I am David Guggenheim, Florida Co-Chair of the Everglades Coalition and President & CEO of The Conservancy of Southwest Florida, based in Naples, Florida. I hold a Ph.D. in Environmental Science & Public Policy.
The Everglades Coalition represents 40 national, state and local organizations working together to protect and restore the Greater Everglades Ecosystem. The Coalition represents a broad diversity of organizations, including environmental and recreational groups, civic organizations and foundations, and represents organizations covering the broad geographical extent of the Greater Everglades Ecosystem, which stretches from the headwaters of the Kissimmee to the Florida Keys, across the entire South Florida peninsula.
The Urgency of Restoration
Today America's Everglades are our nation's most endangered ecosystem. Our lack of foresight over the past century has left the Everglades in a devastated condition that threatens not only the splendid creatures that live within and winter there from all over the nation, but a way of life for millions of people who call - and will call - South Florida their home.
The Coalition strongly believes that Congress should move forward this year to enact legislation that truly results in the restoration of America's Everglades, and we believe that the Restoration Plan submitted by the Corps clearly contains numerous strong points. However, there are several areas where the Coalition believes the legislation can be and must be improved to ensure that restoration succeeds. Our testimony provides these specific recommendations.
Last week, the Florida legislature made good on its commitment to Everglades restoration by approving legislation that establishes a long term funding plan, meeting another critical restoration milestone. Advancing the federal authorizing legislation this year will ensure that the federal and state components of this effort move forward as one, and will ensure that restoration can begin without delay.
Today, the status quo represents the greatest risk to the ecosystem and to taxpayers. We are pushing the system and the endangered species that live there to the brink, with unknown consequences. Restoring the system has already waited more than 30 years, over which time the system has seen dramatic degradation. With every passing day, restoration will be more expensive and its success more uncertain. Our biggest enemy is inaction.
Opportunities for restoration and for preventing the need for further restoration - especially opportunities for acquiring critical lands - are disappearing due to South Florida's rapid growth.
Severe habitat loss and fragmentation continues throughout South Florida at a rapid pace, and populations of threatened and endangered species continue to decline. To make matters worse, infestation by exotic species continues to spread, forcing native species from their habitat.
Without restoration, water levels and water quality will continue to be far from natural, further threatening native species. Recent fires in South Florida highlight the need to restore water tables to their natural levels.
Nearly one trillion gallons of water that the ecosystem needs is sent to tide each year. Disruption of the timing of fresh water flows has led to too little or too much fresh water in the system. Ironically, in an ecosystem that is now often desperately thirsty, our wasteful practices have managed to make fresh water a pollutant. In excess quantities, fresh water is severely damaging South Florida's estuaries, with impacts to commercially - and recreationally - important fish species. Such discharges have also affected tourism.
Last week, Lee County took steps to file an injunction against the South Florida Water Management District to stop harmful fresh water discharges from Lake Okeechobee from impacting the Caloosahatchee estuary. It is illustrative of how it has become routine to trade an impact in one part of the system for an impact in another part.
Without the ability to store fresh water, the system is suffering from a lack of this precious and ironically abundant resource. Salt-water intrusion into estuaries and groundwater is impacting freshwater populations and drinking water supplies. There has been a dramatic decline in sea trout populations over the past several decades, whose buoyant eggs depend on a specific balance of salt and fresh water.
There are numerous examples around the Greater Everglades Ecosystem that illustrate how humankind has pushed the system to its limits and underscore the urgent need for restoration.
The single greatest common characteristic among the 68 threatened and endangered species within the Everglades ecosystem is the degradation of habitat. While each has individual challenges, restoration of as much of the historic Everglades watershed will begin their road to recovery.
Only 50 Florida Panthers remain in the wild today. Population growth and agricultural expansion in South Florida are compromising the ability of natural habitats to support a self-sustaining panther population. Much of the panther's habitat lies in Southwest Florida, among the fastest growing regions in the nation today.
At Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary, wood stork nesting productivity is down 97% since 1958 due to habitat loss, especially isolated wetlands and ephemeral pools.
The fate of the Cape Sable Seaside Sparrow is precarious, forcing the system to be managed under emergency operating conditions in order to hold back water and prevent the flooding of this endangered bird's nesting habitat.
The Greater Everglades Ecosystem is a large, complex ecosystem whose components are closely interrelated. This restoration is critical to restoring the health of the overall system. The declining health of Everglades National Park is a stunning lesson of how in South Florida, land and water are inseparably linked and that protecting our public lands requires more than drawing a line on a map. Clearly, we must also protect and restore the lands and flowways around these treasures. There are numerous other examples throughout the ecosystem, including exquisite aquatic resources. For example, Florida Bay and North America's only living coral reef tract along the Florida Keys are part of this ecosystem, and their health depends upon how the system functions many miles upstream.
