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Nancy Smith

More Testimony: 'Cost-Prohibitive' Reservoir Won't Halt Coasts' Algae

January 26, 2017 - 6:00am
Ernie Barnett
Ernie Barnett

You want a reservoir south of Lake Okeechobee? Look at the $3 million study completed for the Central Everglades Plan, Ernie Barnett told senators Wednesday.

It tells you a reservoir like the one Senate President Joe Negron pursues is cost-prohibitive. And worse. It won't accomplish the main object of the exercise, halting the need for Lake Okeechobee discharges and ending future algal blooms. 

I consider Barnett, executive director of the Florida Land Council and president of Water and Land Advisors, Inc, the most knowledgeable authority on the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan. I've heard him talk about the CEPP plan vs. Negron's plan several times in the past six months. So when he delivered his remarks Wednesday before a Senate appropriations subcommittee, he did so in the even, objective, matter-of-fact way that defines his style.  See the entire meeting here  -- Barnett is the fourth presenter. 

When Negron and scientists at the Everglades Foundation say the original CERP plan calls for a large reservoir or reservoirs south of Lake Okeechobee, they're right. It does. On page 9-9 of the Final CERP Feasibility Report in 1992, the plan includes "above-ground reservoir(s) with a total storage capacity of approximately 360,000 acre-feet located in the Everglades Agricultural Area in western Palm Beach County and conveyance capacity increases for the Miami, North New River, and Bolles and Cross Canals."

But it also says this: "The initial design for the reservoir(s) assumed 60,000 acres, divided into three, equally sized compartments (1, 2, and 3), with the water level fluctuating up to 6 feet above grade in each compartment. The final size, depth and configuration of this facility will be determined through more detailed planning and design."

Here's the rub:  That "detailed planning and design" work was completed in the Central Everglades Plan, which evaluated the larger 12-foot-deep reservoir ... but it concluded such a reservoir was "not cost-effective."

How not-cost-effective are we talking about?

Deep-water storage worked well, the study showed, but it was screened out because of excess costs with nominal improvement in performance .

  • The selected plan provided 200,000 acre feet of average annual Lake Okeechobee water deliveries to the Everglades water catchment areas (WCAs) at a cost of approximately $560 million;
  • The deep storage provided 240,000 acre feet of average annual Lake Okeechobee water deliveries to the Everglades WCAs at a cost of $1.8 billion to $2 billion;
  • This equates to a 400-600 percent increase in costs while providing only 20 percent more benefits.

And worst of all is the bottom line -- the line legislators most need to consider going into any vote on the Negron plan: It won't solve the problem. 

"You can spend several billion dollars on this new south reservoir," Barnett told me after the meeting, "and you'll still have 20, 30, 40 years of lake releases. This will not stop them." He ran out of time, he said, before he could make that final point.

During the 4-11 months of wet season, the Everglades floods, animals have no escape and need what high ground they can find. Canals and reservoirs fill and water can't be moved south without endangering the whole ecosystem.

By the way, the detailed planning and design for the first increment of EAA Storage as formulated in the CEPP Plan is in paragraph 2 of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' Chief of Engineers Report.

A wide combination of storage capacity, reservoir sizes and configurations were evaluated in the Central Everglades Planning Project. Nothing has changed since this analysis. It's completely illogical, don't you think, to formulate the next increment of the plan before the first increment is even under construction?

When asked by one of the subcommittee members, Barnett made a point of telling senators the Central Everglades Plan has several intricate parts, all interconnected. Alter the design now and restoration delay is inevitable. This is why I despair.

Everglades Foundation head scientist Tom Van Lent, who spoke just ahead of Barnett in favor of the Negron plan, was referring to CERP/CEPP when he said, "We have to fix the design problems in this if we're going to solve our (discharge) problems."  

