Lawmakers at the state and federal levels have earmarked a combined $1.165 billion for the next 12 month's worth of work restoring the Florida Everglades.
The amount sets a record for how much money taxpayers are willing to spend in one year on the restoration, and shines bright on the consensus Americans have to protect and restore the once-on-a-planet ecosystem.
"The Everglades has never seen this type of funding at these levels. And that's great," said Eric Eikenberg, chief executive of the Everglades Foundation. "But it's also at a critical time, the momentum that we're seeing right now can only be sustained with these types of dollars."
During the late 1800s and early 1900s, fortune-seeking northerners and the Army Corps dug thousands of miles of canals through ecologically sensitive lands, adding locks, pumps, and levees in a massive water management plan to drain the Everglades to get at the vast tracts of land underneath the River of Grass for cities, subdivisions, railroads, and farms.
The workers even straightened the entire length of rivers or altered the flow of the Kissimmee, St. Lucie, and Caloosahatchee.
Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Fort Myers, and Naples were among the many boomtowns that arose on the now-dry land along both of South Florida's coasts.
Nobody stopped to wonder if the thousands of miles of drainage canals dug from Florida’s east coast to its west, or building roads like Old Tamiami Trail, also known as U.S. 41, across the wide expanse of sawgrass and sedges might create havoc within a huge ecosystem that for millennia relied on a slow-motion river from present-day Orlando to the southern tip of peninsular Florida for its diversity and health.
No going back
As the water was drained away the Everglades lost its equilibrium.
Hurricanes killed thousands who didn't know Lake Okeechobee overflowed its southern bank with regularity and the water made a lazy, 100-mile journey through the heart of the Everglades that was integral to the well-being of nearly every type of flora and fauna between the lake and the Atlantic Ocean at the Keys.
Wildfires raged within the withering sawgrass and cattails, even burning down into the rich, dry peat that had built up during the thousands of years plants died and decomposed into yet another layer.
Loggers decimated cypress forests hundreds of years old, ruining marshes and swamps that were home to nesting birds, alligators, and hundreds of other plants and creatures.
Industrial agriculture operations built on land cleared around Lake Okeechobee are filling it with nutrient pollution to this day, which is often released down the Caloosahatchee and St. Lucie rivers as is happening right now, polluting their estuaries, too.
Some native plants and animals have ceased to exist, while some invasive exotics such as the Burmese python and kudzu have made the Everglades home.
The land clearing was so successful that the Everglades will never be restored to more than half its former size as the metropolitan regions along both coasts now are home to more than 10 million people and growing.
At best, a restored Everglades will be the size of New Jersey.
Multi-billions, multi-decades
In 2000, Congress gave the Army Corps an $8.2 billion budget and a 30-year mandate to undo the environmental disaster it and fortune-seeking businessmen created throughout South Florida's Everglades region.
The money was woefully inadequate; the time was far too short.
Now in 2024 and six years before the original completion date, the Army Corps has said it needs more money and more time. The agency says it will take at least another $1.63 billion and two more decades — but nobody can guarantee when the restoration will be complete, and at what cost.
Link: CBS Saturday Morning News anchor marvels
at the progress of the Everglades restoration
The record one-year spending for the fiscal year 2024-25 is composed of $425 million from Congress for Everglades restoration in the budget signed by President Biden last weekend and more than $740 million Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has now approved.
“These critical investments mean that we can keep moving the needle forward on Everglades restoration, which is vital to Florida’s water-based tourism economy and the environment that supports it, said Anna Upton, chief executive of the Everglades Trust. "Our state and Floridians are fortunate to have strong leadership in support of Everglades restoration. It is because of them that we’re seeing such high levels of Everglades funding and that significant progress is being made toward restoration.”
Two years ago, environmental groups working to restore the Florida Everglades were elated to learn that $1.1 billion from 2022’s trillion-dollar federal infrastructure package had been earmarked to help pay for the massive, multi-decade restoration, then the largest amount ever.
But this year’s combined $1.165 billion sets a new record as the largest amount ever because it’s pledged for a single year’s worth of restoration efforts.
Eikenberg, of the Everglades Foundation, said President Biden has already mentioned some $444 million more in the next federal budget for Everglades restoration.
“The funding that we're seeing out of Washington and Tallahassee are enabling us to stay on track,” Eikenberg said. "We'll certainly be working with Governor DeSantis and the legislature when they convene in 2025 to seek over a billion dollars in combined funding, again.”
Most unique in the world
The heart of the Everglades restoration is liquid — making sure there is enough water, that it's clean enough, and that it's heading to all the right places.
The billions of dollars already spent on the restoration allow for big water projects.
The South Florida Water Management District is building a 6,500-acre stormwater treatment wetland that will allow more water to flow south into the Everglades. The district said the treatment wetland is scheduled to reach completion this year.
The Army Corps is building a key reservoir, which will be 10,500 acres with 240,000 acre-feet of storage. The agency said the project will capture, store, treat, and deliver clean water to the Everglades and Florida Bay, where it is needed while protecting the St. Lucie and Caloosahatchee rivers from harmful and damaging releases from Lake Okeechobee.
Another big, necessary project underway is to raise miles-long sections of Old Tamiami Trail off the ground and onto a bridge.
Now instead of a two-lane dam that cut off the lazy, southern flow of water from Naples to Miami, the River of Grass will be flowing unimpeded south into Everglades National Park.
After flowing through the park, the water mixes into Florida Bay at the southern tip of peninsular Florida, then mixes with seawater in one of the most unique ecosystems in the world.
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