The readers’ forum

SFWMD returns to its core mission

A more streamlined, mission-focused budget at the South Florida Water Management District will continue to deliver progress in Everglades restoration without abandoning the science that supports it, as some critics fear. In streamlining operations and returning the agency to its core mission of flood control, water supply and ecosystem restoration, the District is appropriately assessing the scope of science, research and monitoring.

Over the past six years, we have invested more than $250 million in the monitoring and assessment of South Florida’s ecosystem and flood-control system. To gather water-quality information alone, the District annually collects samples from close to 2,000 monitoring stations and runs more than 300,000 laboratory tests. To evaluate water flow, we gather data from 4,500 sensors at more than 500 sites throughout the greater Everglades.

More than $32 million has been committed for monitoring to produce data that will be helpful to restoration projects.

This funding is further enhanced by significant investments made by other government, academic and environmental organizations.

As a partner in the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP), we also finance a Monitoring and Assessment Program (MAP), in which we have invested $75 million over 10 years together with our federal partners. We now have in hand more than a decade of pre-project data, plus the knowledge that some of the data aren’t as applicable to restoration objectives as originally thought.

As CERP projects become authorized by Congress and construction a reality, we can verify the level of pre-project data and refocus our monitoring efforts on measuring the response of the ecosystem to implemented restoration projects. In the meantime, it’s incumbent upon state, federal and local partners to reevaluate the MAP program. We must strike the right balance between allocating taxpayer dollars toward monitoring the environment and building the projects that will improve it.

Melissa Meeker, executive director, South Florida Water Management District, West Palm Beach