State lawmakers in Miami-Dade County are questioning the wisdom of the state’s planned $1.34 billion buyout of U.S. Sugar Corp.
A press release from state Rep. Juan Zapata, R-Miami, chairman of the Miami-Dade legislative delegation, said the delegation of lawmakers has serious concerns about the expense and effectiveness of the buyout, which is designed to restore a natural flow-way of water between Lake Okeechobee and the southern Everglades.
The lawmakers announced their own public hearing, to be held at 2 p.m., Wednesday, to gather input on the sale of land to the South Florida Water Management District.
According to the press release, Zapata sent a letter expressing concerns and inviting water district officials to brief lawmakers. The district’s governing board is set to vote on the buyout Dec. 16. U.S. Sugar’s board approved the sale contract Monday.
“Although we are all supportive of the Everglades restoration and restoring its natural flow, several members have expressed serious doubt whether this is the correct action to take at this time,” Zapata said in the release.
State Rep. Erik Fresen, R-Miami, said in the release he has “grave concerns with the concept of an unelected board spending over $1 billion of taxpayer funds on land at a time when I’m having to tell social service, health care and education providers that we’re making major cuts that will affect our most vulnerable citizens.”
Meanwhile the U.S. Sugar board’s approval of the sale was blasted by The Lawrence Group of Tennessee, which has attempted to make a competing offer to buy the sugar giant in its entirety.
A press release from The Lawrence Group expressed “surprise and extreme disappointment at the announcement yesterday that the Board of Directors of United States Sugar Corporation had approved the contract.”
Water modification to improve Everglades and Miccosukee tribal lands
By Daily News staff
WEST PALM BEACH — Thousands of acres of wetlands will be returned to a more natural state through a project requested by the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida and supported by the South Florida Water Management District.
Construction of a water-control weir in the L-28 canal near Interstate 75 in Broward County will improve rainfall retention in the wetlands, re-hydrating about 8,000 acres within a triangular area bordered by I-75 and two canal levees, according to the water district. The SFWMD Governing Board this week approved $220,000 in additional funding for the project, on top of $600,000 previously approved in October 2007.
“This project represents cooperation between the district and the Miccosukee Tribe to benefit the Everglades and South Florida’s environment,” said SFWMD Governing Board Chairman Eric Buermann. “It is an opportunity to return another section of Everglades wetlands to a more natural state.”
The L-28 canal runs under Alligator Alley. A pump station moves water into the water conservation area but also has impacted drainage within the triangular wetland area. About 800 acres of the property is within the Big Cypress Preserve, while the rest is owned by the Tribe.
“The Miccosukee Tribe is voluntarily restoring over 8,000 acres of land, which could have been developed, back to the Everglades,” said Gene Duncan the Tribe’s water resources director.
Water managers and the Tribe believe the land will be improved by installing a weir in the canal south of the pump station, according to a water district news release. The device, a simple wall across the canal, will hold water in the triangle at depths closer to historical conditions but will allow water to flow north to the pump station during extremely wet times.
The Tribe is responsible for the final design, permitting, construction and monitoring of the project. The project is expected to be completed next year.
Doubling the budget for South Florida water managers and potentially shelving some Everglades restoration projects are among the ways proposed to pay for the state’s bid to buyout U.S. Sugar.
The South Florida Water Management District on Thursday revealed a plan for a $2.9 billion agency budget — up from the $1.3 billion expected — that includes paying for U.S. Sugar’s 187,000 acres, mill, offices and other holdings.
The budget boost comes from adding in costs for the $1.75 billion deal proposed to move the sugar giant out of the way in a plan to reconnect Lake Okeechobee to the Everglades.
“These are hard numbers to swallow, by us and the public,” district board member Charles Dauray said.
The district proposes taking on more debt to pay for the U.S. Sugar deal without increasing taxes.
The district’s governing board on Wednesday gave an initial endorsement to keeping property taxes about 62 cents per $1,000 of taxable value for most of its 16-county region. For a $150,000 home, factoring in a $50,000 homestead exemption, that would cost residents in Broward and Palm Beach counties $62.40 a year.
“We did it within our means,” district Executive Director Carol Ann Wehle said about the U.S. Sugar deal’s budget repercussions.
