Judge offers qualified praise for state Glades efforts

Though encouraged by a new pollution clean-up plan touted by Gov. Rick Scott, a Miami federal judge presses state and federal agencies to commit to paying for work that could cost $1 billion or more.

 

By CURTIS MORGAN

Cmorgan@Miamiherald.com

 

A Miami federal judge on Thursday commended Gov. Rick Scott for stepping in with a proposal to bust open a legal logjam that for two decades has hampered efforts to stem the flow of pollution into the Everglades.

 

But the praise from U.S. District Judge Alan Gold was delivered in a cautious tone and included a message that might be summed up by that familiar line from Jerry Maguire: Show me the money.

 

Gold, who has issued a series of rulings blasting the “glacial delay’’ in the federally mandated clean-up, urged state and federal environmental managers negotiating a new Everglades clean-up strategy to come back with a firm plan for both protecting the marsh and — just as important — paying for projects that could easily approach $1 billion or more.

 

While he said he was encouraged by ongoing talks to resolve two long-running federal lawsuits over farm, ranch and yard pollution poisoning the River of Grass, he cautioned that without a firm financial commitment from water managers and the state, “what we’re doing is going around in circles, again.’’

 

 

 

 

Col. Alfred A. Pantano, Jr., the district commander of the Corps of Engineers, received the Bill Sadowski Award from 1000 Friends of Florida at the 27th Annual Everglades Coalition Conference in Stuart.

The Jan. 7 award was one of several special recognitions and honorable mentions Pantano received during his last Everglades conference as the district commander before changing command in June.

The award was presented to Patano by Nathaniel Reed, chairman emeritus, founder of 1000 Friends and a Sadowski recipient himself. The award is a framed original watercolor by Quincy artist Dawn McMillan depicting wetland grasses fringed by cypress trees, a symbolic ibis in the foreground. The award is reserved for a public servant at the regional or state level whose work exemplifies the high level of commitment to growth management and the philosophy of negotiation for which Sadowski, former Secretary of the Department of Community Affairs, was known.

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Chantell and Michael Sackett’s case against the Environmental Protection Agency before the Supreme Court on Monday might appear to be David versus Goliath. But those supporting the Sacketts with friend-of-the-court briefs are corporate Goliaths like General Electric and real estate developers eager to weaken the E.P.A.’s ability to protect wetlands and waterways under the federal Clean Water Act.

The Sacketts owned a small lot about 500 feet from Idaho’s pristine Priest Lake. They filled part of it with dirt and rock in preparing to build a house. The E.P.A. determined that the lot is federally protected wetland so the Sacketts needed a permit to do the work, which they did not seek. The agency ordered the couple to remove the fill because pollutants were being discharged.

The E.P.A. can issue compliance orders directing violators to get a permit and remedy any damage they caused. But to enforce an order, the agency has to sue in federal court; it does not have power to take action against a violator on its own. The Sacketts in their brief say they had no reason to believe their lot was covered by the Clean Water Act, though there is evidence to the contrary. They argue that lack of judicial review of the compliance order violated their due process rights, though they could have challenged the order through the agency’s administrative process — and could have gotten a permit after the E.P.A. told them they needed one.

Almost every federal court that has considered the issue found that the law does not allow “judicial review of compliance orders until the E.P.A. brings an enforcement action,” as the Ninth Circuit appeals court said in ruling against the Sacketts. The court explained that this process allows the agency “to act to address environmental problems quickly and without becoming immediately entangled in litigation.” Allowing challenges to E.P.A. orders before they are enforced would give landowners the ability to delay in correcting the harm they caused. Compliance orders are useful because they allow the agency to press landowners to negotiate about mitigating harms.

This case goes far beyond the Sacketts’ right to fill in their lot without a permit. If the Supreme Court allows them to seek pre-enforcement review, it will be handing a big victory to corporations and developers who want to evade the requirements of the Clean Water Act.

01/05/2012

 

 

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency ignited a controversy in 2009 when it agreed to adopt numeric nutrient criteria for Florida waterways. EPA said the specific limits were needed to replace Florida's narrative standards that environmental groups said have failed to prevent algal blooms they say are choking waterways. However, utilities along with industry and agriculture groups generated a firestorm of opposition, saying the rules will be difficult and expensive to meet.

In December, the state Environmental Regulation Commission OK'd its own water quality rules that are intended to replace federal standards. The next stop for the state rules is the Legislature, which in 2010 passed a bill requiring any state rules costing more than $1 million to receive legislative ratification. If it OKs the new water rules, they will be sent to the EPA to consider.

