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Judge: Water district can focus on Everglades land buy; needn't stick to prior reservoir plan

Palm Beach Post – March 24, 2011

In a landmark ruling issued Tuesday, Chief U.S. District Judge Federico Moreno reversed his prior decision to force the South Florida Water Management District to build a $700 million, city-size reservoir and instead encouraged water managers to pursue other, “viable alternatives” to clean the Everglades.

The order is a blow to a 22-year-old lawsuit by the Miccosukee Tribe, which contended that the reservoir was the most realistic route to cleansing the Everglades of pollution.

It now allows the South Florida Water Management District to shift hundreds of millions of dollars toward construction projects stalled by the lawsuit — including those slated for a massive tract of U.S. Sugar land purchased by the district.

The 12-page ruling pleased both water managers and environmentalists — who also had reversed their positions as the reservoir debate evolved.

“This is yet another win in a series of favorable judicial rulings that benefit the Everglades and the people’s water supply,” said Kirk Fordham, CEO of the Everglades Foundation. Fordham attributed the wobbly alliance between state and federal agencies, water managers and environmentalists to “widespread consensus within the scientific community” about methods to clean water headed to the Everglades.

The Miccosukee Tribe did not return a phone call or email for comment.

A district spokesperson said water managers were “pleased,” but declined to answer additional questions. David Guest, attorney for Earth Justice, which represents environmental groups, also liked the ruling but for different reasons.

“Our view was that the reservoir was a water supply reservoir for agriculture,” Guest said. “It was not going to be operated to aid the Everglades in any way. It was going to alleviate flooding but it was not going to improve pollution.”

In May 2008, two years and $272 million into the reservoir project, the district halted construction amid negotiations with U.S. Sugar Corp. to purchase over 187,000 acres of land for an alternative cleanup project. As the economy tanked, that deal dwindled, to 26,800 acres, but water managers said that tract and options for future purchases still would allow them to make inroads into Everglades contamination.

The water managers said, though, that they did not have enough money to both build water treatment areas on the new land and resume construction of the reservoir, called the EAA A-1 Reservoir.

The Miccosukee Tribe challenged the district’s decision to stop building the reservoir, arguing that the district did not have an alternative plan to clean the Everglades and had only halted construction to pursue the land deal with U.S. Sugar.

The district argued that technology had improved since 2006, when construction began on the reservoir, and that purchasing the U.S. Sugar land and building stormwater treatment areas on that land would be “the best water quality bang for the buck,” as the district’s attorney told the judge during a hearing in October 2010.

A special master appointed by the judge concluded that the models used by the district to originally push for construction of the reservoir were “inaccurate” and “contained a large number of assumptions that were not necessarily reliable,” Moreno wrote in his order Tuesday.

“It seems that given these changed circumstances, now is the time to move forward with exploring better viable alternatives rather than cling to what was promised in the past,” Moreno wrote.

The nearly $280 million spent on the massive abandoned reservoir project will not be wasted, the Everglades Foundation’s Fordham said. “It can easily be converted to a filtration marsh,” he said. “Now it’s a question of where does the state find the money.”

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