Doing so required “difficult decisions,” Wehle said. The preliminary budget proposal includes:
Continuing to suspend construction of a massive reservoir in western Palm Beach County. Since June, the district has been paying contractors $1.9 million a month to stand by while water managers decide whether to proceed. Taxpayers already have invested about $250 million in the 16,700-acre reservoir that was being built along U.S. 27.
Shrinking a much-anticipated reservoir and water treatment area east of Lake Okeechobee, planned to hold water that now gets drained to the coast with damaging environmental effects. What once was a 12,000-acre project would shrink to 8,000 acres.
Holding off on building a similar reservoir on the west side of the lake, calling on the federal government to take over construction.
As negotiations with U.S. Sugar continue, the district plans to spend the summer looking for ways to prioritize construction projects before giving final approval to a spending plan in September.
One of the biggest ticket items with a future that remains in doubt is the Everglades Agricultural Area reservoir in western Palm Beach County. The district in June stopped construction on it, citing a lingering legal challenge over how the water would be used. The agency must decide whether the reservoir — with a price tag projected to hit $800 million — is needed in the new plan to use U.S. Sugar land to store, treat and move water to the Everglades.
The Natural Resources Defense Council filed the legal challenge over the reservoir, seeking guarantees that the water would be used for Everglades restoration. On Thursday, the district’s governing board passed a resolution stating that whatever happens with the U.S. Sugar deal, the agency “remains committed to restoring the Everglades” and that “the District will ensure that water will be identified for the natural system.”
The U.S. Sugar deal calls for closing on the purchase by Nov. 30.
The district’s proposed budget comes up for a vote again on Sept. 10, with a final decision scheduled for Sept. 23.
Years from now, historians may look back upon the month recently concluded as the pivotal moment in the preservation and restoration of the Everglades.
Gov. Charlie Crist rocked the environmental world in late June when he announced a tentative deal with U.S. Sugar to purchase 187,000 acres south of Lake Okeechobee.
The deal, at a potential cost of $1.75 billion, has rekindled hopes of re-establishing the natural flow of water from Lake O to the River of Grass — a process everyone agrees is vital to restoring the Everglades.
The state’s deal with U.S. Sugar has garnered much of the attention — and rightfully so.
However, another event — less publicized but highly important — also occurred in June that bodes extremely well for Everglades restoration. Moreover, it provides keen insight into the new thinking required to preserve and reinvigorate the state’s fragile ecosystem.
Shortly before the deal was announced with U.S. Sugar, the South Florida Water Management District launched a new initiative: to reserve water for environmental needs — in particular, for fish and wildlife in the Kissimmee River north of Lake O.
Because water in the Kissimmee flows into the lake — and then is distributed throughout the region for a variety of uses — the district’s decision has significant implications for all of South Florida.
District officials have taken the precedent-setting step of establishing guidelines governing the allocation of water in the Kissimmee. As Chip Merriam, deputy executive director of water resources for SFWMD, wrote in a memo to board members:
“The district … is identifying river water for consumptive use and water for the protection of fish and wildlife. The water identified for the natural system may be protected through a water reservation as contemplated and authorized under state law.”
What does this mean? The river’s environmental needs may soon take precedence over agricultural and developmental needs. Additionally, the latter groups would be allowed to tap into this source only after the natural ecosystem has received an adequate supply of water.
This is a groundbreaking approach to water management. But this is how it should be.
Contrast this important policy change with the approach by the St. Johns River Water Management District — which has allowed water-intensive developments to imperil the St. Johns River — and you begin to grasp the far-reaching implications for the environment.
South Florida water managers are to be applauded for moving boldly in this direction. St. Johns managers need to get on board.
Stricter water-reservation rules are needed — in water districts throughout the state — to ensure this valuable resource is used first for environmental needs.
Standing on his skiff, hedge fund billionaire Paul Tudor Jones II grew more confident with each cast into the salty shallows of Florida Bay - snook or no snook.His goal was more ambitious than catching a few fish. He hoped to persuade Florida’s newly elected governor, Charlie Crist, to loosen Big Sugar’s grip on the agency charged with restoring Florida’s Everglades, the South Florida Water Management District.
