This series, based on more than 200 interviews and thousands of pages of documents, shows that the $7.8 billion plan to restore the Everglades may result in little restoration but will certainly increase water supplies for Florida residents, farmers and businesses, who already lead the nation in per-capita water consumption.
By Michael Grunwald
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 23, 2002
President Bill Clinton and Gov. Jeb Bush met in the Oval Office on Dec. 11, 2000, to launch a $7.8 billion effort to revive the Florida Everglades. Vice President Al Gore, the plan's leading White House advocate, stayed home to watch CNN. That morning, the Supreme Court was hearing final arguments in the Florida vote-count case pitting him against Bush's brother George.
None of the power brokers who did attend the Everglades ceremony mentioned dimpled chads or butterfly ballots, but they were clearly thinking more about Florida's political swamp than its actual one. "What a surreal scene," recalled former Clinton chief of staff John Podesta. "It took a heroic effort to keep the fake smiles plastered on our faces."
It was an oddly muted debut for the widely trumpeted Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan. This rescue mission for wading birds, panthers and gators is, after all, the largest environmental project in American history. The plan is already the national model for future restorations, from a $15 billion proposal for Louisiana coastal wetlands to a $20 billion plan for California rivers and deltas. It is becoming the restoration blueprint for the world, studied in south Brazil's Pantanal and sub-Saharan Africa's Okavango Delta. And at a moment when partisanship reigned, the plan was an example of rare political unity in Florida and Washington.
"We're here to talk about something that is going to be long-lasting, way past counting votes," Jeb Bush said that day. "This is the restoration of a treasure for our country."
But it's not remotely clear whether the Everglades restoration plan will actually restore the Everglades. Most of the plan's ecological benefits for the Everglades are riddled with uncertainties and delayed for decades, though it delivers swift and sure economic benefits to Florida homeowners, agribusinesses and developers.
A Washington Post investigation, based on more than 200 interviews and thousands of pages of documents and e-mails, found that the plan has been shaped by intense political pressures brought by commercial interests. All Florida and federal agencies formally support the plan, but many government officials and scientists expressed serious doubts about its viability and impact in on-the-record interviews.
Marketed as the ultimate restoration project, the plan is really a multipurpose plumbing project -- committed to expanding water supplies and ensuring flood control for South Florida's exploding population as well as to improving water flows to the Everglades. It will build 18 reservoirs for a state that already leads the nation in per-capita water consumption, subsidizing more of the development that degraded the River of Grass in the first place.
The plan also relies on four highly speculative technological gambles that account for nearly half its price tag -- half state money, half federal -- of $7.8 billion in 1999 dollars. Officials say that cost estimate, already about four years of spending on all national parks, will surely rise -- as much as tenfold, according to one former restoration leader. Even if all the questionable technologies pan out and all the funding arrives, there will still be numerous roadblocks to restoration.
"We have no idea if this will work," said Stuart J. Appelbaum of the Army Corps of Engineers. And Appelbaum is in charge of the restoration.
Others expressed even stronger concerns about the restoration and its execution. Richard Harvey, the Environmental Protection Agency's South Florida director, said the plan was looking more and more like "a massive urban and agricultural water-supply project," an unprecedented federal bailout for a state living beyond its ecological means.
"It's falling apart before my eyes," said Harvey, who is trained as a biologist and an engineer. "We were all singing 'Kumbaya.' Now we're singing 'Can't Get No Satisfaction.' "
Half the Everglades has been paved for development or drained for agriculture. The other half is a shrunken, fragmented, convoluted mess, sucked dry when it needs water and flooded when it doesn't.
The restoration plan's goal is to capture 1 trillion gallons of rainwater that now gets flushed out to sea every year, store it in new reservoirs and newfangled injection wells, then distribute it to farms, people and the Everglades in the right amounts at the right times. "The Everglades is a test," the legendary author and activist Marjory Stoneman Douglas used to say. "If we pass, we may get to keep the planet." The Corps and its state partners in the South Florida Water Management District hope that "getting the water right" will re-create the original mix of flora and fauna, as Douglas had always dreamed.
But while the federal interest in the restoration plan is primarily environmental, the state interest is more complex. Jeb Bush and his aides -- backed by developers, agribusinesses, water utilities and, at times, Indian tribes -- have fought consistently and successfully to make sure the plan does not put nature ahead of his constituents.
