PalmBeachPost.com
July 23, 2007
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/state/content/state/epaper/2007/07/23/m1a_WATER_0723.html
by Robert P. King
Decades ago, experts warned that Florida had a choice: water or growth.
Growth won.
Cities and counties kept approving homes, highways and shopping malls. Water managers kept issuing the permits. Legislators failed to demand that the necessary water exist to fuel all these dreams of expansion.
Today, amid yet another of Florida's periodic droughts, the state's leaders say people must change their ways. They say the era of cheap water is ending.
They've said it all before.
"The problem has been the incredible power of the development lobby," said Nat Reed, a Hobe Sound environmentalist who served 12 years on the board of the South Florida Water Management District. "We had the responsibility of saying no to the water, but it didn't happen. And it still doesn't happen."
Severe droughts have hit South Florida as far back as the 1940s, when Everglades wildfires blanketed coastal cities with smoke for months. A few droughts later, then-Gov. Reubin Askew organized a water summit in 1971 to find solutions. The legislature enacted sweeping changes to the state's water laws the following year.
But the problem remains unsolved.
Now millions of Floridians from Miami and Naples to Jacksonville live under watering restrictions. Statewide, residents face at least a $9 billion tab in the coming decades to capture, cleanse and store the water that future Floridians will need.
In South Florida, expanding the water supply is a major goal of the multi-decade $10.9 billion Everglades restoration. But even with that project's promised hundreds of billions of gallons, the region faces the prospect of permanent limits on water use.
All this in a state that gets an average of 53 inches of rain a year - 15 inches more than Seattle - plus enough water underground to supply every family on Earth with an Olympic-sized pool.
"It's a great challenge to grow smart instead of dumb," said veteran planner John DeGrove, who chaired the 1971 conference that inspired the creation of Florida's modern water-management system. "We fell far short of that."
Development vs. reservoirs
Worse than the growth itself, environmentalists worry about where development is heading: to the same rural lands that Florida someday may need for reservoirs. Some warn that Palm Beach County's fate could be sealed in the Everglades Agricultural Area south of Lake Okeechobee, where about 500,000 acres of farms could become suburbia's final frontier.
Water managers say they're not growth controllers, and legally they can't tell cities, counties and state planners where to steer development. Nor can they stop people from moving to Florida. All they can do is ensure that the permits won't cause any harm.
On the other hand, the harm of past decisions is now apparent, and state lawmakers recently have strengthened the district's role in planning. So the district says it is clamping down.
This year, it enacted rules to prevent cities and counties from sucking additional water out of the Everglades. Armed by legislation passed in 2005, the district is demanding that local governments prove they'll have water for their growth proposals. It's even preparing to scale back some existing water permits.
Meanwhile, water managers and municipalities are pinning their future on ever-more-expensive water technologies: recycled sewage, below-ground reservoirs, maybe desalinated sea water.
"Decisions made in the past that we're going to have this many millions of people living here are the reason why we have decided to spend so many billions of dollars on a restoration project," said Chip Merriam, a district deputy executive director.
The crisis of 1971
The warnings about Florida's water are as old as the debate on how to respond.
"The days of plentiful water and indiscriminate use cannot be sustained," the Army Corps of Engineers told Congress in 1968, three years after the end of a crippling South Florida drought.
The corps' main solution was to propose stacking more runoff in Lake Okeechobee, regardless of the ecological havoc.
Three years later, amid yet another drought and a rising environmental movement, Florida came up with a new answer: Tighten regulations on water and limit growth.
Like earlier droughts, the one in 1971 plunged the lake to near-record lows, raked the Everglades with fire and brought salt from the Atlantic creeping toward cities' wells. The region's big water agency, then called the Central and Southern Florida Flood Control District, imposed regionwide cutbacks.
"You could smell the burning muck," said former Gov. Bob Graham, who was living in Miami Lakes at the time. "Ashes fell from Palm Beach County to the Upper Keys. And people said: 'What in the world has happened here? And what can we do to reverse it and not have it happen again?''"
Meanwhile, environmentalists led by biologist Arthur R. Marshall warned Askew that drainage of the lake, the Everglades and the Kissimmee River had depleted the region's ability to store water for dry times.
At a conference of roughly 150 water experts in Miami Beach, Askew said the state needed major changes. Otherwise, "we may create the first desert with 60 inches of rainfall a year."
The experts responded with a starkly worded seven-page statement.
"There is a water crisis in South Florida today," they wrote. They urged the state to impose "enforceable" limits on growth, tying population increases to the available water, with the goal of ensuring "a quality environment." They also called for a single agency to oversee South Florida's land and water planning.