Success would be like catching a 16-pound bonefish, something huge, and maddeningly elusive under Gov. Jeb Bush. It would mean real progress toward Everglades restoration. Progress toward a clean and healthy Florida Bay.
No other governor, not even Big-Tobacco-slaying Democrat Lawton Chiles, had been willing to tackle sugar in hand-to-hand combat. Fighting sugar head-on was political suicide. Yet surrounded by sparkling water and mangrove flats in February 2007, Crist was receptive.
For more than 30 years, the environmental aristocrats who bankrolled state advocacy groups have sounded the same theme: Return farmland to wetlands, so that water can flow like a sheet from Lake Okeechobee to the Everglades, and finally into Florida Bay, the way nature intended.
Yet farm interests stood in the way, and in Florida government, they have remained as fixed as the horizon. In nearly 10 years, the plan to restore the Everglades had never broached a Big-Sugar buyout. All the more reason that jaws dropped when Crist last week stood side-by-side with the U.S. Sugar CEO Robert Buker, announcing the largest conservation land deal in the history of Florida, a $1.75 billion plan to buy the 80-year-old company’s assets.
How that moment came to be has been a mystery to many, from sugar industry watchers to political insiders. Crist has long had an interest in the Everglades and has assembled a staff with similar interests. But the large and complex deal also bears the imprint of Jones, a top Wall Street expert in commodities markets and a passionate conservationist who owns a vacation home in Islamorada.
Jones, traveling in Africa, did not respond to e-mailed questions about his role. But his colleagues and advisers to Crist acknowledge a relationship has developed between the two, one so close that Jones reportedly knew of Sugar’s openness to sell its assets in November, several months before the executive director of the South Florida Water Management District or even Florida Secretary of Environmental Protection Mike Sole.
Crist’s chief of staff, Eric Eikenberg, acknowledged the fishing trips and phone calls Crist and Jones have shared.
“There is a relationship there that has been formed out of respect,” said Eikenberg. “They’ve had multiple conversations since the governor took office.”
Crist is a Republican, and Jones is a top fund-raiser for Barack Obama, a Democrat. Still, the longtime politician and the liberal billionaire have much in common. Both found their environmental epiphany at the end of a fishing pole. Fish don’t like dirty water.
And both had crossed Big Sugar before. Jones had seen Crist willing to vote against the sugar lobby 12 years earlier, back when both men supported a penny-a-pound sugar tax to pay for pollution clean-up. Jones had bankrolled the sugar-tax campaign with an $11 million investment. His devotion to that cause provoked U.S. Sugar’s Buker to tell The Miami Herald in 1996 that Jones was “a cockroach.”
“You shine a light on him and he runs away,” Buker said then.
The sugar tax try failed.
Tide turns for industry
In the intervening years, both Crist and Jones grew more powerful. Jones ascended from commodities trader to Wall Street wizard, becoming one of the wealthiest men in the world according to Forbes, zipping in and out of about 30 commodities markets and assembling companies, one of which manages an estimated $20 billion in assets. Colleagues say he hasn’t traded in sugar in 15 years, and they insist he does not have any financial interest in the debt the state plans to issue for the purchase.
The 53-year-old father of four has been as devoted to his family, his recreation and his philanthropies as he is his hedge funds. Married to Australian model Sonja, Jones founded New York’s poverty-fighting Robin Hood Foundation, and he helped found Miami’s Everglades Foundation, devoted to restoring the environment.
Jones, who was born in Memphis, is an avid hunter and fisherman.
In Greenwich, Conn., he’s known for decorating his waterfront mansion at Christmastime in such an elaborate manner that he must hire off-duty police to manage the traffic.
In Islamorada, he’s known for his ownership of the Coral Bowl, a local bowling alley that he saved from closure for his children and their friends in 2000.
Jones got his start trading cotton and earned a reputation as a hedge fund genius at a young age after predicting the stock market crash of 1987. His environmental awakening came through his Islamorada neighbor, the late George Barley, who was his frequent fishing companion. Active in politics, he hedges his donations the same way he does his investments, becoming one of Obama’s top fund-raisers even as he gave the maximum to Rudolph Giuliani and Mitt Romney.
Crist, meanwhile, skipped like a stone from law-and-order legislator to attorney general to green governor, thanks in part, to the half-million worth of Jones’ checks to the state Republican Party.
