Easing South Florida flooding concerns means sending a bigger polluting flush of Lake Okeechobee water toward the already-suffering coast.

Above-normal July rains prompted the Army Corps of Engineers on Friday to increase the amount of water being drained from Lake Okeechobee west to the Caloosahatchee River and east to the St. Lucie River.

The Army Corps since May has been dumping billions of gallons of lake water through the rivers and out to sea to ease the strain on Lake Okeechobee's 70-year-old dike — considered one of the country's most at-risk of failing.

But the lake draining that helps flood control also wastes water that could be needed to boost South Florida water supplies when dry weather returns. And of greater concern now for the Caloosahatchee and St. Lucie estuaries, the prolonged dumping from the lake is fouling coastal water quality and killing marine habitat. That threatens fishing grounds and can make waterways unsafe for swimming.

"It is a damaging, devastating, horrible effect," said Mark Perry, executive director of the Florida Oceanographic Society in Stuart. "We are expecting [environmental] damage all across the board."

The increased Lake Okeechobee water releases could drain up to 6 billion gallons per day of lake water, enough to fill more than 9,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools.

Lake Okeechobee on Friday had risen to 15.24 above sea level, about 3 feet higher than this time last year.

The Army Corps tries to keep lake levels between 12.5 feet and 15.5 feet, both for the environmental health of the lake and to protect the dike. The dike is in the midst of a decades-long rehab, the initial phases of which are expected to cost $750 million.

Rising lake levels increase the risk of erosion in the lake's earthen dike, which can lead to a breach.

"We are hopeful these larger [lake] releases will allow us to stabilize the rising lake before we have to maximize flows throughout the system," said Jorge Tous, the Army Corps' chief of water management for Florida.

Lake water being dumped into the Caloosahatchee and St. Lucie rivers is a man-made consequence of the vast flood-control system aimed at keeping South Florida dry.

Water once naturally overlapped Lake Okeechobee's southern rim, flowing south in shallow sheets that replenished the Everglades.

But then farming and development got in the way, leading to the creation of the 143-mile-long Herbert Hoover Dike that now encircles the lake. Drainage canals were added to send lake water to the coast.

In addition to threatening the dike, high water can have damaging environmental consequences for the lake — drowning the aquatic plants that provide vital wildlife habitat and fishing grounds.

Yet high-volume, prolonged releases of lake water into the St. Lucie and Caloosahatchee rivers throw off the delicate balance of fresh and salt water in the estuaries. They also bring an infusion of pollutants and cloud the water along the coast.

That damaging combination can kill off oyster beds and sea grasses — vital habitat for fish, manatees and other marine life. The lake releases are already leading to algae blooms that can lead to fish kills and even make contact with the water harmful to people.

Aside from beefing up the dike, long-term help to avoid releasing lake water to the coast involves building more of the water storage and treatment areas that are part of backlogged Everglades restoration plans.

Until then, the rainy-season lake releases are expected to continue.

"It's a major problem right now because we are in the early part of tropical storm season," Perry said. "Where's our protection?"

abreid@tribune.com, 561-228-5504 or Twitter @abreidnews

Copyright © 2013, South Florida Sun-Sentinel

Jay-Z greets art-world guests before a taping of the music video of his song “Picasso Baby” at the Pace Gallery in Chelsea.

“I have no idea why I’m here,” the artist Marilyn Minter said, as she sat in a temporary V.I.P. room at the Pace Gallery in Chelsea on a steamy Wednesday. “I’m just a fame whore.”

Ms. Minter was one of hundreds of fans and art-world types — Kalup Linzy; Lawrence Weiner; Andres Serrano; George Condo; Yvonne Force Villareal; Lisa Phillips, the director of the New Museum; and Agnes Gund, MoMA’s president emerita — invited to take part in a live filming of Jay-Z’s music video for “Picasso Baby,” the art-centric song off his new album, “Magna Carta ...Holy Grail.”

The rap marathon was inspired by the performance artist Marina Abramovic’s 2010 MoMA exhibition, “The Artist Is Present,” said the art dealer Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, who is Jay-Z’s art adviser and was a host of the event along with the film director Mark Romanek. “Jay has been wanting to do something durational for some time.”

The video shoot added a welcome frisson to Chelsea as the dozy season hit its annual doldrums. And it livened up a corner of the Web, where the topic of art-world fame whores racing to sell out can be counted on to set the thumb-tappers in motion.