"Fixing" anything that doesn't absolutely need it is going to create interminable delay for Everglades restoration, which is showing a $5.5 billion project backlog as it is.  The massive project is a barbed-wire tangle of stakeholders, regulations, litigation and federal foot-dragging. It has already been going on for decades. Now that it's getting somewhere, now that we see progress at last, I fear we're about to fall into another costly and depressing delay.

A fact sheet on CEPP issued jointly in March 2015 by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the South Florida Water Management District says this: "The CERP components identified to be studied as part of the Central Everglades Planning Project are the Everglades Agricultural Storage Reservoirs, Water Conservation Area 3 (WCA-3) Decompartmentalization and Sheetflow Enhancement, S-356 Pump Station Modifications, L-31 Levee Seepage Management, Flow to Northwest and Central WCA-3A, and Everglades Rain-Driven Operations. These components are highly interdependent  features (emphasis mine) of the recommended plan that are being formulated, optimized and implemented in a comprehensive and integrated manner. They make up the heart of the CERP and will lead to the next suite of restoration projects."

(See the fact sheet, "Getting to the Heart of CERP", in the attachment below.)

You don't have to know what every feature on that list means or does to understand that introducing a new 66,000-acre reservoir, with all the plumbing and moving parts that go with it, is going to create God-only-knows-how-much havoc with the CERP timetable.

Asked by Sen. Rob Bradley, chairman of the Senate subcommittee, what he wants to see the state do, Barnett said stay the course, expand water storage capacity to the north where it can capture pollutants before they enter the lake, shore up the dike so the lake can hold another foot and a half of water, and add deep well injection to the reservoir at work south of the lake.  "We have between a million acre feet and 3.3 acre feet of storage already in the plan," he said.

As soon as the meeting adjourned, the South Florida Water Management District weighed in with a statement opposing the remarks of Van Lent, who testified to the superiority of water storage south vs. north of the lake. "For a contradiction of today's claims and an objective account of Everglades storage issues," said SFWMD, please see the Jan. 11 testimony to the same subcommittee by University of Florida Water Institute Director Wendy Graham. On the topic of benefits of both northern and southern water storage in the Everglades, she stated at the 31:45 mark of her testimony: 'If you want to protect the estuaries, it's pretty equal north or south of the Lake.'"

TOMORROW: A look at the testimony given by Harbor Branch/FAU marine biologist Brian Lapointe 

Reach Nancy Smith at nsmith@sunshinestatenews.com or at 228-282-2423. Twitter: @NancyLBSmith

Comments

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Nancy, you're on the wrong side here! Very disappointing to me from the days I knew you as the Editor of the Stuart News. You are trying to throw Martin County under the bus!

Why can't Mr. Negron be honest? How much has the Foundation donated to his and his wife's campaigns both in funds , in-kind services and the outright threat to vote against him if he doesn't back the Foundations continued hatred of ag business is S Florida? What deceit these people practice. The lies and exaggerations never end. Buses going to schools? Are you kidding?? You can't just lie to adults but now you lie to our kids.??? Mr. Negron - we have no ability to stop the FOundation save not donating as they wish we would. But Mr Negron - we can stop you. You will have opponents and we WILL work to stop you and this absurd capitulation to an openly aggressive, dishonest organization willing to twist fact to fiction, deceive the public with lies, and assume their voting power will overwhelm the facts, logic and the rest of us. No Mr Negron - our state, our kids and our lives are more important than your political future and the donations the Foundation uses this issue to grow their budgets. We WILL stop you. And we will not capitulate as you have. Mr Negron - you have deceived enough folks. This is plain politics. Shame on you. Florida deserves better. Your time will come. In the meantime we will STOP YOU AND THE FOUNDATION.

Brian Lapointe helped save the Keys, based on 20 years of nutrient research. He was right there that septic tanks were leaching and destroying the waters and the reef. He is correct in the River as well. Negron is reacting to constituents and not to facts. If they get rid of septic tanks, the problems will be gone as well. Force the counties to grow up and have proper wastewater, Florida should not pay for ponds, nor the responsibility of municipal governments.

Comments are now closed.

nancy smith
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