WRDA 2000 Legislation
The Coalition believes that Congress must pass an authorization package that puts in place a program to achieve significant restoration of the Greater Everglades Ecosystem. This can only happen if the legislation includes the specific procedural and legal tools to accomplish this unprecedented and important mission.
Recommendations to Improve Legislation
The legislation that has been drafted by the Administration and introduced in Congress clearly contains numerous strong points. For example, it appropriately establishes the priority of restoring the ecosystem first, with water supply and flood protection goals concurrent but subsidiary. The legislation also includes initial authorization of eleven projects that will provide critical benefits for the natural system.
However, the Coalition believes that the legislation should be improved in a number of areas to ensure that it achieves its intent of restoring the Everglades. We offer the following eight points:
1. Assurances for the Natural System: Stopping the Decline of the Everglades Ecosystem: First and foremost, this effort is about restoring an ecosystem. The principal goal of the CERP is to restore the natural functioning of the Greater Everglades Ecosystem. The project also has secondary benefits of flood control and water supply, which must be compatible with this principal goal. The Coalition strongly believes that the authorizing legislation must ensure that, as the CERP is put in place over time, the Everglades ecosystem does not continue to decline as a result of human or other consumptive uses. Specifically, any assurance to current consumptive users that their current flood protection and water supply "benefits" from the existing water management system will be preserved must be matched by an equivalent assurance for the natural system.
The legislation only protects sufficiently current consumptive uses. The entire natural system is not ensured its current level of water management benefits - which are already woefully inadequate as we have all now recognized - thereby allowing current consumptive users the opportunity to increase their share of the benefits. Indeed, the legislation even opens the door for future consumptive users to receive - and vest themselves in -water or flood protection, at the expense of the natural system. We believe it is unacceptable to purposefully allow the deterioration in the Everglades to increase simultaneous with implementation of the restoration plan. If allowed, the difficulty of the restoration task will be compounded and the resource placed in extreme jeopardy, particularly in the event the CERP is only partially implemented.
The true measure of success in Everglades restoration is not just that we successfully repair the damage already done to the ecosystem, but that we prevent the need for a large-scale restoration in the other portions of the system, including rapidly-developing Southwest Florida. The CERP's "Southwest Florida Study" seeks to achieve this, but will only be able to succeed if the appropriate assurance language exists in the legislation.
2. Ensuring a Full and Equal Interagency Partnership: The Department of Interior and the Corps must be co-equal partners in developing the design, plan and regulations for at least those new project features that are intended to provide benefits for federally-managed lands. The legislation appropriately requires
development of rules that will ensure that each specific CERP project achieves its intended benefits and the requirements of the so-called programmatic regulations. However, the legislation provides the Department of Interior with only a consultative role in the development of the project-specific regulations, which are the primary means by which the restoration process is implemented. This consultative role is essentially little more than Interior's current role in a process that has regularly failed the Everglades.
We believe that Interior, as the agency with legal responsibility and scientific expertise to protect the federally-managed lands, must be accorded partnership status on the projects intended to restore these lands. It has been the plight of these federal lands, most prominently Everglades National Park, which has attracted national attention and served as a catalyst for restoration of the entire ecosystem.
3. Peer Review: The authorization should institutionalize the independent peer review process led by the National Academy of Sciences to review and provide recommendations to the agencies on the restoration process for the entire 30 years. Such a body, which would be a continuation of the existing Committee on Restoration of the Greater Everglades Ecosystem (CROGEE), would also provide Congress with an independent source of expertise to enable it to better evaluate the progress of restoration projects and activities. CROGEE will scrutinize the plan to see if there are ways to achieve greater ecological restoration at a lower cost and investigate some of the plan's experimental technologies to see if they are viable. CROGEE will also play an important role in ensuring that the translation of broadly-stated goals into specific, measurable targets results in ecologically-meaningful measures.
4. Coordination of Other Federal Actions: The authorization should include a process that will ensure coordination of other federal actions in and around the Everglades with the restoration effort. It is counter-productive and poor public policy to have other federal agencies pursuing ends that are in conflict with the restoration effort, as with the inadvisable plan for a major commercial airport at the former Homestead Air Force Base at the edge of the Everglades. We believe that such a provision could have helped avoid the breakdown between federal, state, and local agencies on this matter. Similarly, CERP project features that overlap with previously-authorized restoration projects, such as the Modified Water Deliveries Project and the C-111 Project, need to be formally incorporated, at least for design purposes, into these efforts to ensure expedited and efficient restoration.