Sugar’s star had not risen so high. By last summer, the sugar industry found itself facing unprecedented challenges. Free trade pressures in Washington threatened its long-protected federal subsidies. The black-gold muck that nourished its cane would not last forever, but there was a backup plan to build hundreds of thousands of homes in Palm Beach County’s Everglades Agricultural Area. The real estate downturn threatened that plan.
Meanwhile, the company was fighting a bitter and costly lawsuit from its employee-shareholders. They had learned that the company’s board, dominated by descendants of Charles Stewart Mott, had nixed an offer that would have given them nearly $100 a share more than U.S. Sugar told them their shares were worth.
Amid this, a drought and a newly environmentally sensitive water district board was, U.S. Sugar felt, threatening the dependability of its water supply.
Two months after his Florida Bay fishing trip with Jones, Crist had made two key appointments to the water district board: Miami attorney Eric Buermann was a former general counsel to the Bush-Cheney campaign, but he also carried pro-environment credentials such as a membership in the Theodore Roosevelt Society. Shannon Estenoz, a civil engineer, was a leading Everglades advocate.
Environmental leaders were thrilled with Estenoz and cautiously optimistic about Buermann. The sugar industry was less pleased, particularly with Estenoz.
Buermann became chairman of the governing board, with Estenoz as vice chair.
And things changed. There was a time when the water district could be counted on to allow farmers to recycle their polluted runoff into Lake Okeechobee when necessary. But when the historically low lake levels struck last summer, Crist’s appointees led the charge in voting against such backpumping. It made no sense to allow pollution of the waterways when they were spending billions to restore and clean them, they said.
“It was the first time they had lost in the 20 years I’ve been around,” said Tallahassee lawyer and environmental advocate Thom Rumberger. “They got slapped in the face.”
U.S. Sugar’s Robert Coker asked Crist for a meeting. In November, Coker sent two lobbyists, Brian Ballard and Mac Stipanovich, to “help him better understand our perspective,” Coker said, to see that he was “sensitive to our need for sustainability.”
They discussed backpumping, lake levels, court-ordered pollution controls. Crist ended the meeting by shocking the lobbyists.
“What the governor said was, ‘There are a lot of complex matters. Maybe what we ought to do is just buy U.S. Sugar out,’ ” Coker said.
Ballard and Stipanovich took the proposal back to Coker.
“I was very stunned. That was not the expectation we had for that meeting. What we hoped to get out of that meeting was a commitment to work on issues in a cooperative way,” he said.
And yet when the proposals went back to U.S. Sugar’s board, it was not rejected.
“When you own something and build something for 80 years, you develop an emotional attachment to the business and to the land. The descendants of Charles Stewart Mott, who make up the majority of our board, have had offers in the past for all or parts of our company and our land. They never felt it met their criteria,” he said.
But Crist’s offer had their attention.
“We believe that our company and our board and our shareholders have gotten two things. We’ve gotten reasonable fair value - not what we thought we could have gotten,” Coker said. “And at the same time, they know these lands are going to be used to ensure the future of the Florida Everglades. I think that’s a legacy they were comfortable with.”
At Crist’s announcement, a day on which God, Teddy Roosevelt and the Louisiana Purchase were invoked, Coker found himself shaking hands with George Barley’s widow, Mary, co-founder with Jones of the Everglades Foundation.
It was a strange moment. Coker and Barley had been bitter political opponents for decades.
Coker said Crist brought fresh faces to the issue. Diana Sawaya-Crane had worked for Crist when he was attorney general. He made her a cabinet aide and designated her an environmental adviser. Eikenberg, a former aide to former U.S. Rep. E. Clay Shaw, had worked on Everglades funding in Washington.
Looking for the big ‘wow’
Meanwhile, Michael Sole, Crist’s new environmental protection secretary, had regulated pollution and other matters in 17 years with the agency. Sole had experience organizing state deals to buy and preserve large tracts of land, including the Babcock Ranch Preserve.
In February, Crist asked all of them to work on assessing the feasibility and desirability of acquiring U.S. Sugar’s land.
“Every day, the concept became more and more, ‘Not only is this viable, but, wow, this is the right thing to do for Everglades restoration,’ ” Sole said.