Stephanie Theodore, a Bushwick gallery owner, tweeted a wry suggestion that the Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei divorce his wife, marry Ms. Abramovic and form a megacult. Why not invite James Franco, the art blog Hyperallergic added, and make it an unholy threesome?

At a mere six hours, the taping was a water-cooler break by the usual standards of Ms. Abramovic, who during the run of “The Artist Is Present,” spent the equivalent of 30 full days sitting immobile in the museum atrium, while spectators took turns sitting opposite her. Still, as Mr. Linzy, a performance artist, said, “It’s epic.”

Dressed for the performance not in the Tom Ford suits he favors, but a pair of black jeans, white sneakers, a white short-sleeve shirt, a heavy gold chain, a gumball-size pinkie ring and a wristwatch from his collection of six-figure timepieces, Jay-Z rapped from a platform facing a bench reminiscent of the set of Ms. Abramovic’s original artwork.

Like Ms. Abramovic, he was a mesmeric presence, shifting spectators around as though they were iron filings drawn by a magnet. With his usual braggadocio, Jay-Z rapped lyrics like: “I want a Picasso, in my casa ... I wanna Rothko, no I wanna brothel,” and “What’s it gonna take for me to go, For y’all to see I’m the modern-day Pablo Picasso baby.”

He reminded his listeners that, like most every self-respecting millionaire mogul these days, he is an avid collector of contemporary art, although he alone turns the pursuit to his singular ends in lyrics that knowingly name-check everyone from Jeff Koons to Jean-Michel Basquiat.

In “Picasso Baby,” Jay-Z’s grab bag of references includes Mr. Condo, Art Basel Miami Beach, Francis Bacon, the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Modern and Andy Warhol. He cites Basquiat twice, preening his insider knowledge by lyrically incorporating both the artist’s given name and Samo, his original graffiti tag.

To some spectators, it was particularly bracing to watch a hip-hop god colonize a white cube world that must once have seemed as distant as Mars from the Marcy Houses in Brooklyn, the projects where Jay-Z grew up (and where he was known by his given name, Shawn Carter). “For a young black man in America to be on his level of success and rapping about art, and not what he’s wearing, is the coolest thing,” the artist Mickalene Thomas said.

“People have to realize he’s referencing artists who have been shape-shifters in themselves,” she added. “They have to know that a young person hearing him saying ‘I am Picasso,’ is going to look up Picasso.”

Ms. Minter, whose lush photorealist paintings comment on glamour and decadence, said, “Jay-Z speaks to the times we live in.”

An Mr. Weiner, an austere conceptualist, added, “Jay-Z speaks with the times he lives in.”

Unquestionably, Jay-Z manipulates our credulous times as deftly as he did a crowd that also included Judd Apatow, the designer Cynthia Rowley, Alan Cumming, Adam Driver and the artist Marcel Dzama, who came to the filming wearing a cow costume he constructed for a recent video.

“It’s great how he has really recreated the whole MoMA feel,” Mr. Dzama said. And it helped that Ms. Abramovic herself was on hand, arriving theatrically an hour into the event and emerging from a stretch S.U.V. with a turbaned chauffeur. Wearing one of the floor-length black dresses that a friend, the Givenchy designer Riccardo Tisci, creates for her, Ms. Abramovic stepped from the vehicle and glided into the gallery with the hypnotic gravity of some loopy space priestess from a sci-fi kitsch classic of the ’50s.

Cameras in her wake, she parted the crowd — “Queen of Outer Space” meets the hip-hop monarch — crossing the gallery to mount a low platform, where she and Jay-Z engaged in a pas de deux sure to go down as among the oddest moments in the annals of performance art.

Two minutes later, the dance had already been posted to Vine and gone art-world viral. “OK the video in Infinite Jest that entertains you to death has finally come and it is the Vine of Jay-Z & Marina Abramovic,” wrote @LindsayZoladz. “R.I.P. US ALL.”

Don’t close the coffin lid quite yet.

Like Ms. Abramovic, whose stare-downs at MoMA left so many participants in tears that it inspired the blog “Marina Abramovic Made Me Cry,” the Jay-Z video was too sincere, even in its cynicism, to be all bad.

To a large extent, that was owed to the hip-hop artist’s way with the crowd, both mellow and collaborative. When a generator cut out, taking with it the background music, Jay-Z called out: “Anyone got unusual talents? Anyone can do something awesome?” He then invited a ballet dancer to perform some pirouettes; the performance artist Jacolby Satterwhite to show off his vogueing; and Kiah Victoria, a music student, to blow the roof off the gallery with her a cappella rendition of a torch song.