5. Pilot Projects Must Go First: There should be no irreversible or irretrievable commitment of resources to CERP project features that rely upon pilot projects for their justification. (Such a commitment of resources might include financial expenditures or natural resource destruction.) For example, the Lake Belt pilot project should also examine alternative storage approaches, expediting the benefits to the natural system, and collateral environmental impacts. In addition, adjacent wetlands potentially necessary as mitigation for the reservoir storage areas should not be impacted until completion of the pilot project.
Similarly, development of land in the L-3 IN project area should not proceed until the completion of the pilot project for this critical CERP project feature. We believe that there are many questions regarding the effectiveness of the seepage management technology on which the current concept of the larger L-3 IN project relies. The results of the pilot project will determine specifically whether or not additional land will be required in order to achieve project benefits. Indeed, we continue to recommend that the L-3 IN pilot project be significantly expedited. This project should be closely coordinated with implementation of the Modified Water Deliveries Project to avoid further delays to this current restoration program and the creation of a new problem - increased groundwater levels under private land east of the L-3 IN.
6. Clearly Stated Benefits: The authorization should be crystal-clear about what benefits it intends to provide for America's Everglades. These benefits are spelled out in some detail in the CERP documents and transmittal letter; accordingly, provisions in the legislation, such as those concerning the programmatic and project-specific regulations, should make specific reference to these documents.
7. Land Acquisition: The authorization should provide a process to expeditiously purchase lands necessary for wildlife habitat and CERP projects that are under extreme development pressure.
8. Agency Reports to Congress: The authorization should require agency reports to Congress concerning CERP's progress every two years, not every five years as currently proposed. The two-year report requirement would be consistent with the WRDA cycle and enable more engaged and effective review by Congress and the NAS.
Importance of Authorizing the Initial Package of 11 Projects
The legislation contains 11 projects for authorization this year. The Everglades Coalition believes that approval of all 11 of these projects is absolutely essential. These projects were chosen specifically for their ability, in concert, to provide significant restoration benefits within the first decade of restoration. These projects are either interconnected or provide relief to portions of the system enduring critical stress, and serve to "front-load" restoration with maximal benefits early on. In addition, approval of the initial 11 projects is important to the state/federal partnership in allowing the State to move forward rapidly with purchasing land necessary for the CERP. Given the pace of development in South
Florida, anything that delays land acquisition guarantees a higher cost to taxpayers and could serve to limit options available today.
The Coalition understands the sensitive issue of contingent authorization, but we hope that this issue does not prevent the restoration from moving forward this year. The bottom line is that the ecosystem needs a process that enables restoration to proceed expeditiously with appropriate oversight by Congress, and the Coalition would support such a process.
Approval of the Talisman Water Storage Reservoir (EAA Storage)
Included in the list of 11 projects is the first major reservoir to be constructed by the Corps - commonly referred to as the Talisman Water Storage Reservoir. This project will be built on most of the 50,000 acres of publicly owned land in the Everglades Agricultural Area (EAA) that was purchased last year at a cost of $135 million to taxpayers. This project represents one of the highest priorities of the Everglades Coalition because it begins the process of recapturing water and seasonally storing water that the Central and Southern Florida Project is currently wasting. Therefore, we believe that any Everglades Restoration legislation that fails to include an authorization for this project will be inadequate.
Storage of water in this location is also important because it is adjacent to, and will complement, the Stormwater Treatment Areas (STAB) that the State is spending $800 million to construct as part of a legal settlement. The prime location of the Talisman Reservoirs will allow for water to be stored next to these filtration marshes, and appropriately timed releases of the stored water can ensure that the wetlands function as intended and that the filtered water released into the Central Everglades is clean. Because the capacity of these filtration marshes is 240,000 acre-feet of water per year, nearby storage will negate any future temptation to "stack" inappropriate quantities of water that would diminish their effectiveness.
While evaporation of water from the Talisman Reservoir will occur, the net gain of water will still greatly increase the amount presently available for the natural system. Further, such water essentially is already being lost or mismanaged because it can only be sent to the Caloosahatchee and/or St. Lucie Estuaries, backpumped into Lake Okeechobee, or sent into the Everglades at the wrong time, with the wrong water quality, and/or in the wrong quantity.
As a result of a series of land swaps that occurred when the government purchased the Talisman lands, the government owns a contiguous block of land in the southern EAA. An agreement was signed that construction of this critical reservoir can commence in 2005. The land was purchased for the sole purpose of storing water for the restoration of the Everglades, but is being leased to sugar growers and will remain in cultivation until it is needed for restoration in 2005. To be perfectly clear, the Coalition urges all sides to abide by this contract. When this agreement expires, however, we believe that the taxpayers are entitled to utilize their investment for its intended purpose.
