Saving the glades, sort of

The New York Times has an article by Don Van Natta and Damien Cave about the war over the Everglades:

When Governor Charlie Crist announced Florida’s $1.75 billion plan to save the Everglades by buying out a major landowner, United States Sugar, he declared that the deal would be remembered as a public acquisition “as monumental as the creation of the nation’s first national park, Yellowstone”.
Standing amid the marshes at the Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge in June of 2008, Mr. Crist said, “I can envision no better gift to the Everglades, the people of Florida and the people of America— as well as our planet— than to place in public ownership this missing link that represents the key to true restoration.” Nearly two years later, the governor’s ambitious plan to reclaim the river of grass, as the famed wetlands are known, is instead on track to rescue the fortunes of United States Sugar.
The proposal was downsized only five months after it was announced. By April of 2009, amid the deepening recession, the state said it could afford to purchase only 72,800 acres of United States Sugar’s land, for $536 million. The company would stay in business and the state would retain the option of buying the remaining 107,000 acres at a future date.
United States Sugar dictated many of the terms of the deal as state officials repeatedly made decisions against the immediate needs of the Everglades and the interests of taxpayers, an examination of thousands of state email messages and records and more than sixty interviews showed.
Efforts to restore the Everglades have picked up urgency in the last decade: the sprawling subtropical wetland, the only ecosystem of its kind, is dying for lack of clean water. Many environmentalists remain convinced that Mr. Crist’s deal with United States Sugar, even in its downsized form, offers the Everglades its best hope. But documents and interviews suggest that the price tag and terms of the deal could set back Everglades restoration for years, or even decades.
Negotiations favored United States Sugar from the start, when the state accepted two outside firms’ appraisals of the company’s land that used figures from the height of the real estate market, according to documents. When a “fairness opinion” commissioned by the state found that those appraisals had overvalued the land by $400 million, Florida officials orchestrated a public relations campaign to discredit the findings, internal e-mail showed. Appraisers from the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, which was required to sign off on the deal, were also cut out of the process after raising concerns, e-mail messages showed.
When it came time to decide which land to buy, state officials acknowledged that United States Sugar was, as one official put it during an interview, “pretty much in the driver’s seat”. The water district overseeing the restoration will end up with six large disconnected parcels under the current deal, including all of United States Sugar’s citrus groves.
State officials acknowledged that some of that land, which has been ravaged by canker, a plant disease, is useless for restoration. The officials defended the negotiations as appropriate, saying that United States Sugar needed certain tracts of farmland to continue operating.
Mr. Crist said in an interview that officials had “negotiated to try to get the very best deal we could.” He added, “We have a duty and a responsibility as good stewards to understand that we may never have this opportunity again, ever, ever.”
Supporters of the plan said the land would enable the state and federal government to build reservoirs and water treatment systems. But doing so would require deep financial reserves from the South Florida Water Management District, which oversees restoration and is financed by taxpayers in 16 counties. Internal district documents put the price tag at up to $12 billion and projected that the district would have nowhere near that amount.
In the meantime, more than a dozen projects under way as part of a 10-year-old federal and district restoration effort have been suspended or canceled in anticipation of the cost of the United States Sugar deal. Among them is a massive reservoir in western Palm Beach County that was seen as a major step toward restoration of the Everglades. In total, $1.3 billion had already been spent on the projects, according to an internal water district document.
Former Governor Jeb Bush, who initiated most of that work, said in an interview that he was “deeply disappointed” with the decision by Mr. Crist, his successor and a fellow Republican, calling the move to halt the projects a setback for restoration.

Rico says there's a ton more; click the post title to go read it.