Everglades advocates marked four decades of work on the River of Grass by taking a hard look at successes and failures at their annual coalition gathering last week.
For many, the durability of the Everglades Coalition formed by Gov. Bob Graham — which now numbers nearly 60 conservation groups, both the state’s tribes and federal and state government agencies — ranks as one of its best achievements.
“ This place is so special and so valuable; it has always inspired people with different perspectives to come together with an all-in attitude of bring what you've got: your funding, your expertise, your science staff, your vision, and let's get to work,” National Parks Conservation Association associate director Cara Capp told a packed room at the Miccosukee Casino and Resort, where the organization hosted the conference.
Even during the COVID pandemic, the annual conference has never missed a year, drawing a who’s who among environmental champions that included Graham, former U.S. Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt and Army Corps leaders. Journalist Marjory Stoneman Douglas, the renowned conservationist and Everglades advocate, attended the first meeting in 1986.
Among the failures that still haunts the effort to fix the Everglades is paying for polluted water, said Mary Barley, who sits on the board of the Everglades Foundation — which her late husband, George, helped found — and participated in a panel moderated by Capp.
“A lot of Everglades restoration money is still coming from us and not very much from the polluter,” she said, referring to a 2003 Supreme Court case. Justices sided with sugar growers and other farmers who fought a statewide constitutional amendment passed by voters ordering them to pay for polluting water.
“Innocent taxpayers now have to pay, and we're still paying. So that is, probably to me, the most terrible thing that's ever happened,” she said.
That made restoring historic water flows into the River of Grass and getting that water clean more difficult. While the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the state shared the cost of undoing flood control features that had choked off water supply from Lake Okeechobee to marshes and estuaries that make up the Everglades, the state was responsible for cleaning water polluted by farmers and developers dumping nutrient pollution from stormwater.
“The government could not wrap its brain around coupling water quality and what we would say hydrology because those two aspects of Everglades restoration had evolved on two different paths,” said Shannon Estenoz, who served as deputy assistant secretary at the Department of Interior for the Biden administration.
“ Water quality had evolved on a litigation path and hydrologic restoration had evolved on [an] … infrastructure planning path,” she said. “They got so far apart that the projects that needed us to address both just got stuck.”
By 2016, planners finally came up with a way to bundle the work and speed up planning that focused on the central Everglades, where restoring water flow was most needed. Estenoz says that marked one of the most important changes in restoration progress.
The effort also continues to draw record high funding. Gov. Ron DeSantis has tapped into a constitutional amendment approved by voters in 2016 to use a portion of taxes off real estate deals to pay for buying and managing conservation land. That’s allowed the state to spend over $2.8 billion on the restoration plan as of 2024 and another $2.6 billion to clean up water pollution. The federal government has spent another $2.6 billion on the restoration plan. The two governments have spent billions more on other Everglades work not included in the massive plan Congress approved in 2000.
But in recent years, climate change has started to redefine what the original architects of restoration envisioned. Despite calls by the National Academies of Sciences, which issues biennial progress reports, for a midcourse correction to address the looming impacts, planners are only now incorporating climate driven change. Work on Biscayne Bay, which was again postponed last year, is the first to incorporate sea level rise.
The plan, originally expected to cost $8 billion and take about 20 years to finish, will now likely coast at least four times as much.
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