On the day before the 2017 Florida Legislature convenes, 57 Everglades Agricultural Area (EAA) farmers used the occasion to deliver perhaps the strongest letter of opposition yet to Senate President Joe Negron's plan for a reservoir south of Lake Okeechobee. In both tone and content, the farmers didn't mince words about how and who would be affected by 60,000 acres of farmland taken out of production.
Sunshine State News prints here the farmers' letter in full:
Dear President Negron,
We read with dismay your Memorandum to your Senate colleagues dated March 2, 2017, concerning water discharges from Lake Okeechobee to the coasts. This Memorandum is just the latest fusillade in what can only be described as a war on your part against farmers south of Lake Okeechobee, the hard-working men and women we employ and the communities in which they and their families live. It is in this context that we are compelled to respond to you with directness and candor.
For generations, farming has played an important role in Florida’s economy, employing tens of thousands of Floridians today and having an estimated economic impact of billions of dollars on Florida’s economy. Farming, like tourism, auto racing, and citrus, is part of the very fabric of Florida, which you well know. During your public career you have been a supporter of Florida’s farmers, our way of life, and the traditions we represent.
Until now.
Now it is clear that your agenda as Senate President has been hijacked by out-of-state special interests who seek to do harm to the people in Florida who live on the land and help put food on our tables. Your plan to take Florida farmland, which we have already written to you to say is not for sale, has long been the dream of these extreme environmental activists who do not care about the interests of Floridians, generally, and especially not those in the communities south of Lake Okeechobee. They do not share the values of most Floridians, and certainly not the values that drive hard-working farmers to get up before sunrise each day and care for the land we farm and the food we grow.
It is for these reasons that we must directly challenge the half-truths and overt misrepresentations emanating from your office lest they become facts by default.
In your Memorandum, you selectively chose facts that fit your public relations narrative that acquiring our productive farmland south of Lake Okeechobee in one way or another will magically solve local water-quality problems in coastal communities east and west of the Lake. This narrative is totally at odds with both the applicable science and the experience of decades of studying, planning, and constructing water-management projects for the purposes of restoring the Everglades system holistically and protecting the lives of all those who live in the shadow of the Herbert Hoover Dike. This science and this accumulated experience make it obvious that your plan to prevent unwanted water discharges from the Lake by "sending the water south" will fall far short of what you say you are trying to accomplish while requiring extraordinary expenditures and an unacceptable delay in solving the problems we face.
Here are the facts about your plan to take our farmland:
1. The true cost of your plan has always been grossly understated, presumably for marketing purposes. According to recent estimates from the South Florida Water Management District and recent property appraisals, today’s land costs will push the total cost of the plan from concept to completion to approximately $4.3 billion, almost twice the cost you use in your plan. The cost estimates supporting this statement were prepared in accordance with Army Corps of Engineers’ guidelines and are attached.
2. The time frame for the projects contained in your plan “coming on line" has not really been discussed in detail to date, as it should be if the objective is to provide relief sooner rather than later to the coastal communities adversely impacted by unwanted water discharges from the Lake. The projects you are proposing would take a minimum of 15 years to be designed, funded, permitted, and constructed.
3. The science on which your plan is based is fraudulent; the environmental special interests who supplied you with the data used in your plan cooked the books to reach conclusions unsupported by the actual science. This is not our conclusion; it is the public judgment of the South Florida Water Management District, whose data and predictive models your environmentalist advisors have intentionally manipulated and distorted.
4. Other less expensive, faster options exist that would actually solve the Lake discharge problems plaguing the coastal estuaries, including underground storage, that was first included in the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan. These cost-effective, environmentally safe, short-time-to-completion options have been discarded out of hand for no apparent reason other than politics.
5. The UF report on which the Florida Legislature spent $250,000 clearly states that the timing and sequence of Everglades restoration projects are critical to their success. You have repeatedly ignored the totality of the UF Report, choosing instead to cherry-pick the one section that just so happens to be the one that kills farming jobs and, ultimately, decimates the Everglades Agricultural Area farming community, which is the not-so-hidden agenda of the environmentalist special interests on whom you rely for advice.
6. Your ill-considered plan is a public relations solution to a political problem. It was lobbed into the public arena during the height of last year's elections to please activists in your home county; separated from the politics, it bears no relation to the best use of Amendment One funds statewide or to the health of Florida's economy.
7. In addition to being the most expensive option with the longest time horizon, your plan would have minimal effect. Only a fraction of the discharges into the coastal estuaries would be prevented after billions of taxpayer dollars have been spent and after a lead time approaching two decades has ticked away. This is because -- as the real experts in these matters have pointed out repeatedly -- when water discharges from the Lake are necessitated by abnormal rain events, the Everglades are already flooded and additional water cannot be sent south. Only a few hundred thousand acre feet of the two and a half million acre feet of water that might typically be discharged from the Lake in these circumstances could be statically stored in the reservoirs contemplated by your plan.
Attached to this letter is a full response to the specific assertions in your Memorandum. But the real significance of your Memorandum is not what it says; rather, it is what it does not say. It is obvious that the real takeaway from your recent trip to Washington, D.C., is that as long as current Everglades restoration projects, engineering and feasibility studies, and the ongoing Herbert Hoover Dike repairs are incomplete, the federal government will not, and cannot, commit to sharing the cost with the state of any new projects, including yours. So Florida taxpayers would be looking at more than $4 billion dollars in costs for your plan without a federal partner to shoulder any of the burden.
With session starting, we look forward to a spirited and fact-based debate that we believe can produce cost-effective water quantity and water quality solutions that will benefit all of Florida. Hopefully, your two years as president of the Florida Senate will end up being remembered as a milestone in the decades-long history of Everglades restoration and Lake Okeechobee water management, rather than as a massive missed opportunity. Borrowing billions the state doesn't have to take farmland it doesn't need to build projects that won't work is not the solution to the problems we all want to solve.
Sincerely,
Atwood Family Farms
BHK Inc.
Big B Farm
Big B. Sugar Corp.
C&C Farms
Chery Lake
Cooperation Produce, Inc.
Deep South Sugar Corp.
Double H. Farms
Evans Groves
Florida Crystals
Frontier Produce, Inc.
Glades Sugar Farms
H&A Farming & Leasing
Herring Farms, Inc.
Hooker-Jones Co.
Hundley Farms, Inc.
Jahna Groves
JEM Farms, Inc.
Johnson Harvesting
Kennedy Enterprises
Kennedy Farms, Inc.
L & M Farms
Lewis Friend Farms
Lipman Produce
Lost Lalle Groves, Inc.
Markham Sugar Farms, Inc.
Meador Family Farms, LLC
Miami Sod, Co.
Nelson & Co., Inc.
nK Lago Farms, LLC.
On Point Ag. Inc.
Orsenigo Farms
Pioneer Ranch & Sugar Farms
R.C. Hatton, Inc.
Riverfront Packing
Roth Farms
Simonson Farms, Inc.
Southern Hill Farms
Star Farms Corp.
Start Ranch Enterprises, Inc.
Stein Sugar Farms, Inc.
Stewart Stein Farms, Inc.
Straughn Farms
Sugar & Spice, Inc.
Sugar Cane Growers Cooperative
Syfrett Ranch
Tater Farms, LLC
Tee Pee Farms
TKM Bengard Farms
Triple F. Farms
U.S. Sugar Corp.
W.E. McKinstry, Inc.
W.G. Roe & Sons, Inc.
Wedgworth Farms, Inc.
Wilder Brothers Farms
William Kennedy Farms
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