The next year, lawmakers enacted a top-to-bottom rewrite of Florida's water laws.
They created five regional water management districts, granting them taxing authority, the power to issue and revoke water permits, and the duty of deciding when nature had reached its limits.
For South Florida, water management would be in the hands of the Flood Control District, which got a new name, slightly different boundaries and a new mission of protecting the environment. The switch became final in 1977.
The environmental mission was a huge change for the district, whose board had been dominated by farming and drainage advocates.
Askew began appointing environmental and planning advocates to the board, including Marshall and DeGrove.
Water managers didn't get explicit control over development. Still, some news accounts predicted that the South Florida district would be a super agency with "almost dictatorial control" over the economy.
"There is a limit to the number of people which South Florida can support through its water resources," the district's chief engineer, William Storch, warned builders in October 1971.
He called it likely that some of their development plans "will never get off the ground."
Since then, the combined population of Palm Beach, Martin and St. Lucie counties has shot up more than 280 percent. During the next five decades, that population is expected to double again.
Leverage over growth
At times, the district has used its power over water and drainage to try to gain leverage over growth.
In the mid-1980s, water managers pushed for limits on development in Royal Palm Beach and then-unincorporated Wellington, prompting county officials to accuse them of an illegal power grab.
Last year, the district rebuffed Miami-Dade County's request for a huge increase in its water permit, threatening developers' dreams of building closer to the Everglades. More recently, the district has been raising questions about proposals for a resort development in Briny Breezes.
But mainly, such hard lines haven't held, former board member Reed laments.
Like some other environmentalists, Reed says the district has legal powers it isn't using. But an old ally of Reed's, former Executive Director Sam Poole, disagrees.
"I don't think there's any sort of unused hammer that the agency has," said Poole, who served from 1994 to 1999. "To me, the greatest disappointment I felt was our inability to get local governments to appreciate the consequences of continued development."
The 1972 reforms also ordered the district to catalog the water available in the lake, the Everglades and region's aquifers, then determine the minimum that must be left for nature's needs. But with minor exceptions, none of the five water districts did those calculations until the legislature ordered them again in the late 1990s.
By 2001, when the South Florida district established a minimum for the Everglades, it found that significant harm was occurring.
Besides water permits, the district also issues environmental permits that allow developers to drain wetlands, create retention ponds and otherwise alter the landscape. It usually says yes to those, too.
Since October 2002, the district has issued an average of about 2,025 environmental permits per year, while rejecting just 63. Applicants also withdraw about 480 permit requests per year, often to avoid a flat-out rejection.
Those numbers don't show how closely the final permit matches what the applicant requested. The approved versions often will protect more wetlands or require more pollution cleanup, said Bob Brown, who runs the district's environmental regulation department.
West Palm Beach engineering consultant Dan Shalloway agreed that getting a permit is harder than some people think.
"I can guarantee you that I will get you a permit," he said. "I can't guarantee you that it won't cost you so much that it will make the project economically unfeasible."
But Reed said the proof is in the sprawl.
"We were going to hold all development east of Interstate 95, and then east of the turnpike," he said. "Now county commissioners have allowed development to the edge of the Everglades."
Shalloway said growth by itself isn't the problem.
Instead, he said, the question is how growth occurs: Homes spread on 1-acre lots with wells and septic tanks will cause more harm than the same number packed into a dense development, irrigated with recycled waste water and buffered by wetlands.
Properly designed, he argued, a clustered development in the Glades probably would use less water than the sugar cane it replaced.
"The solution is storage," he said. "And the solution is conservation."
Graham maintains that sprawl in the sugar region would doom the restoration, and "truly put in peril the water supply for the next generation of Floridians."
Projected doom
Recent projections by University of Florida planning experts sketch a grim future if the state's policies don't change: a belt of suburbia from West Palm Beach to Fort Myers by 2060, and sprawl stretching toward Lake Okeechobee in the Treasure Coast. The university's GeoPlan Center did the study for the growth-management group 1000 Friends of Florida.
Graham said he's convinced even tough rules won't head off such a fate. If you want to protect land, he said, the public must own at least a share of it.
Ultimately, he blames an attitude as old as South Florida itself - the one displayed in the Jimmy Buffett song that calls the region "the southernmost frontier."
"That's not just lyrics," he said. "It's truth: the attitude of the frontier, that there was always something over the horizon that we could go to if we messed up our current nest.
"What's happened," he said, "is there is no more 'over the horizon.''"