“I just love the way Jay-Z riffs on what Marina did,” said Roselee Goldberg, the performance art historian and founder of Performa.

That the boo-birds on Twitter failed to share the love will doubtless help Jay-Z’s cause or, anyway, his record sales. The shock and peril that once characterized much performance art had been co-opted by a marketing wizard, turned, as the bloggers carped, into a tool of aesthetic predictability.

Here it seems proper to resuscitate both Andy Warhol’s famous observation that “being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art,” and to paraphrase an aphorism often attributed to the actual Picasso: mediocre artists borrow, great artists steal.

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A Big Sugar ad campaign has struck a sour note with environmentalists.

In fliers mailed to thousands of South Florida homes and in a television spot, the sugar industry touts legislation signed by Gov. Rick Scott in May — which extends a $25-an-acre tax on cane fields to help pay for an $880 million expansion of projects to reduce the flow of farm pollution flowing in the Everglades — as a “historic partnership” with environmentalists and the state that will “put the final phase of restoration into place.”

The ad boasts that “smart farming techniques" have helped preserve the Everglades and proclaims farmers the “largest private funders of Everglades restoration” with some $400 million invested in the effort to date.

The state’s three largest growers — Florida Crystals, U.S. Sugar and the Florida Sugar Cane Growers Cooperative — bankrolled the ad targeting key communities and residents in South Florida, said Brian Hughes, president of Tallahassee-based Meteoric Media Strategies, which created the ad. He wouldn’t discuss the cost or say how many people will get fliers, but called it a “modest” campaign.

“It’s not uncommon for coalitions and businesses to reach out in whatever media form to make sure people understand the facts,’’ said Hughes. “The sugar farmers are proud of the work they have put in to be part of the solution.’’

But two environmental leaders quoted in the flier supporting the legislation — Eric Draper of Florida Audubon and Eric Eikenberg of the Everglades Foundation — aren’t exactly on board with its message.

Both groups caught some flak during the legislative session from other activists who wanted the industry to pay more of the massive clean-up costs. The state has already spend some $1.2 billion constructing sprawling pollution-scrubbing artificial marshes that have not yet met strict water-quality standards for the Everglades.

Under pressure from federal judges overseeing two long-running environmental lawsuits, Scott championed an expanded clean-up plan expected to take several decades to construct. The law, aimed at raising $32 million a year, adds 10 years to a $25-per-acre tax that Everglades sugar growers pay, extending it to 2026. After that, the tax declines to $20 and then, in 2036, to $10 per acre.

Draper said the flier tells only “half of the story.”

The industry has significantly reduced its use of the damaging nutrient phosphorus, which harms native vegetation, but environmentalists contend farms should do more to reduce the volume of pollution that wash off fields after storms into South Florida’s canal system. They also argue that South Florida taxpayers, not the industry, have been stuck with the bulk of the clean-up costs through property taxes that support the South Florida Water Management District, which is managing the clean-up.

Eikenberg, chief executive officer of the Everglades Foundation, also said the bill addresses only one part of restoration efforts — water quality — and is far from the “final phase.”

There are billions of dollars of pending projects and decades of work ahead to boost the water supply and restore the natural flow to the River of Grass. That starts with a critical project for the Central Everglades that needs support from water managers to secure federal funding but has been questioned by the industry. Water managers face a key vote on the $2.2 billion suite of projects next week.

The South Florida Water Management District, one of the state’s largest landowners with some 1.5 million acres ranging from wild banks of the restored Kissimmee River to bird-covered marshes at the southern end of Miami-Dade County, is pondering unloading some of its vast holdings.

Environmentalists are closely watching what the district is calling a “land assessment process,” worried that an agency that has been forced to slash its budget over the past few years by Gov. Rick Scott and the Legislature may shed important acreage that could shrink wildlife habitat, compromise Everglades restoration projects or, worse, wind up in the hands of developers.

The district’s initial assessment, for example, includes 209 acres along Old Cutler Road bordering Biscayne Bay in Cutler Bay, which includes a 138-acre chunk the district purchased for $24.5 million less than three years ago to protect it from pending conversion into suburbia.

“Are we really going to get into the business of the South Florida Water Management District selling land fronting Biscayne Bay to a private developer?’’ said Charles Lee, director of advocacy for Audubon of Florida.

