Everglades restoration cleared another hurdle Tuesday when the chief of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers signed off on chronically stalled work needed to move water south through the central wetlands and Florida Bay.

The move puts back on track projects that environmentalists had hoped to finalize earlier this year. Despite letters from lawmakers, including Gov. Rick Scott and the U.S. Secretary of the Interior, the Corps balked at approving the work in April, preventing it from being included in a major waterworks bill that typically languishes among bipartisan bickering.

In September, Florida lawmakers mounted a rare united effort to push through bipartisan legislation authorizing $1.9 billion in projects.

“No longer will bureaucratic red tape and finger pointing stand in the way of what we all know needs to get done – sending clean water south,” said U.S. Rep. Patrick Murphy, D-Jupiter, who helped steer the law.

Related

The suite of projects, called the Central Everglades Planning Project (CEPP), was pulled from a larger Everglades restoration plan in an attempt to speed up work that has dragged on for more than a decade. The report will now go to the Secretary of the Army and the Office of Management and Budget, but is not expected to face opposition.

Watch Out for That Puddle, Soon It Could Be Federally Regulated

The EPA wants to redefine ‘the waters of the United States’ to mean virtually any wet spot in the country.

Earlier this year the Environmental Protection Agency and Army Corps of Engineers proposed a rule redefining the “waters of the United States” that are subject to regulation under the Clean Water Act. The two agencies recently finished collecting public comments on their draft rule and are deciding how to proceed. Their best course is to abandon the rule or anything like it. Here’s why:

EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy wrote in Huffington Post in March that the draft rule would clarify the meaning of the relevant terms in the law without expanding federal jurisdiction and promised it would “save us time, keep money in our pockets, cut red tape, [and] give certainty to business.” None of this is true.

The Clean Water Act of 1972 prohibits discharges into “navigable waters” without a federal permit, defining “navigable waters” as “waters of the United States.” Initially the Army Corps and EPA interpreted waters of the U.S. to mean those that could be used as channels of navigation for interstate commerce. This reading is logical and necessary because the Clean Water Act is authorized by Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce—which as Chief Justice John Marshall wrote in Gibbons v. Ogden (1824), includes the transport of passengers and goods across state lines but not the commercial or noncommercial activity within a single state.

Within a few years, however, the two agencies claimed regulatory authority over wetlands and other nonnavigable waters that had no significant connection to interstate commerce. The Supreme Court has twice rejected these claims.

In SWANCC v. Army Corps of Engineers (2001), the court forbade the Army Corps from regulating “isolated water bodies” that were not connected to traditional navigable waters. Nevertheless, the Army Corps and EPA have largely ignored or circumvented the ruling with new interpretations. They claimed that they could regulate anything with a “hydrological connection” to traditional navigable waters—including normally dry-land features such as arroyos in the desert as well as ditches and culverts hundreds of miles from traditional navigable waters.

In Rapanos v. United States (2006), the Pacific Legal Foundation challenged the agencies’ jurisdictional reach again. A majority of the justices ruled that federal agencies could not regulate wetlands merely because they have a hydrological connection to downstream navigable waters.

Nevertheless, the agencies now seek to regulate isolated water bodies and any “other water” with a hydrological connection to traditional navigable waters—the very waters the Supreme Court said they could not regulate. The draft rule redefines “waters of the United States” so broadly that it covers virtually any wet—or occasionally wet—spot in the country, including ditches, drains, seasonal puddle-like depressions, intermittent streams, ponds, impoundments, prairie potholes, and large “buffer areas” of land adjacent to every waterway.

Specifically, the draft rule would allow for federal regulation of any pond, stream or ditch that has significant effects on downstream waters—and lets the agencies aggregate the effects of similar features across an entire “ecoregion,” covering thousands of square miles, such as the Central Great Plains. Certain ditches and artificial pools are excluded from federal control—but only if they are in dry, upland areas.

Federal bureaucrats already exercise considerable discretion. For example, according to a 2004 Government Accountability Office audit, federal officials in the same Army Corps office disagree on whether a particular water feature, occasional wet spot, or land adjoining a waterway is subject to regulation under the existing rules. The GAO concluded “the definitions used to make jurisdictional determinations” were “vague.” This situation fosters uncertainty and undermines economic activity and development.

The proposed rule magnifies the problem. It starts by including all tributaries in the nation (e.g., your backyard creek), and then authorizes federal officials to decide on a case-by-case basis if any “other waters” or land should be regulated. The proposed rule also asserts that federal jurisdiction is not limited to water contained in “aquatic systems” but covers the “associated chemical, physical, and biological features” of any aquatic system “as a whole.”