Even though South Florida's population is growing faster than Haiti's or India's -- and enjoying some of the nation's cheapest water -- the plan commits to supplying enough water for its population to double again as baby boomers retire to its condos and golf courses. Florida will have a veto over all 52 of the plan's projects, and one clause stipulates that no aspect of the plan can harm anyone in any way.
Meanwhile, internal documents call some of the plan's environmental promises into doubt. For example, the restoration's leaders pledged to send 80 percent of the project's water to nature rather than to people, but a water budget obtained by The Post falls hundreds of billions of gallons short. Even Jayantha Obeysekera, the water district's top hydrology modeler, says the 80 percent assurances are based on "gross assumptions that I don't like at all."
The plan's leaders secured environmental support by promising major environmental improvements by 2010, the project's $4 billion mark. But Richard Punnett, chief Everglades hydrologist for the Corps, recently said he expected no significant water flow changes by then. "It could be a lot longer than that," conceded Tommy Strowd, the water district's operations director. Robert Johnson, Everglades National Park's top scientist, said he did not expect the plan to help the park until 2020 -- if at all. Many scientists fear it could actually damage the turquoise bay and coral reefs of Biscayne National Park.
"We sold it big to get it passed, but the real environmental fixes won't happen for many, many years," acknowledged Corps biologist Stephen Traxler.
The official cost -- about 20 years worth of the federal program to control the former Soviet Union's nuclear weapons -- is equally suspect, and it does not include another $7 billion worth of separate Everglades projects. Michael Parker, the Corps' civilian chief until President Bush ousted him in March, predicted in January that Everglades restoration could cost "$60 billion, $80 billion, easy." This is likely to become America's most expensive public works project ever.
Still, the plan does not assure pristine water quality, even though rehydrating the Everglades with anything less could simply poison it more efficiently. "I mean, duh. That would defeat the whole purpose," said Florida International University microbiologist Ron Jones.
The plan barely addresses the exotic plant species that have invaded 1.5 million acres of the ecosystem: melaleuca that sucks the wet out of wetlands, Old World climbing ferns that spread like viruses. One of the plan's top stated priorities is expanding the "spatial extent" of the Everglades, but its own dirt-moving will destroy 34,000 acres of Everglades wetlands. And it offers only "limited help" for Lake Okeechobee, the diseased heart of the ecosystem, according to Karl Havens, the water district's own Lake Okeechobee scientist.
"I don't see a shred of evidence that all this money will help the environment," said Fish and Wildlife Service biologist Bob Gasaway.
The nightmare scenario for many biologists and conservationists is that South Florida will get its new reservoirs for irrigation and growth, but that a disillusioned Congress will cut off the money flow before the water flow can reach the Everglades. Congress passed less ambitious Everglades restoration projects in 1989 and 1994, but both have been paralyzed by infighting and litigation, and neither has delivered a drop of water to the Everglades.
"In 10 years, I'm afraid, they're going to wonder what they've bought for their billions," said Elaine Hall, head of external affairs for Everglades National Park.
The plan's leaders acknowledge that it is not perfect. They say they simply can't afford to wait for perfection. Douglas warned that the Everglades was in its "eleventh hour" in her 1947 book "River of Grass," and the clock is still ticking. "Maybe this plan is premature, but I don't want to do a post-mortem on the Everglades," Appelbaum said.
If the Everglades is the ultimate test of man's ability to undo the damage he has inflicted on nature, the restoration is also a test of the Corps, a 227-year-old public works agency that is under unprecedented scrutiny for building wasteful and destructive water projects.
A half-century ago, the Corps built the water-moving system that enabled South Florida to grow and thrive but also ravaged the Everglades. Today, as the Corps prepares to replumb its replumbing, its restoration managers hope to reinvent an agency known for damming, diking and dredging rivers. They're working more closely with environmental agencies. They're hiring more scientists like Traxler, a ponytailed nature-lover who used to train dolphins at Sea World.
"This is not the usual Corps mumbo-jumbo," Appelbaum said. "We've got a real environmental ethic here." The restoration's leaders have already bought enough land to cover four Manhattans, and hundreds of scientists and engineers are at work on everything from surveys mapping the bumps and dips of the Everglades to equations modeling how sea grasses synthesize nitrogen. But many scientists believe the 4,000-page plan reflects an engineer's bias for fancy engineering, clinging to man's control of nature instead of removing man-made structures and letting nature heal itself. Many environmentalists are increasingly skeptical that the highly political agencies that nearly killed the Everglades can save it now.