Water managers insist that’s not the intention and say they expect to keep the vast majority of the lands. One goal is to transfer or swap parcels to other government agencies, where they would continue to be used as conservation or recreation areas. The district, for instance, is negotiating transferring ownership of the 3,300-acre-plus Strazzulla wetlands in Palm Beach County to the bordering Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge.

“Clearly, we would like to see that lands bought with public money continue to be used in some public fashion,’’ said Tommy Strowd, the district’s deputy executive director.

But water managers also won’t rule out that some scattered tracts that no longer serve useful purposes may wind up for sale to private bidders — but only after another round of more thorough evaluation and appraisals, public comment and approval from the agency’s governing board.

Lawmakers ordered the state’s water-management districts to slash property tax rates by nearly a third several years ago, but Strowd said the district is not pursuing the assessment as a money maker — though it could wind up saving millions in maintenance costs.

It comes, he said, as part of an initiative ordered by Scott for every state agency to analyze whether public lands they manage fulfill “core missions.” In the case of the district, that’s defined as flood protection along with maintaining water supply, water quality and the ecological health of natural areas.

Some of the district’s parcels are clearly a poor fit — like the graceful home and 16-acre estate of former state lawmaker Edna Pearce Lockett along the Kissimmee River in Highlands County, which the district wound up with as part of a 1993 deal to acquire 423 surrounding acres. But other agencies have since passed on offers to take it over, largely because of the expense of maintaining it.

The U.S. Supreme Court gave the family of a Central Florida landowner – as well as property owners and developers across the state and country – a significant victory on Tuesday with a ruling that stands to make it tougher and more expensive for government agencies to protect the nation’s dwindling wetlands.

In a 5 to 4 decision, the court found that the St. Johns River Water Management District had imposed excessive demands on Coy Koontz Sr., who was denied a permit to build on a 15-acre plot outside of Orlando unless he offset or “mitigated” for paving over wetlands by restoring wetlands owned by the district several miles away.

Koontz died several years ago but his son, Coy Koontz Jr., said the family was ecstatic at winning a land-use legal battle dating back nearly two decades and giving other landowners “a bigger stick” to fight similar cases in the future.

“As my wife said, it certainly vindicates my father’s decision to take this fight on,” Koontz said during a media conference call organized by the Pacific Legal Foundation, a private property rights advocacy group that represented the family in the case.

Foundation attorney Paul Beard said the ruling would help protect landowners and set a higher bar for government regulators. “Anyone who owns a home or business and wants to make use of it, they will no longer be subject to willy-nilly extortion demands from permitting agencies,” he said.

But environmentalists, echoing dissenting justices, also warned that the ruling could weaken or undermine wetlands protection laws and other land-use regulations. Similar off-site “mitigation” agreements have long been an important tool for federal, state and local regulators trying to enforce a national “no net loss” of wetlands policy established by President George H. W. Bush in 1988.

The case started in 1994 when Koontz applied to dredge and fill 3.7 acres of his land while preserving the rest of the tract in Orange County’s Econlockhatchee River basin. The district rejected his plan, instead giving him the option of building on one acre or paying to restore district-owned wetlands several miles away to compensate for the environmental damage of plowing under wetlands on his own land.

Koontz sued instead, arguing the district’s demands constituted an illegal “taking” by denying him use of his land without fair compensation. He won a $376,000 award at a trial court level but the Florida Supreme Court overturned that decision in 2011, accepting the district’s argument that nothing had actually been taken from Koontz since he retained ownership of the land.

On appeal, the federal high court found the district actions violated Koontz’s property rights.

Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the conservative majority, said the district over-reached, failing to meet two key tests established in earlier rulings requiring agencies to show a “nexus” and “rough proportionality” when demanding that a property owner take actions or pay for outside work, such as wetlands mitigation or road widening, in order to obtain a permits.

Massimiliano Gioni, 39, the 2013 Venice Biennale curator is also the associate director and director of exhibitions for the New Museum. More Photos »

HONG KONG -- Despite severe thunderstorms and flooding that closed schools and suspended subway service, art collectors from across Asia and the world streamed into the Hong Kong Convention Center Wednesday for Art Basel’s first branded fair in this eastern megalopolis port.

A $2 million wall-sized Yoyoi Kusama painting, a postcard-sized Gerhard Richter painting priced at $50,000, and dust — make that kiln-fired dust — tagged at $100 were among first-day sales at the initial Hong Kong Art Basel fair, sister to namesake fairs in Miami Beach and Basel, Switzerland.

