Our Sanibel Newsletter.. Lake Okeechobee discharges

Dear Neighbor,
Within the past couple of months the Corps of Engineers and SFWMD made the rounds with a theme presentation that could have been entitled "shared adversity". Representatives Carpenter and Merriam wrung their hands, shed a few crocodile tears, and assured us that everyone is sharing the consequences of a water management plan designed to aid the farmlands but gone sour because of hurricanes and excessive rainfall this past year. They promised us that EVERYONE is suffering equally from the bad plan and bad weather.

We subsequently learn that shared adversity means 25% of the Lake discharges go East, about 75% come West and ZERO PERCENT goes South to the farms, for whom this horrific problem was created. When this sham was exposed the SFWMD "defense" was that it's impossible to send the water South. A couple of weeks later they announced that it would be "difficult". We NOW learn it's very possible if we get our checkbook out. In other words, we are being blackmailed by the very people this sorry program was implemented to benefit. In recent media coverage, "Merriam said the district's executive manager, Carol Ann Wehle, also has been approaching sugar growers to see if any of them are willing to be compensated for offering their land for water storage". The only way to learn gall like that is from munching at the public trough for some time...too much time.

To summarize; we have an industry, sugar, subsidized by taxpayers, who suffered a 50% crop loss this year and are about to receive an additional $400 million for hurricane relief. Protected by an organization that is poster boy for political cronyism (SFWMD), they sat idly by while the rivers and estuaries of South Florida are destroyed by a system set up to insure they have enough irrigation water. They are NOW considering taking some of "their" water if we will pay them to do it. How to win friends and influence neighbors?


Looking Forward.
Birds don't vote, fish don't make campaign contributions, and the minority of Florida residents trying to protect them are out-financed, under- populated, and un-represented.

I suspect the agricultural industry will end up taking a few inches of the water stored for them at GREAT expense to the taxpayers and water systems of South Florida. We may have to compensate them for their "generosity", but we must not allow this lesson to be forgotten. In the 2006 Florida Legislature a bill is expected to make the SFWMD Board elected NOT appointed.

This Bill is critical to help us not get in this vulnerable position again where politics and money trump public interest and need.