Simply put: Manage the water flow to benefit the environment and domestic use, NOT AGRICULTURE. Mike Valiquette

To: Mike Valiquette
As I was driving home today across U.S. 27 in Levy and Marion
counties today, I noticed that every farm had a retention pond. Why is
that not the rule state wide?

Ted,
IT IS A RULE!!!
I have been asking that question at Corps and District podiums for over a
year.
As a building contractor I have to retain the water on every lot that I build on
so no water runs off on the neighbor’s property.
Knowing that the Sugar industry has over 250,000 acres of "farmed out" land that
is of no practical use to them other than selling it off to development, I want
to know why they (Sugar) can't be forced to develop this acreage into their own
retention and filter ponds to handle their own rain water runoff.
If they stop putting their wet season runoff into the STA's and WCA's that
would free up the taxpayer funded STA's and WCA's for filtering and moving Lake
Okeechobee water SOUTH. Combine this with a flow way south (Plan 6) to "vent"
off excess lake water and your problem is solved.
PURRE's legal council, White & Case" is looking into why Plan 6 was never
implemented. It seems that the main reason was that, once again, the Corps did
their models using "dry cycle" numbers and didn't want to spend all of that
money building the flow way if there was no water available to fill it up.
Being a builder I think in more practical terms. If you know that you are
going to have a water volume and flow problem in the future (they obviously knew
this or they would not have been doing the study in the late 80's and early
90's) what better time to build your flow way then during the dry cycle when you
will have less dewatering expense during construction?
Had they built their flow way then we wouldn't be discussing this issue now.
We would have no problem to discuss.

It is clear to me that the only REAL solution to this massive problem is to
utilize the entire infrastructure system that we already have in place:
1. Don’t spend millions of dollars and years of time building storage
reservoirs (Acceler8) that simply guarantee AG endless water and breeds algae.
2. Force AG to retain and filter their own water and then filter the Lake O
water in the taxpayer owned STA’s & WCA’s so it can be moved SOUTH.
3. Clean and widen the Miami(C-123), North River(L-38), Hillsboro(L-39), and
West Palm Beach(C-52) canals to move this clean filtered Lake water SOUTH via
sheet flow and to tide in four or more SOUTHERN directions.
4. Clean and utilize the entire I-75 canal system with existing bridge
culverts that are all ready in place to move this filtered water further SOUTH. Most of
these bridge culverts are sitting DRY.
5. Clean and utilize all of the existing US-41 culverts and spillways that when they were
built where immediately closed. We don’t need a “Skyway Bridge” to accomplish
this task. Now water can go to Florida Bay and the 10,000 Islands the way Mother Nature intended.
6. Install “forward pumps” or simply modify to reverse the flow of the
existing pumps stations (S-2, S-3 and S-4) to move water from Lake O when the
water level is low. This will ease the worry irrigation water from AG.
7. Stop using scare tactics on the dike safety as a reason to lower the Lake and dump more water on the estuaries. Col. Carpenter told me, in person, at a private meeting in Ft. Myers prior to his retirement that the SFWMD report on imminent dike failure was bogus and the dike has been and will be maintained properly by the Corps.
8. Start the clean-up of Lake Okeechobee immediately.
9. Continue the restoration of the Kissimmee River including STA water filter marshes.

CLEAN SHEET FLOW SOUTH IS OUR ONLY SOLUTION

Keep up the fight,
Michael Valiquette, Chairman
PURRE Water Coalition