Wild Idea Gets Everglades Plan Moving Again

To jump start the stalled $10 billion Everglades restoration project, Gov. Charlie Crist came up with an idea so wild it took everyone's breath away.

On Tuesday, he announced it would actually happen: Florida will buy every bit of land now owned by the nation's largest sugar company and use it to restore the River of Grass.

Although many details of the $1.75 billion deal still must be worked out before it closes in November, the bottom line is this: U.S. Sugar will continue farming its land - 187,000 acres, three times the size of Orlando - for six more years, then shut everything down and hand it over to the state.

Under the deal, U.S. Sugar Corp. said, it will sell all its holdings to the state, "including sugarcane land, sugar mill, refinery, citrus plant, citrus nursery, rock mines, railroad and railcars and all equipment." The land is in Hendry, Glades and Palm Beach counties.

Crist said that eight months ago, when he first proposed buying up everything U.S. Sugar owns, "originally there was some surprise" among his staff. "But the more people thought about it, they thought, why not?"

Crist said U.S. Sugar agreed to negotiate after the South Florida Water Management District board voted to stop allowing the company to backpump its farm runoff into heavily polluted Lake Okeechobee.

The board vote followed a federal court decision in favor of Earthjustice and the Florida Wildlife Federation, which had challenged the practice as a violation of the Clean Water Act.

"That got the ball rolling," he said.

Company executives called the decision to sell bittersweet, because it will end more than 70 years of farming there.

U.S. Sugar produces 700,000 tons of sugar a year, or about 10 percent of all sugar produced in the nation. The company, which operates its own railroad, employs 1,700 workers, most of whom live in Clewiston, "the sweetest town in America."

The purchase turns a restoration effort "that was beginning to look stalled by inadequate financial and land capital into an unprecedented opportunity to completely rewrite the course of Everglades restoration," said Jeff Danter, state director of the Nature Conservancy.

The negotiations between the state and U.S. Sugar were so secretive that not even leaders of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers - the state's partner in the Everglades project - knew about the deal until late Tuesday, said Stu Appelbaum, who heads the Everglades restoration program for the Corps.

When state and federal experts were first putting together the restoration plan in the late 1990s, this kind of land purchase was "not something that was ever contemplated or suggested," Appelbaum said. As a result of Tuesday's announcement "the whole landscape has changed."

U.S. Sugar's land will help solve two problems at once, Appelbaum said. It can reconnect Lake Okeechobee to the Everglades, and halt the flow of pollution from the lake to the Caloosahatchee and St. Lucie rivers, he said.

Historically, the Everglades functioned as a safety valve for the lake. When heavy rains north of the lake sent swollen currents down the Kissimmee River, the river flowed into the lake and filled it until it spilled over.

The spillover then slowly flowed through the wide River of Grass south to Florida Bay.

But in the name of flood control, the corps straightened the Kissimmee's bends, turning it into a funnel for pollution from the farms and ranches north of the lake.

And the Corps built a dike around the rim of the lake, cutting off the flow to the Everglades, which now routinely starves for water.

Meanwhile the lake became a reservoir full of phosphorous and algae blooms.

Whenever it got too full, the Corps and the water district would send the excess flowing east through the St. Lucie River and west through the Caloosahatchee River.

The pollution from the lake wreaked havoc in those rivers' estuaries, harming fishing and tourism on both coasts.

Now the sugar farms can be turned into water storage areas and filter marshes where water from the lake can flow once again into the Everglades, Appelbaum said.

However, to make it work will require more than simply tearing down the dike, because 70 years of farming has drastically depleted the soil there, he said.

And the Corps and the state will have to find a way to clean the pollution from the lake's water first, said Terry Rice, a retired colonel who once oversaw all Corps operations in Florida.

"You can't put anything in the Everglades that's dirty," Rice said. The Everglades is already suffering from too much phosphorous, and adding the lake water to the load won't help, he said.

"Right now," he said, "we're talking about a whole lot of extra water and no way to clean it."

Appelbaum agreed that the lake water is far too filthy to be sent straight into the River of Grass. "It will clearly need treatment," he said. All in all, he said, "we've got a lot of planning to do."