Despite historic funding for Everglades restoration, work falls behind schedule
As Everglades restoration heads toward the quarter century mark, work to revive a wetlands the size of Puerto Rico continues to battle delays.
A towering four-story embankment wall needed for a deep reservoir pushed by state lawmakers and touted by Gov. Ron DeSantis as a crown jewel will not be completed until 2034, four years later than scheduled last year.
Projects to the south needed to move water out of conservation areas where tribal tree islands are continually flooded and into Florida Bay could also be delayed into the 2030s, years later than planned just after the reservoir was authorized.
And authorizations for a massive project targeting Biscayne Bay and southern marshes , which could fight flooding and improve water quality, were each pushed back two years.
Officials with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the South Florida Water Management District, which manage the work jointly, said money was not the issue: restoration work has received historic funding. The contract for the reservoir alone amounts to $2.78 billion and ranks as the highest ever awarded by the Corps' Jacksonville district. Instead, they blamed the complexity of the large-scale projects first authorized by Congress in 2000.
"We can't just dig dirt faster to do projects faster," Jennifer Reynolds, the district chief for restoration and former deputy commander for the Army Corps, said during a partner task force meeting last week.
The latest update on work was provided when the Corps unveiled the draft work schedule updated yearly during a workshop the day before. The delays, particularly at the southern end where the Miccosukee Tribe's ancestral tree islands and Miami-Dade struggle with increasing flooding, triggered multiple complaints about falling behind.
"The timeline keeps slipping," Cara Capp, an Everglades policy director for the National Parks Conservation Association, said about projects for Biscayne Bay and the southern Everglades. "Planning is on hold. That's the latest email that stakeholders received."
In Cutler Bay, where the low-lying Lakes by the Bay neighborhood floods repeatedly, residents are growing more frustrated and worry land needed to complete work will only become more difficult to acquire, said environmental consultant Laura Reynolds, no relation to Jennifer Reynolds.
"This is major work that will help resiliency for our town, so it's concerning that, what is it 70 to 80% of the budget, will go to the EAA reservoir," she said. "We have to see some successes and we need to talk about successes that mean something to people, or we're not going to get any funding."
The delays for Biscayne Bay mark the fourth time work was pushed back, said Scott Pollowitz, executive coordinator for Friends of Biscayne Bay.
"The millions of residents of Miami-Dade, Biscayne Bay's ecosystems and Everglades National Park cannot afford to delay these projects," he said.
Because the project is located in such a densely populated area, the Army Corps decided it needed more data and more time to study projects before asking Congress for authorization, explained Corps Ecosystem Branch Chief Eva Velez.
"Because of how urbanized this area has become, because of how close everyone is, and also the soil conditions, we need more data in order to get to the right level of confidence of what it's going to cost should this get authorized by Congress," she said.
With so much work being done on the massive reservoir in Palm Beach County near sugarcane fields, concern is also deepening that the focus of restoration has shifted away from the southern end – where fixing Everglades National Park provided the legal and political support needed for the sprawling $23 billion restoration effort. Instead, pollution control has driven projects. In recent years, algae blooms in the St. Lucie estuary and Caloosahatchee worsened by nutrient-polluted water from Lake Okeechobee have dominated work, propelling projects forward to construct deepwater reservoirs to divert dirty water.
"The tribe has been questioning why there has been such a shift in some of the projects that were supposed to be aimed at the southern part of the system," said Kevin Kevin Cunniff, resiliency chief for the Miccosukee Tribe. "What might it take to be able to reverse the shift?"
Moving water south to areas where it flowed historically – down Shark River to the southwest coast, south into Florida Bay and east to Biscayne Bay – was the aim of reconnecting the system. But the pressure in restoring wetlands in booming South Florida is taking a toll. Efforts to bridge the Tamiami Trail to move water south stalled over real estate negotiations. The same thing happened with two pump stations.
"I'm still scratching my head a little to understand where the priority shifts have been and why," Cuniff said.
Even the state's chief science officer, Mark Rains, raised questions.
"I don't actually look at the [schedule] deadlines anymore because I don't understand what they're telling me," said Rains, a wetlands ecologist, who asked if there was a way to better explain the scheduling. "It seems completely mystifying to me."
Much of the delay, officials said, comes from the nitty gritty work of building infrastructure to move and hold water in areas already heavily developed: design details, analyzing the local geology, dealing with existing utilities, obtaining land and striking agreements with different government agencies involved in doing the work.
"It used to be easy. It used to be just about money. But we're not in that place anymore," said Jennifer Reynolds. "The place that we're in now is that we have to think about all of the things that have to happen before you can actually put a bulldozer on the ground."