By The Miami Herald Editorial

HeraldEd@MiamiHerald.com

As the Florida Legislature prepares to grapple with another tight budget year, and leaders vow to continue to build an appealing pro-business environment that reduces costs for businesses to generate more jobs, there’s one jobs creator being virtually ignored that stretches from Kissimmee near Walt Disney World to the Florida Keys: the Everglades.

Cleaning up Florida’s fabled River of Grass after decades of abuse from polluted rainwater runoff draining from area farms, homes and businesses into the ’Glades ecosystem is not only necessary but economically desirable. The 27th annual Everglades Coalition conference underway this week appropriately titled its meeting: “Everglades Restoration: Worth Every Penny.”

The numbers tell why.

Just in the past three years, in the midst of a recession, Everglades restoration projects — whether they redirect canals or elevate roadways or make other needed environmental fixes — have generated 10,500 jobs. Add to that the spin-off of tourism, recreational fishing and other ventures and as many as 442,000 jobs will materialize in the next decades, according to the coalition.

Building the bridge on the Tamiami Trail, which will help restore water flows to the river, is putting 1,212 people to work.

Even as Florida struggles to balance its budget for the coming year, Gov. Rick Scott and the Legislature have to see why the Everglades is not only a water source for agriculture and drinking water for one in three Floridians — the major water source, in fact, for South Florida residents — but also a boon for business.

This is, after all, an international treasure, a rare river that’s more grass than water to the eye, 100 miles long and 60 miles wide, where tourists near and far come to watch flocking birds and gator brawls.

The Everglades ecosystem isn’t some isolated sore spot. It runs from central Florida’s Kissimmee Chain of Lakes into Lake Okeechobee (our water supply) and through the River of Grass, out to Florida Bay and the Keys. Hundreds of thousands of jobs already depend on it.

Visitors to Everglades National Park spend about $165 million a year. And the jobs created by restoration projects pay well, too. Hydrologists, engineers, geologists, surveyors — those are the kinds of jobs Florida should want to keep.

Job-killing government regulators are at it again. Now they want to take away our beloved pythons.

Well, to be clear, not my beloved python. I’ve never been quite comfortable with the idea of a pet that would devour me without compunction. (I’ve enough trouble maintaining personal relationships with cold-blooded humans.)

But these days, all right-thinking citizens are so conditioned to oppose government regulators that it doesn’t much matter that the thing they want to regulate, all 13-feet of it, came slithering into the backyard swimming pool of a Palmetto Bay home on Christmas Day.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has proposed banning the importation and interstate sale of nine different big constrictors. Pythons, boas and anacondas, aside from having starring roles in our collective nightmares, have been deemed “injurious” to the environment. South Floridians figured that out years ago. Burmese pythons, tossed out by dim-witted pet owners, have been breeding in the Everglades and devouring indigenous animals like tourists at an all-you-can-eat restaurant.

Last year, Frank J. Mazzotti of the University of Florida’s Wildlife Ecology and Conservation Research and Education Center in Fort Lauderdale told a congressional committee that researchers have found 23 species of birds, 15 kinds of mammals and the occasional alligator in the bellies of captured pythons.

Wood storks, snowy egrets, great egrets, great blue herons, little blue herons and limpkins were on the python menu. Along with the endangered wood rat. Mazzotti said that where Burmese pythons have become common in the glades, marsh rabbits have turned scarce. “The only muskrats that have been seen in [Everglades National Park] in the past three years have come from the stomachs of pythons,” he said.

Other big constrictors seem to be flourishing too. William Thomas of the state’s Invasive Species Strike Force spoke Wednesday of finding Northern African pythons hereabouts. South Florida, by the way, is a long swim from northern Africa.

Not that the big snakes are content to stay put in the southern reaches of Florida. Art Roybal, a senior fish and wildlife biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service office in Vero Beach, talked Wednesday of persistent sightings of a big constrictor near Sebastian Inlet that has survived three hard winters. (Perhaps the Burmese pythons, weary of the upstart new constrictors moving into the neighborhood, are fleeing South Florida.)

Michael E. Dorcas, a biology professor at Davidson College and author of Invasive Pythons in the United States, told me that nearly all the studies he has seen show that, based on climate, pythons can survive throughout the state of Florida. Many of the models, he said, indicate that the big snakes could move even further north. Roybal thinks they could spread west along the gulf coast into Texas.

