Nancy Smith: "There's No Business Like Everglades Show Business"

Nancy Smith starts off her column with this line, "Buy the land, don't buy the land -- it's all pretend, all a big show and all for naught."

Then she has this analysis:

     And then there's the matter of the University of Florida Water Institute report. When Florida lawmakers get a good look at pages 6 and 8, a half-billion-dollar land buy to stop the pollution of the St. Lucie and Caloosahatchee estuaries is going to be a tougher sell than a family vacation at the Holiday Inn Kabul. [emphasis added]
     Those two pages work like a tag team.
     I'll spare you the technical explanation. What page 6 says in everyday language is, nearly 80 percent of the water to the St. Lucie and Caloosahatchee estuaries is local basin runoff. That means only 20 percent has been coming from Lake Okeechobee.
    Then, on page 8 the report states, after completion of all the current projects -- IRL-5, C-43, the Restoration Strategies, and Central Everglades Planning Project (CEPP) -- lake discharges will be reduced only by 55 percent. But -- reducing 55 percent of the 20 percent of the water the lake contributes to the estuaries means you move that 20 percent contribution to less than 10 percent of the fresh water that goes into the estuaries.
     I know it's complicated, but this is the bottom line legislators already have heard in testimony: Florida is going a long way toward solving the lake-to-estuaries component of the water problem by working to complete the projects already on the table and with land already owned by the state.

We'll find out soon enough if Nancy Smith is correct that legislators will vote this land buy down. Five hundred million dollars could fund a whole lot of environmental projects in this state that have gone neglected for many years.