By Craig Pittman, St. Petersburg Times Staff Writer

February 18, 2011

The size of crowds surprises federal officials.

 A proposal to create a new wildlife refuge in the headwaters of the Everglades has sparked a strong backlash against what opponents are calling “another government land grab.” At four public hearings over the past month, hundreds of people showed up, most of them to rail against plans for a 150,000-acre Everglades Headwaters National Wildlife Refuge in Central Florida.

 The size of the crowds – more than 600 at one hearing – surprised officials of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, said Charlie Pelizza, a manager of several wildlife refuges who has been in charge of the hearings. The level of opposition, and the determination of some opponents to show up repeatedly at hearings in Kissimmee, Okeechobee, Sebring and Vero Beach, also surprised them, he said.

 ”We just seem to have found a group of individuals who are concerned about the project, and they wanted to make sure their voices were heard,” Pelizza said. As a result, the deadline for commenting on the plan has been pushed back from Feb. 28 to March 31. “It got very heated,” said Ruskin attorney Scott Fitzpatrick, who represents Polk County landowners opposing the refuge plan. “I hope the project will be amended to reflect the concerns that were expressed.”

 Federal officials want to create the refuge as a way to preserve habitat for such species as the Florida panther and black bear, protect areas that recharge the aquifer and maintain the land’s rural character. Some of the opponents are hunters and anglers concerned they might lose access to property they now use, Pelizza said. Some are airboat and all-terrain-vehicle users with similar concerns based on past experiences with federal parks and refuges. “We’re against any federal sprawl,” said Bishop Wright Jr., president of the Florida Airboat Association. “We don’t condone the ‘lock it up, keep it out’ theory.”

 Some opponents don’t believe the government should spend millions of dollars on a refuge at a time when the economy is so sour, said Fitzpatrick. And some – particularly his clients in the River Ranch Property Owners Association – are concerned that the government is targeting their property for acquisition whether they like it or not, he said.

 The groundswell of anger began when the proposal unveiled by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar last month included a map covering far more than just 150,000 acres. Instead, it showed a swath of more than 1 million acres of rural land stretching from the outskirts of the town of Kissimmee to the northern shore of Lake Okeechobee as the “study area” within which the refuge would be created.

The study area map upset a lot of the opponents because it showed that the government was interested in so much land, said Carlton Ward Jr., an eighth-generation native and author of Florida Cowboys: Keepers of the Last Frontier, who spoke in favor of the refuge plan at the Kissimmee hearing. “I believe a lot of the opposition seemed to be based on conspiracy theories instead of what’s really going on,” Ward said.

 The Fish and Wildlife Service called this area “one of the great grassland and savanna landscapes in eastern North America.” The River of Grass originated there, the water from the Kissimmee flowing slowly southward into Lake Okeechobee, then spilling over the lip of the lake into the main Everglades – until the Army Corps of Engineers altered the flow in the 1960s.

Instead of buying up all 150,000 acres, the federal government would take a different tack. About 50,000 acres would be purchased outright, and then on about 100,000 acres the Fish and Wildlife Service would buy only the development rights – in effect guaranteeing that the property would never be turned into subdivisions, golf courses, parking lots or big-box stores like a lot of the state’s rural land.

 To Norman Miller, 82, a part-time resident of Sanibel, saving all that farmland sounded like a great idea. Miller, who still owns a farm in his native Indiana, drove over to the hearing in the Okeechobee High School and got very excited when he saw the 500-seat gym filled. Miller told the crowd he supported what the agency was doing and urged them to get behind it too. He thought they would applaud him. Instead, “They said, ‘Go back to Indiana!’ ” he said. “I’ve never experienced that before.”

Many of them, Miller said, seemed to “think that everything associated with the federal government is bad.”

Study projects 400,000 jobs and $46 billion economic boost from Everglades restoration

By Andy Reid, Sun Sentinel

7:02 PM EDT, October 18, 2010

Everglades = economy.

That’s the message of a new economic study commissioned by environmentalists, which concludes that stepped-up Everglades restoration would result in hundreds of thousands of new jobs and a more than $46 billion boost to Florida’s economy.

The Everglades Foundation on Monday released the results of a year-long study that estimates the economy gets a $4 return for every $1 the state and federal governments invest in protecting what remains of Florida’s famed River of Grass.

Investing nearly $12 billion to get Everglades restoration back on track would bring more than $46 billion return and create 400,000 jobs over 50 years, according to the study completed by Mather Economics, an Atlanta-based consulting firm.

According to the study, the job-creating benefits from cleaning and storing stormwater needed to replenish the Everglades include: bolstering South Florida’s drinking water supply; boosting tourism by improving water quality and fishing grounds in the Everglades and South Florida’s coastal estuaries; and creating nearly 23,000 construction jobs to build reservoirs, stormwater treatment areas and other environmental projects.

“Our state’s economy is entirely dependent on the Everglades and our water supply,” said Kirk Fordham, CEO of the Everglades Foundation. “This is an economic imperative that [we] invest in Everglades restoration.”

The results of the study will be used as a sales pitch to the new federal and state leaders that voters choose in the Nov. 2 election. The idea is to give elected officials a dollars-and-sense reason to invest in Everglades restoration at a time when the slumping economy strains spending on environmental projects.

The Everglades Foundation wants to restore the $200 million a year of state money that used to flow to Everglades restoration, before the budget squeeze.

The group also wants to increase the federal funding for Everglades restoration that has picked up under the Obama’s administration, after eight years of delays and unkept commitments from Congress and the White House.

The study comes after the completion of the South Florida Water Management District’s $197 million Everglades restoration land deal with U.S. Sugar Corp.

The land deal give the district 26,800 acres to use to help store and treat stormwater for the Everglades, but the district still needs the money to pay for construction.

In addition, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in September called for a revised Everglades cleanup effort that the district estimates would include $1.5 billion in costs — money that district officials say they don’t have.

Supporters of the U.S. Sugar land deal point to the study as proof that the expense of finding more money to build restoration projects is worth the rewards to the environment and the economy.

But opponents long warned that spending $197 million of taxpayers’ money during a lean economy on more land would take away money from already-overdue restoration projects.

Getting those eye-popping 400,000 new jobs over five decades that the study projects would require following through on a host of Everglades projects that remain shelved.

The study estimates the economic benefits of completing the Everglades restoration plan that state and federal officials agreed to in 2000, but that has since been bogged down by funding delays and other hurdles.

One of the benefits of restoring more of the “sheet flow” of stormwater that once naturally drained south from Lake Okeechobee to the Everglades would be to beef up South Florida’s drinking water supply, according to the study.

More clean water in the Everglades would boost drinking water supplies. The study estimates that Everglades restoration would bring $13 billion in savings for South Florida communities that would otherwise have to tap into saltier underground water supplies that require more costly treatment to use for drinking water.

Improving water quality throughout the region would improve property values throughout South Florida by about $16 billion, according to the study.

The more than 400,000 jobs projected over 50 years would include more than 270,000 related to construction and real estate, 80,500 tied to improved wildlife habitat and hunting and nearly 37,000 connected to recreational fishing, according to the study.

“The results of this report are encouraging,” said Barry Johnson, president and CEO of the Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce. “Creating jobs in new categories is very important to the sustainability of our economy.”

Andy Reid can be reached at abreid@SunSentinel.com or 561-228-5504.

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