The specter of 15-foot pythons invading all 25  of Florida’s congressional districts (27 after redistricting) has created a kind of a political miracle. Eleven Florida lawmakers, both Republican and Democrat, have written the White House in a show of bipartisan unity demanding that President Obama stop equivocating and approve the proposed snake ban.

Except, these days, any talk of new environmental regulations sets off a hellfire of a reaction. Republicans get angry. Democrats get cowed. An outfit called the U.S. Association of Reptile Keepers has hired a bigtime lobbying firm (yes, in Washington even pythons have their lobbyists) to sell a wildly embellished claim that a ban would “put approximately 1 million Americans in jeopardy of becoming felons, destroy thousands of jobs, and threaten the annual $1.4 billion national and international trade in high quality captive-bred reptiles.”

Powerful members of Congress, adopting their default anti-reg position, came out against the “job-killing” ban. It seems instructive that the two leaders of the pro-snake faction, Senators Orrin Hatch and Lisa Murkowski, hail from states likely to remain unaffected by the python invasion, at least until global warming heats up Utah and Alaska.

The mindless opposition to a big-snake ban illustrates the great lesson of contemporary politics. Americans are fervently opposed to job-killing regulations unless nature gas fracking has happened to ruin their drinking water, or drilling for deep water oil has spoiled their beach, or strip mining has filled up a nearby mountain stream with coal silt or sugar cane fertilizer has spoiled their fishing in the Biscayne National Park, or a python has swallowed the family’s toy poodle. We’re united in opposition to job-killing environmental regulations unless it’s our particular environment that needs regulating.

Not that a constrictor ban would do much, at this point, to save South Florida from the slithering descendants of pet snakes. It’s too late. There’s too many on the loose. Down here, they’re beyond eradication.

But maybe, when the constrictors have wiped out the wading birds and the small mammals in the Everglades, they’ll turn on the Nile monitors and green iguanas and tegu lizards and other exotic discards of the pet reptile industry that are fast taking over South Florida. Our only hope is that these creatures, like the industry, will adopt a policy of self-regulation.

 

Age, decay and human error are behind a string of water and sewer failures.

On Christmas Eve, utility workers try to fix a water main break in Oakland Park that left that city, Fort Lauderdale and Wilton Manors without running water. R.C. White / For The Miami Herald

 

By Michael Vasquez and Carli Teproff

mrvasquez@MiamiHerald.com

The hectic nature of Christmas Eve — last-minute presents to buy, family to entertain, meals to cook — can be a mountain of stress. Now try keeping it together after all the faucets stop running.

That was the challenge presented to more than 200,000 Broward County homes and businesses this holiday season, after a ruptured water line left families high and, quite literally, dry. On Christmas Day, though the water was again flowing, it had to be boiled before families could be assured it was safe.

The National Park Service at Biscayne National Park recently released a draft General Management Plan (GMP) that proposes to close more than 20 percent of public waters to recreational boating and fishing. As local boating and sport fishing businesses that are opposed to this broad public access closure, we think there has to be a better way to balance conservation and preserve recreation.

The Park Service’s proposals include establishment of between a 10,000- and 21,000-acre marine reserve within Biscayne National Park’s boundaries. This vast marine reserve would entirely prohibit recreational fishing. Additionally, the park’s plans establish several no-combustion-engine zones that act as a de facto closure of even more of the park’s waters to boating. Engine powered boats will find it almost impossible to launch from shore and other prohibited areas within the park. Although Florida’s Fish and Wildlife Conservation says that less-restrictive measures should be implemented, these appeals have fallen on deaf ears.

Recreational boating and fishing are important contributors to the Florida economy. Biscayne National Park is the largest marine park in the national park system and one of the country’s largest urban recreational fishing areas. It supports approximately 10 million angler trips a year. Recreational boating in Florida has an overall economic impact of over $3.4 billion in retail sales. Fishing and angling activity alone contributes $7.5 billion to our economy.

The Biscayne General Management Plan proposes closures to both boating and fishing, that if implemented will close public access, limit visitor experiences and directly affect the thousands of recreational boating and fishing jobs and retail sales that service Biscayne National Park.

We urge the National Park Service to eliminate the concept of marine reserves and the massive no-combustion-engine zones that are proposed in the draft GMP and instead work collaboratively with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, boaters and fishermen to develop a management plan that will preserve the park’s valuable natural resources while maintaining public access.

Scott Deal, president, Maverick Boat Company Inc., Fort Pierce

Joe Neber, president, Contender Boats Inc., Homestead

Carl Liederman, American Sportfishing Association, Miami