Guest columnist: Time to pull eminent domain on Big Sugar
Wickstrom is founder of Stuart-based Florida Sportsman Magazine.
January 7, 2006

Words worth borrowing:

"Here is a New Year's wish: that the agony of Florida's environment and
coastal economies, increasingly threatened by polluted water gushing from
Lake Okeechobee, will be relieved by the one measure no government agency
has had the courage to propose - the taking by eminent domain of large
tracts in the Everglades Agricultural Area, replacing sugar cane with vast
storage and cleansing marshes.

"It is an amazement that coastal real estate, tourism and fisheries,
representing hundreds of billions of dollars in real value, are at grave
risk by a crop that could not be profitable if not for immense subsidies
through Big Sugar's manipulation of U.S. farm policy and international trade
agreements.

"That Big Sugar dominates the political landscape is no excuse for silence
while the state of Florida professes nothing more can be done and nothing
can be done more quickly than to wait years, if not decades, for results.

"Nothing, that is, except eminent domain."

I would second the notion, expressed by Sierra Club advocate Alan Farago in
an Orlando Sentinel column.

Although the wish may be more wishful thinking than likelihood, it is
increasingly agreed that Big Sugar simply must give up more of its land that
was drained at great public expense and replaced the natural River of Grass.
The reclaimed land formerly stored many billions of gallons during the wet
season.

Without that storage area, and coupled with mismanagement that keeps Lake
Okeechobee levels far too high, bureaucratic puppets of Big Sugar discharge
more than 500 billion gallons of fresh water to the sea. The discharges
cause immense damages to both coasts, damages that dwarf the propped-up
value of sugarland.

It should be obvious to all that Florida's "public interest" would justify
an eminent domain taking of a sufficient amount of sugar country to serve as
a "simulacrum" (an approximation of natural flow) to both stop the estuary
ruination and restore the big lake itself.

Unfortunately, our elected leaders (better identified as sugar followers)
disdain eminent domain and play into an array of supposed complications that
make the process extra difficult.

Thus, the wish for condemnation probably will remain just a wish. That's
painful because there is a solid concept indicating that the public
acquisition of just 58,000 more acres for a flowway (combined with really
low lake level management) would eliminate the vast majority of discharge
horrors on the coasts.

All of which leaves us with another wish: That a planned lawsuit (see
Riverscoalition.org) to stop the big discharges will succeed and bring a
clean-up of the estuaries.

May the rivers once again teem with life, for wildlife, plants - and humans.