Florida is taking on a bigger role in building the nearly $4 billion Everglades Agricultural Area Reservoir, a key component of the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan.
It is intended to send needed water south to Florida Bay, while reducing harmful Lake Okeechobee discharges to coastal estuaries.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis penned a deal with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Friday, July 18, to speed up the joint federal and state project by allowing Florida to take the lead on construction. Florida will build the 6,500-acre stormwater treatment area, while the Corps will build the 10,500-acre, 78-billion-gallon reservoir, DeSantis said at a press conference at the JW Marriott Marco Island Beach Resort.
DeSantis and Acting Assistant Secretary of the Army D. Lee Forsgren signed the memorandum of understanding in front of local politicians, Marco Island City Manager Mike McNees, media and a group attending the 39th Annual Environmental Permitting Summer School conference being held at the resort.
“We are not just going to say the federal government needs to do our work for us,” DeSantis said. “There will be projects in the EAA that will be completed by the state of Florida on behalf of the Army Corps. It will be using the allocated federal funds, and it will allow us to accelerate the commitment and the investment in the project to ensure that we’re not waiting until 2034, that actually we’re going to get it done five years earlier in 2029.”
“The Army Corps will expedite permits removing red tape and authorizing Florida to manage future ER (Everglades Restoration) projects on their behalf,” DeSantis said.
When the first contracts were awarded for the EAA reservoir in 2021, the completion date was 2029, but lawsuits involving a competing construction company and from the sugar industry, along with permitting issues pushed the estimated completion date to 2034, a date shared in December 2024 with an integrated delivery schedule update. Florida and the federal government share a 50/50 funding commitment for the Everglades restoration.
“The expedited completion of the EAA Reservoir will accelerate Florida’s clean water economy and support tourism, outdoor recreation, and real estate economies,” Bradley Watson, The Everglades Foundation’s vice president of government affairs, said in a statement after the press conference. The foundation uses science and policy expertise in its fight to preserve and restore The Everglades.
The announcement came three days after DeSantis held a ribbon cutting for the Caloosahatchee Reservoir in Hendry County. Here, 18 square miles of potential storage will be designed to improve the health of the beleaguered Caloosahatchee River. When filled, it will hold 55 billion gallons of 20-foot-deep water behind 19 miles of embankments, with 15 miles of canals.
Building a reservoir larger than Manhattan
The Everglades Agricultural Area Reservoir is located south of Lake Okeechobee. It is designed to store excess lake water which will be cleaned in the adjacent stormwater treatment area Florida will build and then sent south to The Everglades. A major goal is to stop the perennial outbreaks of toxic blue-green algae and red tide fueled by Lake Okeechobee’s nutrient-laden water.
At a combined 17,000 acres, the EAA Reservoir and stormwater treatment area will be bigger than the island of Manhattan, DeSantis said. It originally was to be much larger – a proposed 60,000 acres when approved in 2017.
The reservoir when completed will provide clean freshwater to the Everglades in the dry season (December to June). The water will also help recharge the Biscayne Aquifer, which provides drinking water to millions in South Florida, while helping balance the salinity of Florida Bay, according to The Everglades Foundation. Florida Bay is a large, shallow estuary located at the southern tip of Florida, between the mainland and the Florida Keys, largely contained within Everglades National Park.
The Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP) is a large-scale ecological restoration project for the Everglades that was authorized by Congress in 2000. The 68-project federal-state effort will replumb 1.5 million acres of a World Heritage Site that provides drinking water to more than 8 million on Florida’s east coast. It aims to restore, preserve, and protect the south Florida ecosystem while addressing other water-related needs like water supply and flood protection. CERP is a massive undertaking, with a projected cost exceeding $10.5 billion and a 35-year timeline.
More than a year ago, The Everglades Foundation’s chief science office, Steve Davis, organized a “Glades briefing” for journalists, where he touted the imporantance of the EAA reservoirs.
“The reservoir project is critical to truly alleviating the types of problems we’re experiencing along the Caloosahatchee and all the way down to the estuary – those massive discharges to the west coast that are made more problematic by an inability to send lake water to the south,” he said.
DeSantis thanks Trump
DeSantis said President Donald Trump gave his blessing to the agreement with the Army Corps when he visited the Alligator Alcatraz immigrant detention center located in the Big Cypress National Preserve with him on July 1.
“I spoke to the president about this even before he took office, he’s like, ‘Hey, how can I help?’ And I was like, ‘well, this is one thing you guys have funding for is to delegate responsibility for us to bring some of these projects to completion on the Everglades.’ And he was all about it,” DeSantis said. “When he was down here for the Alligator Alcatraz, this came up and he said, ‘it’s going to happen.'”
“And I got to give credit to the Department of the Army. They’ve worked really, really closely with us to be able to get us to where we are here today,” DeSantis said. “This is a really, really big deal.”
Florida is a model partner, Forsgren said.
“We’ve had a 25-year partnership with the state of Florida and the Department of the Army feels very comfortable that the state of Florida is, we would call it a model partner,” he said. “We don’t have those in all of our projects or all our systems, but the state of Florida has proven that it is a model partner and pretty effective builder on their own right. And so, we are ecstatic to be doubling down today on that partnership.”
This article originally appeared on Marco Eagle: DeSantis pens deal for Florida to lead Everglades reservoir project with Army Corps
Reporting by J. Kyle Foster, Naples Daily News / Marco Eagle
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