What isn’t a chemical, physical or biological feature of an aquatic system as a whole? Does that cover an entire ecoregion? Probably, since agency bureaucrats generally have discretion to interpret and apply their own definitions. Rather than clarify federal jurisdiction, as promised, the proposed rule introduces vastly greater uncertainty.

By any fair reading, the proposed rule would federalize virtually all water in the nation, and much of the land, in direct contravention of Supreme Court precedent and express congressional policy in the Clean Water Act “to recognize, preserve, and protect the primary responsibilities and rights of States to prevent, reduce, and eliminate pollution, to plan the development and use . . . of land and water resources.” It is patently unreasonable and should be amended or withdrawn.

If the rule is adopted in its present form, the Pacific Legal Foundation and others will again take these two agencies to court. But that takes time. Instead, Congress, the states, and the American people should prevail on the administration to follow the law.

<img src="http://www.miamiherald.com/incoming/s91naa/picture2951602/alternates/FREE_960/photo%20(31)%20(2).JPG" alt="Sediment carried into Lake Ingraham by canals dredged a century ago at Cape Sable are gradually filling the lake with acres of mud flats." width="800" height="" title="Sediment carried into Lake Ingraham by canals dredged a century ago at Cape Sable are gradually filling the lake with acres of mud flats." class="gallery-image">

<img src="http://www.miamiherald.com/incoming/lfg5ko/picture2951604/alternates/FREE_960/Aerial%20of%20East%20Cape%20Canal%20and%20East%20Side%20Creek%20looking%20NNE%20from%20near%20canal%20mo.jpg" alt="A dam constructed on the East Cape Canal in 2011 keeps sediments from widening the canal and moving deeper into the marsh. However the East Side Creek, to the right, continues to carry sediment from the bay inland." width="800" height="" title="A dam constructed on the East Cape Canal in 2011 keeps sediments from widening the canal and moving deeper into the marsh. However the East Side Creek, to the right, continues to carry sediment from the bay inland." class="gallery-image">

<img src="http://www.miamiherald.com/incoming/xxwn4s/picture2951606/alternates/FREE_960/20111219_123706_0330.jpg" alt="Rubble piles up as a swift current rushes past a failed dam on the Raulerson Canal and further erodes canal banks." width="800" height="" title="Rubble piles up as a swift current rushes past a failed dam on the Raulerson Canal and further erodes canal banks." class="gallery-image">

<img src="http://www.miamiherald.com/incoming/grumqf/picture2951607/alternates/FREE_960/Aerial%20of%20Raulerson%20Canal%20looking%20WSW%20from%20interior%20and%20showing%20turbidity%20pl.jpg" alt="From above and looking west, a plume of sediment fills the Raulerson Canal." width="800" height="" title="From above and looking west, a plume of sediment fills the Raulerson Canal." class="gallery-image">

<img src="http://www.miamiherald.com/incoming/jcx4k3/picture2951608/alternates/FREE_960/spoonbill0208%20flamingo(2)%20(2).JPG" alt="While fisherman stalk redfish in the background, a flock of flamingos crosses a shallow-water flat on Lake Ingraham in Everglades National Park in 2012." width="800" height="" title="While fisherman stalk redfish in the background, a flock of flamingos crosses a shallow-water flat on Lake Ingraham in Everglades National Park in 2012." class="gallery-image">

<img src="http://www.miamiherald.com/incoming/t5zoq/picture2951609/alternates/FREE_960/unnamed.jpg" alt="Flamingos take flight in Florida Bay." width="800" height="" title="Flamingos take flight in Florida Bay." class="gallery-image">

    

From the sky, Florida’s rugged tip looks like a scrap of emerald green lace: marshes and mangroves and tree islands all knit together by ribbons of creeks and lakes.

But at Cape Sable, a remote outpost where the Atlantic meets the Gulf of Mexico, the coast is fraying.

Usually, geological change is so slow that “you never see something in your lifetime,” Audubon Florida biologist Peter Frezza said recently as he piloted his boat around acres of mud flats filling Lake Ingraham. “But we’re watching this happen.”

For more than a decade, scientists have seen the cape as the tip of the sword in climate change. Sliced open by canals dug through the marl dividing marshes from the bay a century ago by Henry Flagler’s land company, the cape is particularly vulnerable to rising seas. Flagler was hoping to drain the wetland and lure homesteaders and ranchers.

No one ever came that far south — swarms of mosquitoes were said to suffocate cattle — but the canals widened. And as they expanded, the coast and marshes where crocodiles nest and migrating birds refuel for transcontinental flights started collapsing like a sandcastle pounded by waves.

Wildlife managers are now in a race. The more saltwater flows into marshes, the faster they die. And the faster marshes die, the more damaging nutrients from the dead sedge and other vegetation wash into the bay.

