to go to the Sawgrass Rebellion's website.
to the excellent "GetNaples" resource site.
Posted on 09/11/2002 10:36:10 AM PDT by AAABEST
For the first time Tuesday, Interior Secretary Gale Norton publicly voiced her support of federal property buyouts for Everglades restoration.
Norton said the current impasse over property in a controversial area in Miami-Dade County is posing a hurdle to the overall restoration.
At issue is a plan to purchase about 100 homes on the western fringe of an area known as the 8 1/2 square-mile area to clear the way for increased water flows into Everglades National Park and, ultimately, into Florida Bay.
The increased flows, known as the Modified Waters Delivery project, must occur before many projects in the $8 billion restoration can commence. Last month, the Army Corps of Engineers halted work on a crucial restoration project in that region because of the impasse in the 8 1/2 square-mile area.
"Legally, other aspects of the Everglades restoration cannot go forward until the Modified Waters project is well under way," Norton told reporters. "We have to get past this hurdle."
The "hurdle" has delayed work on Modified Waters for more than a decade. The Corps of Engineers originally proposed building a protective levy around the residents, but there is scientific disagreement over whether it would protect the residents and achieve restoration at the same time.
So the Corps proposed an alternative, which was to purchase a small portion of the area in the lowest-lying parts adjacent to the park. The residents sued, saying the plan violated a mandate in a 1989 law that called for protecting all of them from the restoration's increased water flows.
A federal judge ruled in favor of the 8 1/2 square-mile residents this summer. In response, Congress is trying to craft a new law allowing the compromise to go forward. The House rejected the change this summer, but Florida Sens. Bob Graham and Bill Nelson were successful last week in getting it included in the Interior Department spending bill for 2003.
Norton's public support of the buyouts could help the provision stay intact in a final bill that emerges from a House-Senate conference, said Shannon Estenoz, an Everglades policy expert at the World Wildlife Fund.
Before this week, top-level officials in the Bush Administration had been silent on the matter.
"This is precisely the kind of public support that we were hoping would come out of the administration," Estenoz said. "I think that's pretty significant."
On the same day Norton made her comments, top Corps officials from Florida were in Washington, briefing lawmakers' staff on the history surrounding the 8 1/2 square-mile area.
If the legislative measure fails, the Corps will push for an appeal of the federal judge's ruling that sided with the residents, said Dennis Duke, the Corps' program manager for ecosystem restoration.
Until the dispute is settled, restoration work there "is closed for a bit," he said. "We've suspended most activities."
Advocates for residents in the area are angry. They insist that the original plan to build a levy around them would have worked for everyone, at much less cost to taxpayers.
"(The buyout) is a political solution, not a technical solution and not a humane solution," said Joette Lorian, who lobbies for the Miccosukee Indian Tribe, which owns land near the area. She claims the government will spend $58 million more to purchase and condemn properties there than to build a wall around them.
"If we continue doing restoration in this fashion, we will lose public support for the restoration."
Exactly right. Believe it or not they already did find a different way to do it and protect the homes. Congress authorized money to have the area protected by levees in such a way that would not affect sheet flow. Everyone was happy. In fact NEPA requires that there be no damage to communities invovled in restoration.
The envirals, the ACOE and other political interests decided they wanted the people gone and are changing the rules mid stream. The Green Non-governmentals are already beefing up their land aquisition departments.
Any decent person should be outraged by this dispicible and ill-intended land grab. It has not a damn thing to do with saving the environment. It's political payoff for commercial interests and fringe "environmental" groups that have become little more than real estate investment conglomerates.
I've never liked this woman...MUD
The Second Amendment...
America's Original Homeland Security !!
Molon Labe !!
Remember all the free vacations to Florida in the late sixties to get people to buy in Ft. Myers? I remember dear old dad saying the land was man-made. Well, my parents took the vacation-pressure sales pitch but then moved to Clearwater.
Why, well... sure! Whatever furthers the socialist agenda. Truth, lies -- whatever works!
Privatization is the answer, not nationalization.
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