Paddling its waters, Rep. Soto explains quest to designate Kissimmee River as wild and scenic

U.S. Rep. Darren Soto got a promising answer 51/2 years ago during a congressional hearing, where the head then of the U.S. Department of Interior testified.

“Mr. Secretary,” Soto said. “I’m from Florida and we care deeply about the Everglades. We recently sent you a letter about designating the Kissimmee River, where we spent billions to restore it, on making it a wild and scenic river. Can we expect a response at some point soon?

Ryan Zinke’s response, in Washington-speak: “absolutely.” The interior secretary might have added that a check was in the mail as not so much came of his assurance.

But Soto has stuck with his quest to secure a wild and scenic designation for the Kissimmee, one of Florida’s most storied waters in both heinous and heartening ways, and filed legislation three times.

Finally, in December, the Democrat from Kissimmee succeeded in winning approval of a key first step toward the designation – a requirement that the Interior Department begin to study the Kissimmee’s qualifications within a year.

Partly honorific, a wild and scenic label can provide protections against development, roads or other intrusions, be a hook for protection and restoration funds and advertise that the federal government has chosen to elevate its overall watch and regard for a designated river.

But the label is not easy to obtain and they are far and few between.

Florida, for example, has about 26,000 miles of river, of which only 50 miles wear the wild and scenic badge. Those are: 42 miles of Central Florida’s Wekiva River since 2000 and 8 miles of the Loxahatchee River mostly in Palm Beach County since 1985.

Nationally, the system takes in about 13,500 miles along 226 rivers in 41 states and Puerto Rico, and way less than than 1 percent of the nation’s river mileage.

So, a wild and scenic designation is a tough get, and legislation compelling the interior department to consider the Kissimmee offers no certainty it will happen. An interior department study on the Kissimmee River could take a minimum of two to three years.

“I am likely to serve again on the natural resources committee,” Soto said, “which has oversight and I have a great relationship with Deb Haaland,” the current Interior Department secretary and a former member of Congress. “I feel pretty good about our ability to get them moving.”

There is a philisophical wrinkle, however, to the notion of declaring the Kissimmee River as wild and scenic. It may be that, according to the interior department’s ulimate determination, but it is far from the version of what nature put there in the first place.

It forms in Osceola County, flowing from East Lake Tohopekaliga through Lake Tohopekaliga, Lake Cypress, Lake Hatchineha and Lake Kissimmee. It then appears in its full glory, flowing south to Lake Okeechobee.

In a straight line, that’s a run of 90 miles or so, but the original river was substantially longer than that with extensive meandering – until the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers arrived in the 1960s. What happened then is etched as a major chapter from Florida’s story of environmental crimes.

For the sake of flood control, the Corps filled in the original river channel, rerouted the river into a wide canal, and then proceeded, after some years of uproar, to excavate the original channel to restore natural river flow.

Not once but twice, the Kissimmee River had major surgery performed by bulldozers.

The second restorative operation cost $1 billion, or a lot more than the original, destructive work. The Corps of Engineers touts it as the largest environmental repair of its kind in the world.

But does that legacy of wreckage and repair honor the sense of wild and scenic?

“The committee really had some great debate and discussion over that very topic,” Soto said. “We all agreed that since our goal was to restore it to its original form and glory that the moniker would still be appropriate.”

Soto lives in a home fronting Lake Tohopekaliga, often called Toho, in Kissimmee. He paddles a kayak there often, and he agreed to take a quick paddle on another waterway feeding into the Kissimmee River – Shingle Creek.

“A lot of this water starts in the Orlando metropolitan area – Boggy Creek, Shingle Creek and others – and flows into Big Lake Toho,” Soto said. “With a lot of this flow starting in urban, suburban areas, there’s a lot of nutrient pollution that we have to limit and allow Mother Nature to help.”

Much of Mother Nature’s ability to remove nutrient pollution — from sewage, storm water, fertilizer and other sources — rests with the curlicues and adjoining wetlands of the restored Kissimmee River.

“We’ve seen a pretty good bounce back of flora and fauna but the South Florida Water Management District has told me it could take 20 to 30 years to get back to the flora and fauna that was there before the channelization of the river,” Soto said.

Currents flowing down the Kissimmee River into the huge Lake Okeechobee amount to the original reservoir that provided a sheet flow of water through the famed river of grass, or Everglades.

That’s all screwed up now because of the historic rise of agriculture south of Lake Okeechobee. Kissimmee River waters are dumped from Okeechobee to the east and west coasts of Florida causing tremendous environmental harm.

The restoration of the Everglades means, in large part, sending the Kissimmee River’s flow back to the Everglades.

“If you kayak on the Kissimmee River right now you will see that it’s pretty wild. You see mostly nature surrounded by ranches set off from it,” Soto said. “You feel like you are very far out there. It’s very scenic and getting more scenic.”

kspear@orlandosentinel.com