Clean water advocates express optimism on Senate vote for Everglades reservoir

Clean water advocates, standing with the Caloosahatchee River as a backdrop Tuesday morning at Centennial Park, expressed their hope for the U.S. Senate to authorize construction for a reservoir south of Lake Okeechobee.

The $1.6 billion project has been approved by Congress but needs a minimum of a 51-49 Senate vote Wednesday for what is called the Water Resources Development Act.

Florida senators Bill Nelson, a Democrat up for reelection next month, and Republican Marco Rubio each have called for this bill to pass.

The reservoir will cover about 16,000 acres of land, about half the size of the city of Fort Myers. The land is currently leased from the state of Florida by sugar company Florida Crystals. The U.S. Department of Interior bought the land, southeast of Clewiston, in 1987.

After the Senate vote, the fight is far from finished, said Eric Eikenberg, CEO of the Everglades Foundation, a non-profit that has been advocating for the region for 25 years.

“It needs to be built in the next four years,” Eikenberg said of the reservoir, which will store excess water from the lake, clean it and then send it south to the Everglades. “The next governor of Florida needs to build it. We need a sense of urgency. The public needs to remain energized.”

The reservoir, to be dug 23 feet deep, will hold about 70 billion gallons of water, which will ease the water releases east and west of Lake Okeechobee. Those releases, of pollutant-laden water, fueled blue-green algae blooms in the Caloosahatchee and St. Lucie rivers over the past two years.

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The blooms, combined with red tide, have devastated the Southwest Florida economy, said Rae Ann Wessel, natural resource policy director for the Sanibel-Captiva Conservation Foundation. She said the economic impacts to the islands have been worse this year than 2017, when island businesses shut down for two weeks because of Hurricane Irma.

“This has so many benefits that will return that money,” Wessel said. “The state, the federal government, everybody gets that money back.”

Nelson released a statement about the upcoming vote: "Meantime, the state has to do more to improve environmental protections and reduce the amount of pollutants that flow into the lake in the first place.

Shane Spring of the Florida Realtors Association, Brad Cornell of Audubon Florida, Bonita Springs Area Chamber of Commerce president Tiffany Esposito and Captains for Clean Water executive director Daniel Andrews also attended the news conference.

“The way I look at it, Democrats need clean water and so do Republicans,” Andrews said. “It’s not a left versus right thing.

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“Right now, we’re optimistic. But with Washington politics, you never really know.”

Said Eikenberg: “The next fight is for funding. We need $200 million to get started. We cannot afford to have these anemic amounts of money coming out of Washington.”

Connect with this reporter: David Dorsey (Facebook), @DavidADorsey (Twitter).