The Florida Legislature is attempting to seize total control of Lake Okeechobee, eliminating the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers from the process and giving total water management control to the South Florida Water Management District. This proposal is a bad idea, as it overlooks the history of the management of the lake and related water bodies in regard to the Clean Water Act.
First, Florida petitioned the federal government for the construction of the Herbert Hoover Dike and the Central & Southern Flood Control Project to provide flood relief and water-supply sources for agricultural and urban development. This expensive effort, in conjunction with navigation projects for the Kissimmee, St. Lucie and Caloosahatchee rivers, resulted in a fair-weather water management system that is unable to adapt to increasingly common drought and flood conditions.
SFWMD managed water for the benefit of agriculture and urban water supplies — a reasonable effort until it abandoned any concept of environmental water supplies for estuaries or preserved wetland systems such as Everglades National Park. Additionally, public waters were allowed to be degraded by the actions of public agencies that were supposed to be adhering to the provisions of the CWA.
Eventually, the deterioration reached such extremes that the federal government sued Florida to prevent further degradation and restore national resources. The lawsuit dragged on for years until former Gov. Lawton Chiles symbolically surrendered the state’s sword. The parties agreed to a restoration plan calling for cost sharing and joint consultation in management. This is where we are, or should be, today.
Unfortunately, in the years of bad lake management, water levels were allowed to reach heights for water supply purposes that led to deterioration of the Dike. As a result, the Corps had to institute new regulation schedules to protect the Dike’s primary purpose of flood prevention. Additionally, SFWMD practiced favoritism for water supply deliveries while shunting flood waters to communities that were not normally in the lake’s flood zones. Only in these last few years have these adversely affected communities on the east and west sides of the lake able to get the Corps to consider their needs, often contrary to SFWMD recommendations.
The quality of the environment is key to the economies of east- and west-coast communities. Without the creative tension of the state-federal partnership, both partners receiving input from affected parties, that one agency will be swayed to the interests of favored stakeholders and lobbyists, to the detriment of the other stakeholders, notably the silent stakeholder: nature. Trying to co-opt the federal role in management while expecting the federal dollars indicates that the lessons of the lawsuit have been forgotten.
West-coast needs have not been addressed except through temporary and discretionary relief, and we need equitable attention from both partners. Eliminating one will only result in further harm to our communities, our economies and our environments.
[Wayne Daltry is president of Riverwatch, the Caloosahatchee River Citizens Association. Other versions of this column appeared in other newspapers. A version of this column ran on page 7 on 3/10/2014 under the headline "Lake Okeechobee restoration efforts shouldn’t be turned over"]
