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Everglades project hits federal snag

Five years into a restoration project, a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers memo details federal inaction and little monetary help.

By CRAIG PITTMAN
Published March 19, 2005

Five years after the massive Everglades restoration project was launched amid great fanfare, the federal government has produced little more than paperwork, according to an internal U.S. Army Corps of Engineers memo.

The March 7 memo, obtained by the St. Petersburg Times, was written by Gary Hardesty, the top corps official in charge of the project in Washington. In the memo, which was not intended for public release, Hardesty noted that "we haven't built a single project during the first five years. ... We've missed almost every milestone ... "

Because of the delays, the projected cost to the taxpayers has shot up.

"We are already approaching a billion-dollar increase" in the first four construction projects out of dozens planned, Hardesty said. And when state and federal officials ran a computer model of the whole project, the results were not what they expected.

"We had too much water going in one direction," Hardesty said in an interview Friday. "It would trigger some flooding on the western edge of Miami-Dade County."

The Everglades plan, approved by Congress and the state Legislature in 2000, is supposed to restore the River of Grass to a semblance of its former glory and provide enough water for South Florida's population to double.

"This is the most important project we're working on in the country," said Hardesty.

Yet so far federal agencies have spent a mere $230,000 on the Everglades restoration plan, at a time when the state has spent more than $1-billion. The state and federal government are supposed to be 50-50 partners on the cost, which according to some estimates may top $14-billion.

A spokeswoman for the Miccosukkee Tribe of Indians, which lives in the Everglades, agreed with Hardesty that the federal government has little to show for the past five years.

"I think they've spent more money on hotel meeting rooms than on moving Everglades restoration forward," said tribe spokeswoman Joette Lorion.

Because of the problems facing the project, Hardesty noted in his memo, some in Congress now question whether the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan, or CERP for short, can proceed.

"I'm hearing statements like "CERP is dead,' " Hardesty wrote.

The complex restoration plan calls for removing some of South Florida's many levees and canals, injecting water deep underground for later use, turning some limestone quarries into big reservoirs and raising part of the Tamiami Trail to allow the water to flow naturally beneath it.

The Everglades 1999 plan the corps presented to Congress is known among state and federal officials as the "Yellow Book." According to the Yellow Book, by now the corps was to have begun construction on some of the water storage projects needed for restoration.

This year, the corps must submit to Congress its first report on the progress since the Yellow Book's approval. Hardesty's three-page memo outlined what the five-year report should and should not say.

"We do need to talk about all that we've done since 1999, yes, but keep in mind ... it's different from what we told Congress we would do in the Yellow Book - and it's not restoration!!!" Hardesty wrote to his corps colleagues.

The corps, Hardesty said, spent five years completing regulations and guidance memos on how the construction projects would be carried out.

"In the next five years is when we'll get into the construction of the project components," said Hardesty, who had an Army press relations person with him throughout the 45-minute interview.

In his memo, Hardesty warned his colleagues against writing a report that was "overly optimistic in tone," and said, "We need to be truthful."

However, he fretted that spelling out the lack of concrete results so far could doom the restoration plan's future.

"It is far more important," he wrote, "that the 5-Year Report focus more on the strategic direction of the program over the next five years to rebuild congressional confidence or we may lose support and ultimately program funding."

But funding is a sore point too. "Cost growth is a huge issue," Hardesty noted in his memo. "On CERP, it's not a good story."

Originally the plan's cost was figured at $7.8-billion. Over the past five years the estimate has crept higher, with some federal officials predicting the price will top $14-billion.

Yet corps officials testified before Congress "all too often that the $7.8-billion cost estimate was a conservative cost estimate, with high contingencies and which in all likelihood would decrease," Hardesty wrote. "It's in the hearing records."

Those statements could cause problems when Congress sees the five-year report, he warned.

Because of the sluggish pace of federal spending, last fall Gov. Jeb Bush announced that the state would borrow money and take the lead on getting eight construction projects started. State officials expect to break ground on most of them in the next year, said Ernie Barnett of the state Department of Environmental Protection.

Because the state is pushing ahead, Barnett said he does not agree with Hardesty's statements about the status of Everglades restoration. But he agreed that "I certainly sense his frustration on the federal side's progress."

Congress is frustrated with the state, too, Hardesty wrote in his memo. Two years ago the Legislature, at the behest of the sugar industry, pushed back by a decade the deadline for cleaning up phosphorus pollution in the Everglades.

"Congress was extremely upset" by the Legislature's move, Hardesty wrote, and one powerful congressional committee chairman "has stated publicly that CERP funding will not be used to help the state clean up its water quality problems."

Water routing is a bigger concern. Last summer, state and federal officials ran a computer model that was supposed to show what would happen if all the Everglades restoration elements were in place, but the water didn't go where it was supposed to.

That has led to sharp questions about whether there's a need to rewrite the Yellow Book to fix those problems, Hardesty said. For now, though, officials are reexamining the computer model to see if anything is with it, he said.

If it turns out the model was right, "we may have to go back to reopen the door on some parts of the project," he said.

[Last modified March 19, 2005, 01:14:56]