In the News

The U.S. House on Tuesday approved a controversial dredging project at the Port of Palm Beach and cleared a path for eventual federal spending on a plan to curb polluted discharges from Lake Okeechobee.

The long-awaited water resources bill, passed by a vote of 412 to 4, will unleash federal spending on a range of Florida projects, from seaport dredging to Everglades restoration. Senate passage is expected to quickly follow.

All of these projects are projected to generate a wave of construction jobs and boost the local economy.

“Is the bill perfect? No. But it’s a good day for Florida,” said U.S. Rep. Lois Frankel, D-West Palm Beach, who negotiated the final compromise bill as part of a House-Senate conference committee.

Florida has eight of the bill’s 34 water projects and $2 billion of the $12 billion authorized for federal spending. Funding still depends on annual appropriations and local or state matching money.

The seaport dredging — including an $88.5 million project to deepen the Lake Worth Inlet at the Port of Palm Beach — is designed to help attract larger cargo and cruise vessels. But the Palm Beach project has drawn opposition from nearby communities.

Frankel said her vote for the bill should not be construed as support for the Lake Worth dredging, which has sparked fears of damage to the environment, marine life and the character of the region.

“Moving forward, our first priority should be to first do no harm, without degradation of our environment or quality of life,” Frankel said. “It should be a local community decision as to what uses dominate the Intracoastal Waterway in the Lake Worth Inlet, and I urge the Port of Palm Beach, Town of Palm Beach, County Commission and other interested stakeholders to come to a joint resolution.”

One “big disappointment” was failure to get the Central Everglades Planning Project cleared for construction by the Army Corps of Engineers in time to be authorized by the water bill, she said.

That project is designed to move water south from Lake Okeechobee to be stored and gradually released while filtering out pollution. One goal is to take pressure off the lake and the dike rimming it. That would help avoid discharges during wet seasons into estuaries that flow to the east and west, polluting waterways and depressing real-estate values while impairing boating, fishing and swimming.

But a “pre-funding” amendment in the bill will allow the state to move forward with planning and design work and potentially be reimbursed by future legislation once the Army Corps clears it.

“While I wish the Central Everglades Planning Project planning was completed so it could have been included in this bill, the other projects will allow Everglades restoration to move forward without interruption,” said U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Weston.

The other work includes a Caloosahatchee River storage project to reduce polluted water flow from Lake Okeechobee to the west coast; a spreader canal to improve the timing and distribution of flows into Florida Bay; and a Biscayne Bay coastal wetlands project in Miami-Dade County.

The bill also approves federal spending on the Broward County Water Preserve Area, which would build two above-ground reservoirs and create a buffer between the Everglades and urban development.

“It’s pretty much one of the very few Everglades projects that will re-create a set of wetlands habitat, rather than improve wetlands that are there now and have been damaged,” said Julie Hill-Gabriel, Everglades policy director for Audubon Florida.

“Stormwater runoff from urban Broward County now goes right into one of the water conservation areas in the Everglades,” she said. “We went out on an airboat on a bird tour, and at one point I looked over and said, `What is that?’ There was this brown water flooding into the water conservation area. This project will hold the water and let some of the nutrients drain out before we send it into the Everglades.”

The state’s 15 deep-water ports, members of Congress from both parties and environmental groups banded together to lobby for the Florida projects, taking advantage of the first federal water-projects bill in more than seven years.

“Sometimes bipartisanship does prevail in Washington,” Wasserman Schultz said.