If Congress fails to authorize the Talisman Water Storage Reservoir this year, it is very likely that the government would miss several key dates by which the sugar growers must be notified of the termination of their leases - the first of which is October 1, 2002. This Congress cannot assume that the next Congress will act to meet that critical deadline. If these dates are missed, the leases are automatically extended in their present form (which are below fair market value), restoration is delayed, and a new de facto subsidy to the sugar industry is created.
That Talisman Water Storage Reservoir will not immediately solve all of the problems facing the Everglades, but it will provide immediate relief from the current crisis conditions by giving water managers some additional and badly needed flexibility.
The Corps' Everglades Restoration Plan (Alternative D-13R) anticipates water being stored on 60,000 acres in the EAA at a maximum depth of 6 feet. This would ultimately result in the storage of 117.3 billion gallons (360,000 acre- feet) of water on publicly owned lands in the EAA.
-- The first two phases of the Talisman lands to be utilized for water storage in the EAA are a little more than 40,000 acres. The Corps has proposed storing water at a maximum depth of six feet, therefore, the Talisman Water Storage Reservoir will store approximately 78.2 billion gallons of water (240,000 acre- feet).
From January 25, 1999 to January 24, 2000, 15.9 billion gallons (45,444 acre-feet) of polluted, phosphorus-laden water were back-pumped from the Everglades Agricultural Area into Lake Okeechobee.
-- From January 25, 1998 to January 24, 1999, 24.5 gallons (75,444 acre- feet) of polluted, phosphorus-laden water were back-pumped from the Everglades Agricultural Area into Lake Okeechobee.
Even though the South Florida Water Management District (SFWMD) estimates that the EAA is responsible for approximately 5% of the total phosphorus that is deposited in the Lake. We believe that this indicates the magnitude of the phosphorus problems, especially given that phosphorus is not naturally produced in Lake Okeechobee. The SFWMD's estimate of phosphorus levels in the Lake is illustrative of the severity of the present ecological crisis. We also believe that it clearly demonstrates the need for the Talisman Reservoir and the necessity of congressional action this year for the entire CERP.
Once one of America's premier bass fishing spots, Lake Okeechobee, is also being hurt by a management regime that has treated it as a reservoir for unwanted polluted water. As previously indicated, water managers are presently attempting to restore more natural water levels in the Lake but are finding that their options boil down to making the Lake's problem another area's problem. This "Hobson's Choice" is repeated throughout South Florida because water managers can only pit one part of the system against another part when they try to alleviate any of the numerous problem of the current C&SF; project. This scenario will continue to exist until we build water storage back into the system and demonstrates why we believe we must authorize the Talisman Reservoir this year.
Hurricane Irene dumped up to 17 inches of rain on South Florida last October. To protect their investment, sugar growers began pumping their fields before Irene's arrival and had them dry as quickly as possible after the storm. Water managers could only put the EAA's water in a finite number of places - the coastal estuaries, Lake Okeechobee, and the Central Everglades. Compared to the residential areas, Irene spared the EAA of the higher rainfall amounts. However, when the pumping practices in the EAA are coupled with the necessity of providing flood protection, water managers have only one option: Send the water to where no one lives.
We believe the water management crisis created by Hurricane Irene dramatically illustrates how the present system fails the Everglades. Since Irene, several of my colleagues have unsuccessfully attempted to obtain information from the SFWMD as to where water was pumped from and discharged. We believe that these figures would demonstrate that the Talisman Reservoir would not have solved all the problems. At the same time, however, we also believe that these figures would show how this much-needed flexibility could meet the multiple needs of South Florida and the Everglades.
The Everglades for All Generations
One of the highlights of my work at The Conservancy is our education program. Each year, we teach thousands of school children about their home in the Western Everglades. We take many of these children into the field to experience a swamp walk, a beach hike or a snorkeling adventure. Invariably, they are touched by a profound sense of awe and wonder, and are bursting with hundreds of questions about what they see. But they are troubled to learn that the Everglades were suffering back when I was their age, and it is hard for them to understand why the Everglades are still imperiled today. Today we stand at the brink of a tremendous opportunity to right a terrible wrong, to rescue a beloved ecosystem before it is too late. It is a responsibility we must accept on behalf of our children and their children. Our success now depends upon swift and decisive action, and with our presented modifications, the restoration bill is stronger.
The Everglades Coalition is grateful for the opportunity to provide input to the Committee, and we sincerely thank you for your leadership and vision on restoring America's Everglades.