Art Basel Hong Kong was far from a carbon copy of its predecessors, all owned by Switzerland’s MCH group.

For one thing, half of Art Basel Hong Kong’s 245 participating galleries have presences in Asian cities. These include world capitals such as Beijing and Singapore along with emerging art destinations such as Makati City, Philippines, and Bangalore, India. The East-West balance is key to attracting collectors and museum groups — which Wednesday included Paris's Pompidou Center and the Dallas Museum of Art — to the fair.

“Otherwise why would you come all this way?” said Bonnie Clearwater, director of North Miami’s Museum of Contemporary Art, who brought a group of 10 Florida collectors to Hong Kong.

Another difference: A serene, almost Zen-like atmosphere. Even as the halls became heavily trafficked during the fair’s nighttime vernissage, fairgoers found none of the frenetic crush typical of Miami’s openings or the old-world stateliness of Basel.

Partly that was due to the fair’s size. Despite featuring fewer galleries than Basel and Miami Beach, the show stretched across 366,000 square feet, compared to 215,000 in Florida and 334,000 in Switzerland.

Gallerists who had worked previous art shows here — including Art HK, an existing fair that MCH purchased and reshaped — said that the typical first-day boom when collectors rush to make splashy purchases seems to be less pronounced in Hong Kong.

“It just takes a little longer,” said Sean Kelly, a New York art dealer. In Hong Kong, unlike in Miami and Basel, reserving works on opening day is more popular than buying them outright.

Credit, too, the relatively recent introduction of contemporary art to the Asian sensibility, said Rachel Lehmann of New York's Lehmann Maupin gallery, which recently opened an outpost in Hong Kong,

“I think there is an authentic need to communicate about art. The whole process of explaining, asking questions—which we a little bit forgot in the West. It’s kind of refreshing,” she said.

And then there’s local cultural influence. “I think that is the Chinese way,” said Pierre Ravelle-Chapuis, director of Van de Weghe Fine Art in New York. “They try to negotiate for low prices on the last day.”

Despite the relatively calm ambiance, Art Basel Hong Kong brought out the rich and the famous, both in terms of artworks and attendees. Works included such familiar Western artists as Andy Warhol, Joan Miró and Pablo Picasso. And in the crowd, familiar names as well, including Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, Indonesian-Chinese tycoon Budi Tek and model Kate Moss. Organizers expect about 60,000 visitors during the course of the show, which ends Sunday.

As in Miami and Basel, Hong Kong stands to gain more from Art Basel than the usual trade-convention bump in hotel bookings — namely, cultural cachet. Just as Art Basel has showcased the city beyond fun-in-the-sun frivolity, Hong Kong is hoping to prove to globetrotters that it's not just a buttoned-up business capital with killer harbor views.

A severe property crunch, however, means that Hong Kong cannot support the profusion of side fairs crucial to achieving the full-whirl "Miami effect." Instead, the city's best hope to capitalize on an Art Basel reputation boost will likely come in 2017, when the city plans to open a major contemporary art museum called M+. That museum will also help educate Chinese contemporary art collectors who are now negotiating a steep learning curve without much institutional support.

In the meantime, Art Basel Hong Kong will play primary host to this regional maturation. Indeed, much of the intrigue in the halls opening day came from seeing how galleries bet on what to sell in the rapidly developing, unpredictable Asian collectors market.

Tokyo’s Wako Works of Art, a specialist in European works, decided to play the field for its first Art Basel. It brought works ranging from $1,500 to $1.6 million, and had sold a postcard-sized Gerhard Richter painting for $50,000 during the show’s first hour.

Casa Triângulo of Sao Paolo, an Art Basel Miami Beach regular, followed success with Asian collectors for works by Brazilian artist Mariana PauloAsian at the Florida fair, bring three of her works to Hong Kong. Admittedly a little out of their element—“In Miami we know many more people,” said the gallery’s director—the gallery nevertheless sold a Paulo diptych of bold-colored coral life Wednesday for $60,000.

London’s Victoria Miro gallery and Tokyo’s Ota Fine Arts had the fair’s most notable opening-day success with their booth featuring dozens of works by international art star (and polka dot aficionado) Yayoi Kusama. Thirteen of her works had sold by sunset, including the $2 million painting, a red riot of swirling tadpole-like shapes. Galerie Gmurzynska of Zurich had similar brand-name success, selling a painting by Colombian artist Fernando Botero for $1.3 million.