Effort to rescue 'River of Grass' lags behind schedule

WASHINGTON — Fifteen years ago, officials in Florida and Washington announced a bold partnership to restore the Everglades by 2030.

Today, with that ambitious effort to save one of the world's ecological jewels nearing the halfway point, the finish line still appears decades away. None of the 68 projects originally included in the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan has been completed, and only 13 have been authorized.

The project's original price tag of $7.8 billion has nearly doubled and continues to rise.

The Great Recession is partly to blame for squeezing federal and state spending, and an increasingly fractious Congress has failed to pass bills authorizing water-related projects.

"There hasn't been a sense of urgency," said former Florida governor Bob Graham, a Democrat and former U.S. senator who co-sponsored the Everglades restoration law. "There's an attitude of, well, if it doesn't happen this year, it'll happen next year or two years from now, or three years from now."

The Everglades, a World Heritage site and the largest subtropical wetland ecosystem in the world, once stretched over 8 million acres — from the southern suburbs of present-day Orlando down to the Florida Keys. As recently as the early 1900s, the southern interior "was a vast and foreboding swampland, largely inaccessible," according to the South Florida Water Management District, the state agency that oversees Everglades restoration.

That changed when hurricanes in the 1920s struck communities around Lake Okeechobee, prompting calls for drainage and flood-control measures designed to protect lives and property. By the 1940s, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had begun designing the present-day patchwork of canals and other "plumbing" components that fostered massive growth in the region.

The Everglades began shrinking as human activity increased. Thanks mainly to expanded farming and creeping development, it has lost more than half its acreage.

Dubbed "River of Grass" by author Marjory Stoneman Douglas in 1947, the Everglades is home to 67 threatened or endangered species and serves as the water supply to 7 million Floridians, or about one every three people in the state.

There have been a few recent signs that the effort to get the plan back on course may be gaining momentum.

Florida's Republican governor, Rick Scott, unveiled a budget in January that includes $130 million for key components of the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan.

And in November, Florida voters overwhelmingly approved amending the state's constitution to require that the state devote one-third of certain real estate transaction fees to water conservation projects. One catch: The amendment doesn't require that any of the fee revenue be spent on the Everglades specifically.

There's also talk in Congress that bipartisan passage of a water bill last year could pave the way for a new water bill by 2016 that could mean hundreds of millions more in federal aid for Everglades restoration.

Advocates say any real progress depends on the state's willingness to exercise an option it holds to buy land owned by U.S. Sugar Corp. that's considered vital to the project's future. Those 46,800 acres are in addition to 26,000 acres the state bought from U.S. Sugar in several years ago that already are being used for water quality efforts.

The state must exercise the option by Oct. 12 or lose control of the land, which is vital for the water storage capacity at the heart of restoration efforts. The land would be used to help move more water south of Lake Okeechobee, reducing polluted runoff from the lake that now discharges east into the Indian River Lagoon and west down the Caloosahatchee Watershed.

The estimated purchase price is $350 million, considered a relative bargain. Punting on the purchase now would basically eliminate any chance of meeting the 2030 target for Everglades restoration, said Charles Lee, advocacy director for the Audubon Society of Florida.

"This is the linchpin," he said. "If you don't do this, the rest of it all starts to fall apart."

It's not clear whether Scott will exercise the option.

The 55,000-acre Picayune Strand, a habitat for Florida panthers inside the Everglades, offers an example of how expensive the entire rescue plan has become. Before the area was abandoned as the site of a massive housing development decades ago, more than 250 miles of roads were built and nearly 100 miles of canals were dug to drain the wetlands, according to the Everglades Foundation.

Restoring the Picayune Strand was projected to cost about $15 million when then-Florida governor Jeb Bush and then-president Bill Clinton signed the Everglades restoration program in 2000. Since then, the cost has risen to more than $600 million.

The water projects bill that Congress passed last year authorized hundreds of millions of dollars for four Everglades projects including a reservoir project designed to reduce harmful discharges into the Caloosahatchee River.

But Congress still must come up with the money. President Obama's fiscal 2016 budget request includes only about $75 million, mainly for design costs, and there's no guarantee lawmakers will go along with that amount.

Graham, the former governor, says 2030 is still an attainable goal for rescuing the Everglades.

"I did think we'd be further along than we are," he said. "But we've now got the resources at the state level. And we've got a fairly clear plan to restore the water flow that existed 100-plus years ago, before human beings started to assert themselves into that natural system."