A year earlier, Sole and Eikenberg had sat in a briefing on Everglades restoration, looking at a map with more than 200 small and complex projects needed to store dirty farm water and runoff, clean it, and enable it to flow when needed into the Everglades.
Looking at the map, Eikenberg said he could only shake his head at the complexity and expense. Water district Executive Director Carol Wehle recalls how Eikenberg ended that initial meeting.
“He said, ‘This is messy and it’s complicated, and it’s a lot of little projects. Isn’t there some big wow that would move a lot of this forward?’ ” Wehle recalled.
Buying U.S. Sugar didn’t even enter her mind. It was never on the table. Eikenberg and Sole said they didn’t raise the possibility, either.
“It never would have occurred to me to say, ‘Hey, what if we bought out U.S. Sugar,’ ” Wehle said.
That the day had come was as amazing to Wehle as it was to Eikenberg, Sole and even U.S. Sugar’s Buker, who had fought the environmentalists so hard, for so long.
Asked what had transpired in 10 years of Everglades restoration to make U.S. Sugar suddenly receptive to selling its assets, Buker, put it simply: “What changed in 10 years ago from now is the people have changed.”
The Rivers Coalition, a Treasure Coast environmental group that has sued the federal government to stop discharges from Lake Okeechobee into the St. Lucie Estuary, unanimously approved a resolution Thursday supporting a deal between the state and U.S. Sugar Corp. designed to move the water south instead.
On Tuesday, the South Florida Water Management District and the sugar company signed a “statement of principles” calling for the state to buy about 187,000 acres in the Everglades Agricultural Area for $1.8 billion. The land could be used to restore the traditional flow of water from Lake Okeechobee to the Everglades.
Establishing the flow way also is designed to significantly reduce the amount of water released into the St. Lucie Estuary.
“The Rivers Coalition is in full support of this acquisition,” said Leon Abood, chairman of the group, “providing the last is used for the southern conveyance of water from Lake Okeechobee.
But Abood said it’s too early for the group to consider dropping its lawsuit.
The Stuart-based Rivers Coalition, a consortium of local environmental groups, outdoors enthusiasts and fishing clubs, filed a federal lawsuit in November 2006 against the Army Corps of Engineers, which operates the control structures at Lake Okeechobee in an effort to end discharges that in most years send hundreds of billions of gallons of muddy, polluted fresh water into the St. Lucie Estuary.
“Over the last couple of days I’ve been asked lots of times if we’re going to drop the lawsuit,” Abood said. “The answer is unequivocally no. We’re going to keep moving forward.”
At the same time, Abood said the coalition plans to work closely with government agencies to make sure the southern flow way becomes a reality and to make sure the end result benefits Treasure Coast waterways.
“We don’t want to take our eyes off local drainage issues,” he said.
In a surprise move environmentalists call “breathtaking,” U.S. Sugar Corp. plans to announce today a deal to sell the state 187,000 acres in the Everglades for $1.75-billion.
If approved, it would be the largest conservation purchase the state has ever made, helping restore the ecosystem’s natural flow and providing a quantum leap to the effort to clean up the Everglades.
“It’s like the Louisiana Purchase for the Everglades,” said John Marshall of the Arthur R. Marshall Foundation, an advocacy group.
The effect on U.S. Sugar is also profound. A force in Florida’s economy and politics for decades, the Clewiston company could cease to exist in about five years.
The farmland, currently used for sugar cane and citrus production, is sprinkled around the south end of Lake Okeechobee. It would be converted into reservoirs and water-filtering areas. The state could trade parts to competing sugar interests for other property deemed vital to the restoration effort.
Company executives plan a 10:30 a.m. announcement in Loxahatchee along with the South Florida Water Management District and Gov. Charlie Crist.
“It would be breathtaking in its significance and priceless in value,” said Kirk Fordham, chief executive officer of the Everglades Foundation. “It would be a once-in-a-generation opportunity that would move Everglades restoration beyond all expectations.”
The deal, hashed out in secrecy over recent months, would be the state’s largest land purchase, surpassing the 74,000-acre Babcock Ranch acquisition in Charlotte and Lee counties in 2006, then considered the biggest conservation feat.