Scientists think they have a fix. Simply plug the canals. But getting money to repair a problem accessible only by boat — and easily lost in the long list of Everglades restoration projects — has been tough. Three years ago Everglades National Park constructed $7 million dams to plug the two most damaging canals using federal stimulus grants. Now, tired of waiting for work to continue, the nonprofit Everglades Foundation has supplied $143,000 to the park service, half the cost of completing an environmental assessment needed before more money — an estimated $10 million — can be sought to plug four smaller canals.

“With the canals plugged, we may not be able to stop” the damage, said acting park superintendent Bob Krumenaker. “But we can slow down the action and make the system more resilient for a considerably longer time.”

As early as the 1950s, wildlife managers spotted trouble at the two main canals, the East Cape and Homestead. Originally dug only 15 to 20 feet wide, the canals broadened to 10 times their width with the constant scouring by tides. Workers erected earthen dams to stop the canals from widening. But hurricanes and erosion washed away the dams. About 2005, damage started increasing exponentially, Frezza said.

“Even in the last three years the rate water is moving in and out is truly astonishing,” said Carol Mitchell, deputy science director at Everglades and Dry Tortugas National Parks.

At the Raulerson Brothers Canal at the western tip of Lake Ingraham, water rushes down the canal at low tide in white-capped rapids. One morning last month, Tom Van Lent, the director of science and policy at the Everglades Foundation, pointed to three feet of exposed grass and mangrove roots, a sign of just how quickly the marsh has shrunk “like letting air out of a mattress.” A side creek that Van Lent said was impassable five years ago sends water gushing out.

Scientists fear that all the nutrients washing out of the dying marsh could profoundly damage the bay. In 1992, when a massive algae bloom turned much of Florida Bay into a smelly, slimy dead zone, scientists believe the trigger was nutrient run-off. In recent years, the amount of algae-feeding nutrients in Lake Ingraham has remained much higher than in the Everglades to the north.

“We’ll never know what triggers an algae bloom,” Van Lent said. “But adding nutrients to Florida Bay is not a good thing.”

On the flip side, sediment carried by incoming tides over the last 30 years has dramatically changed Lake Ingraham. Once a freshwater lake, it is now salty and filled with acres of barren mud flats. Audubon’s Frezza said the food chain has shrunk, with small fish declining and larger fish and seabirds going elsewhere to hunt.

“It’s not quite the dead sea, but it’s pretty bad,” Van Lent said.

Park officials hope to complete the environmental assessment within the next 18 months, Krumenaker said. The assessment will look at whether plugging the four remaining canals — the Raulerson, East Side Creek, Slagle’s Ditch and House Ditch — can slow the process and improve water quality. Once the assessment is complete, the park hopes to begin the arduous process of finding money, teaming up with nonprofits to go after grants.

“We’ll talk to anyone who’s interested in this project and has a checkbook,” Krumenaker said.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/environment/article2951611.html#storylink=cpy

"South Florida at forefront of climate planning, top U.S. scientist says " @miamiherald by Jenny Staletovich

A week before a seasonal high tide is expected to soak Miami Beach, the White House’s chief science adviser visited the city Wednesday to praise regional leaders for their work on climate change.

“What’s going on... here is really a model for what we need to see going on around the country,” John Holdren told an audience of about 650 at the Sixth Annual Southeast Florida Climate Leadership Summit at the Miami Beach Convention Center.

Holdren, who last month landed on The Daily Show after skirmishing with the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology over polar ice melt, got a decidedly warmer welcome at the gathering that drew a wide audience from government, private industry and nonprofits.

The summit, part of a compact forged four years ago among South Florida’s four counties, serves as annual wrap-up and rallying cry for addressing threats from climate change. The two-day event features about a dozen panels on public policy and and planning.

In his address, Holdren ran down a laundry list of climate-related risks from rising temperatures to worsening storms. Sitting just feet above sea level, South Florida is particularly vulnerable to both flooding and saltwater tainting water supplies.

Because porous limestone lies under Florida, controlling water can be tricky, Tommy Strowd, director of operations for the Lake Worth Drainage District and a former deputy director at the South Florida Water Management District, told the group. The system of canals and flood control structures built a half century ago to drain the Everglades that covered much of South Florida only made matters worse.

To address threats, the White House has taken a number of steps, from setting carbon limits on power plants to committing $1 billion to Everglades restoration, said policy adviser Mike Boots, who chairs the White House Council on Environmental Quality. In March, the administration also released federal data hoping to encourage scientists and private industry to come up with solutions.

“We do not have the luxury of time on this issue, so we need you... to keep acting boldly,” he told the group.

Holdren said afterward he considers South Florida a leader on the issue because it is one of the few regions that has formed a compact.