rules for land development.Opponents say the study will lead to clustered developments, where homes are built in dense pockets with land preserved around the cluster. Opponents say clustering would lead to urban sprawl and damage the environmental ...

Lagoon's health goes under the microscope
JIM WAYMER /Florida Today /March 10
Snorkeling as a young girl in the Indian River Lagoon, Heather Holberger watched the oysters die.Now, at 23, the Florida Tech graduate student plans to return to her hometown of Stuart, 60 miles south of Brevard, to grow them back.She'll work at the Florida Oceanographic Society, where she'll give out 100,000 tiny seed oysters to dockside residents. Then, when they grow as large as half-dollars, she'll plant them where they once thrived naturally to see whether they'll take.Holberger holds hope that the 156-mile estuary -- which fosters more than 4,000 species and adds $1 billion annually to the regional economy -- can recover from the onslaught from the pollution and pavement that each newcomer brings."I think it will improve, there are a lot of people who are aware of it now," she said. "Hopefully the water will be clear and nice again for our children."She and hundreds of other scient ...

Author has more than swampland to sell you
JULES WAGMAN /Piladelphia Inquier /March 12
Grunwald says it was not until late in the 20th century, long after the Everglades’ eastern reaches had been drained and developed, that environmentalists convinced Floridians and the nation that the Everglades were worth saving as a national treasure and necessity for life in South Florida.Now the Army Corps of Engineers has begun dismantling its drainage canals and river-straightening projects. Some short stretches of the Kissimmee River, as it flows south from the Orlando area into Lake Okeechobee, have been restored, and its waters there are flowing clean again. But much remains to be done, Grunwald declares.With fits and starts, the state and corps is making progress. But as fast as officials solve one problem, people move to Florida for its sun and fun — and create new problems for the Everglades. ...



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