Smith’s Everglades Bill Already Helping after One Year
WASHINGTON – Florida’s environmentalists said the Everglades restoration bill Sen. Bob Smith, R-NH, filed and President Clinton signed into law last year is already doing some good after its first anniversary this week.
The restoration project is scheduled to be complete in 2038, but Stu Applebaum, the chief of eco-systems restoration for the Everglades project, said Smith’s “plan itself and the legislation set the stage and planted the seed. It set the groundwork, which is very important for a 30-plus year project.”
Stuart Stahl, president and chief executive officer of the Audubon Society of Florida, said “Bob Smith was the person who made that bill happen. The Everglades have long been drained and this bill will put into place a restoration process that sets the stage for full restoration.”
The bill, signed by Clinton December 11, 2000, has 68 component projects that will restore the water system, and ensure that clean water flows in and out of the Everglades, Stahl said.
“Over the last two years, 8000 acres of water storage area have been bought along the Caloosahatchee River,” Stahl said. “If you don’t store the water you can’t clean it up and flow it right.”
Shannon Estenoz, an Everglades expert with the World Wildlife Fund, said this water storage is a measure the state of Florida has never taken before, and is the most important part of Smith’s bill.
“The Everglades doesn’t get enough water now,” she said. “We don’t want to be introducing new water into the Everglades that’s dirty. It’s absolutely essential. If you don’t get that water quality right, then you’re not going to restore the Everglades. If we get the water right, the creatures that depend on the Everglades will rebound.”
Stahl said the bill is a “historic piece of legislation that initiated the largest eco-restoration undertaking in human history. I can’t tell you how much Senator Smith meant to us in Florida as well as the nation because the Everglades is a national treasure.”
Smith said because Florida’s “main cities are on the coastline, and a lot of fresh water gets diverted to those communities for their own use, it was draining the natural system. [The U.S. government] put a series of canals in there in the 40s because of flooding. When we put the canals in, we dried up the Everglades, and we lost 90 percent of the wading birds, alligators, Florida panthers – all these animals were beginning to die off, so they needed help.”
“We’re a big fan of Senator Smith because he was so fair and so open and allowed such a deliberative process,” said Kathy Copeland, senior policy advisor of the south Florida division of water management. “He very much cared about the state of Florida.”
Copeland said the bill “was monumental. It’s really historic. It did a lot in terms of consensus-building among diverse interests” because it brought people from three different groups – agriculture, environmentalists and urban water users – behind one cause.
“He was very helpful to us and he was a real leader in pushing the planning, the engineering and the design through,” Copeland said. “It was one of the largest environmental bills ever passed in the state of Florida.”
With this particular bill, Smith said he knew he needed to “build a coalition, to develop a compromise.” He said the bill had not taken shape for a long time because the many different groups of people involved in the process, including the Environmental Protection Agency [EPA] and the Army Corps of Engineers, could not decide on a plan.
“We basically got them all at a table and we got them talking and we finally came up with something that everybody can agree to,” Smith said.
“The impact of Senator Smith’s legislation was enormous,” said Rep. Mark Foley, R-FL, whose district includes the Everglades. “Senator Smith’s leadership ensured the protection of the Everglades National Park and also bolstered the water supply of the state of Florida.”