It towers over the last Everglades purchase, when the state paid $133-million in 1999 to St. Joe Co. for the 50,000-acre Talisman Sugar Plantation.
Put another way, the 187,000 acres is larger than Pinellas County, which has a land mass of almost 180,000 acres.
“This is monumental, an unprecedented opportunity,” said Jennifer Conner, a senior policy adviser at the Nature Conservancy.
Eric Draper of Audubon of Florida called the purchase the “missing link” in the restoration project, because it would connect the Everglades with Lake Okeechobee.
“This deal brings a commonsense idea to the table,” Draper said.
The entire restoration effort is the largest of its kind in the world, attempting to undo and reroute decades of flood control projects that have diverted water to make way for growth. What’s left of the ecosystem is about half the original size.
In 1999, state and federal officials unveiled a multibillion-dollar plan to return the Everglades to a semblance of its former self. The plan required capturing water before it reached the ocean and rerouting it through the Everglades.
Because of many delays, some of the restoration plan’s crucial elements are already six years behind schedule, and the cost has ballooned, according to a Government Accountability Office report released in July. Through 2006, the federal government spent $2.3-billion on Everglades restoration, while Florida spent $4.8-billion.
Environmental groups and the state have long envied the U.S. Sugar property only to be rebuffed by the company. Now, for reasons that were still unclear Monday, the company has decided to change course.
Neither U.S. Sugar nor the governor’s office would comment on the deal Monday. A few environmental leaders were still in pleasant disbelief it would happen, stunned such a major deal could be hatched in secret.
The $1.75-billion price tag is tentative as the state will have to appraise the property, as is required by law. U.S. Sugar would lease it back for about five years, offsetting some of the cost.
Property taxes paid by people in 16 counties served by the South Florida Water Management District would be leveraged to issue bonds to help raise the money.
Information from the Associated Press was used in this report.
By the numbers
187,000: Number of acres U.S. Sugar plans to sell
179,200: The land mass, in acres, of Pinellas County
$1.75-billion: The price the state has agreed to pay
700,000: Approximate amount of tons of cane sugar U.S. Sugar produces in a year.
Now that the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission has a commissioner who is knowledgeable about the Big Cypress National Preserve and the Everglades, there is a chance that the FWC will finally get the federal government to stop screwing around and do what’s right.
Ron Bergeron of Weston has spent a good portion of his life in the Everglades and the Big Cypress. Few people know the Everglades better than Bergeron, who was appointed to the FWC last summer by Gov. Charlie Crist and who refers to the ‘Glades as one of the 10 natural wonders of the world.
Bergeron has become the FWC’s point man on South Florida issues. The FWC meets Wednesday and Thursday at the IGFA Fishing Hall of Fame & Museum in Dania Beach (the meeting is open to the public). Wednesday, Bergeron will make presentations on how to manage the Addition Lands of the Big Cypress National Preserve and on Everglades restoration.
Big Cypress National Preserve, which is only an hour’s drive west of Miami and Fort Lauderdale, was created by an act of Congress in 1974 thanks to the efforts of local sportsmen who didn’t want to see the 566,000-acre area developed. In 1988, Congress established the Addition Lands, whose 147,000 acres became part of Big Cypress.
Twenty years later the Addition Lands are still closed to the public because the National Park Service and the Department of the Interior prefer to twiddle their thumbs rather than open those lands, and the FWC hasn’t pushed the feds to do what Congress mandated.
Hopefully, that will change with Bergeron leading the way.
He noted that Big Cypress was intentionally made a preserve and not a park because Congress wanted to allow traditional recreational activities such as hunting, fishing and frogging. Likewise for the Addition Lands. It’s all spelled out in the bill that created them.
“It was never intended to be a national park,” Bergeron said. “We want to follow the intent of Congress.”
Everglades National Park has gotten special treatment from the feds that has damaged the freshwater Everglades, which extend from Tamiami Trail to the Broward-Palm Beach County line. When water is abundant and the park doesn’t want water, the Everglades water conservation areas get flooded, which kills tree islands and most everything that depends on those islands for food and shelter.
A number of agencies have been stalemated on how to get water past Tamiami Trail and into the park. Bergeron supports a swale pilot project that would get water into the park through natural sloughs. He also is in favor of keeping open the canals in the Everglades, which have world-class bass fishing.
“We have a resource that should be enjoyed by the public, properly managed and properly respected,” Bergeron said. “We should be able to bring our children out bass fishing and hunting and bird-watching and protect the traditional Gladesman culture and still protect the environment.
“When I was 3 years old, I asked my grandfather to take me on his airboat. If he had said, ‘Sorry, the Everglades is closed,’ I never would’ve fallen in love with the Everglades and I wouldn’t be spending half my time trying to save the Everglades.”
This week a team from Florida Gulf Coast University planted 360 shoots of the aquatic grass vallisneria, also known as tape grass and eel grass, in shallow water on the southwest side of the 1,500-acre lake near Immokalee. Over the summer, the team will plant several thousand vallisneria shoots in the lake.
Later this year, the state will plant bulrush in the same area.
“The lake is imperiled,” research associate David Ceilley said. “The EPA and the state have recognized that it needs to be fixed. What we’re trying to do is jump-start restoration of the lake.”
Lake Trafford, a popular fishing spot for Southwest Floridians, including Lee County residents, started going downhill decades ago when its water became choked with the exotic pest plant hydrilla.
As the plant died naturally, it sank to the bottom, rotted and became muck.
Hoping to solve the hydrilla problem, officials sprayed it with herbicides in the 1970s. Tons of dead plant material rotted to increase the muck layer until it was 6 feet thick and smothered the lake’s bottom vegetation.
As muck rots, it depletes the dissolved oxygen in the water. High winds stir up the muck, and trapped nutrients become suspended in the water, sparking algal blooms. The algae suck more oxygen from the water, and fish suffocate - rotting fish also add nutrients and remove oxygen.
Over the past 12 years, the lake has experienced several major fish kills.
In November 2005, a $10.3 million project got under way to remove the equivalent of 30,000 dump-truck loads of muck from the lake. The demucking project is being paid for by Friends of Lake Trafford, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, Collier County, state monies, and the Big Cypress Basin, which is part of the South Florida Water Management District.
Most of the muck has been removed, but dredging has been temporarily stopped because water levels in the lake are too low for equipment to work.
Removing muck leaves a nice, clean lake bottom, but nice, clean lake bottoms don’t support much life. Muck is gone, plants are going in Plants set in de-mucked lake bottom
To be healthy, a lake needs vegetation, and vallisneria is one of the most important freshwater plants in North America.
Found in many freshwater bodies of the contiguous United States and parts of Mexico and Canada, vallisneria is food for fish, turtles, manatees and birds. It provides habitat for small fish, crabs, shrimp and clams and traps nutrients to help prevent algal blooms.
“We have the opportunity to re-establish native plants that are good for the environment,” said Clarence Tears, director of the Big Cypress Basin, which is putting up $25,000 for the tape grass project. “If we don’t establish native plants soon, exotic vegetation, which often grow faster, can take hold.”
To keep grazers such as turtles from eating the newly-planted vallisneria, the FGCU team covered 12 plots of 30 plants each with inverted 3-foot-diameter plastic wading pools, whose bottoms had been cut out and replaced with wire mesh.
“The idea is to get dense plots established and protected, then remove the covers and monitor the sites,” Ceilley said. “With the muck gone, the water quality will improve, and we expect nothing but improvement over time.”
In addition to FGCU’s vallisneria efforts, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission will plant $250,000 worth of bulrush just shoreward of the vallisneria.
Lack of rain has dropped Lake Trafford’s water levels to about 3.5 feet below normal for this time of year, and state biologists are waiting for water levels to rise before starting to plant.
“Bulrush is an emergent plant - it grows up out of the water,” said biologist Jon Fury. “Vallisneria doesn’t grow up out of the water. Both are good for fish and wildlife habitat.
“Small invertebrates attach themselves to the bulrush. The invertebrates attract small fish, which attract bigger fish. We’ll plant it in the littoral zone, the shallow areas, where we find most fish reproduction and recruitment.”
“Places like Corkscrew Sanctuary will benefit,” Ceilley said. “But the primary mission is to restore recreational Florida bass fishing in the lake. That’s an important resource for this area. As a fish guy myself, I’m all for that.”