"I'm getting angrier by the day," said Shannon Estenoz, an engineer who is Everglades coordinator for the World Wildlife Fund and co-chair of the Everglades Coalition, the network of environmental groups that led the fight for restoration. "I'm starting to think we were suckers for supporting this."
The Everglades restoration has enjoyed nearly universal political support from its inception. Lobbyists for the sugar industry and the Audubon Society literally walked the halls of Congress arm-in-arm to promote it. It was the centerpiece of Clinton's and Jeb Bush's eco-legacies; President Bush has called it the prime example of his "new environmentalism for the 21st century."
But to understand the gap between the rosy perception and murky reality of Everglades restoration, it helps to understand the Everglades, what mankind has done to it and how consensus politics created this plan to fix it.
The Devil's Garden
"If the Devil ever raised a garden the Everglades was it -- the biggest and meanest swamp you're ever likely to see, bigger than some states of the Union," James Carlos Blake wrote in the 1998 novel "Red Grass River." "It's pineywoods and palmetto scrubs and cypress heads and tangled vines but mostly it's a river, a river like none other on earth."
Some people romanticize the Everglades: the ancient wilderness, the exquisite experience, the magnificent beauty. In fact, it's only a bit older than the Pyramids, not so ancient in wilderness time. As experiences go, it's a sweltering slog, full of mosquitoes, snakes, quicksand and sharp-edged sawgrass as well as the snub-nosed alligators and skinny-legged wading birds on the postcards. And while it's beautiful in a subtle way, like a waterlogged wheat field, it's mostly a vast expanse of green and brown marsh with some teardrop-shaped tree islands. To the west, graceful cypress stands do give the feel of a primeval forest, but as a natural spectacle, it's not the Grand Canyon or Mount McKinley.
"To put it crudely, there is nothing in the Everglades that will make Mr. Johnnie Q. Public suck in his breath," Everglades National Park's first leader wrote in 1938.
But the Everglades is unique. That's why the national park, covering 40 percent of the remaining Everglades, was the first established for biology rather than scenery. That's why the United Nations designated it a World Heritage Site and an International Biosphere Reserve.
For a subtropical marsh, the Everglades is unusually flat, unusually wet and unusually low in nutrients. Those characteristics produced its singular biodiversity, from the algae mats at the bottom of its food chain to the storks, herons and other wading birds the 19th-century naturalist John James Audubon observed "in such numbers to actually block out the light of the sun." The park is the only place on Earth where alligators and crocodiles live side by side; President Bush has joked that Congress should study its example.
The original free-flowing Everglades began where Lake Okeechobee spilled over its lower lip during summer downpours, sending a shallow 60-mile-wide sheet of water on a leisurely 100-mile journey through table-flat grasslands. The land declined only a few inches per mile, so this "sheet flow" crept south toward the mangrove fringes of Florida Bay at just a few inches per second, spreading across millions of acres of absorbent prairies. This kept the spongy marsh perpetually wet -- during the winter, it dried down just enough to concentrate fish into pools for feeding frenzies by wading birds -- while replenishing its underground aquifers.
This liquid garden -- really, a river obscured by grass -- did not change much for 5,000 years. "In our very midst, we have a tract of land . . . that is as much unknown to the white man as the heart of Africa," the explorer Hugh Willoughby wrote in 1898.
Only the Seminole and Miccosukee Indians lived in the Everglades. They traveled its grassy sloughs in dugout canoes, hunting deer and bobcats for subsistence, sleeping in open-faced chickee huts built on stilts. Americans fought three Seminole wars in the 1800s, but the tribes retreated ever deeper into the bog and were never conquered.
Miccosukee tribal chairman Buffalo Tiger, 82, remembers the Everglades as The Breathmaker created it, teeming with turtles and turkeys, following natural patterns of flood and drought. His people used to be able to feel the rains coming. But as he listened one recent afternoon to the cars roaring past his airboat-tour business off Tamiami Trail -- the east-west highway that blocks the old Everglades sheet flow as solidly as any dam -- he sighed that Miccosukees must check the radio now like everyone else. The natural patterns had been lost.
"We believe we are part of nature," said Tiger, who recently wrote a book titled "A Life in the Everglades" but lives in Miami now. "The white man always tries to control nature."
The Empire of the Everglades
The white men who did venture into the Everglades almost all had the same reaction: They wanted to drain the swamp. Florida gained statehood in 1845, and one of its legislature's first acts was to petition Congress to "survey the Everglades, with a view to their reclamation." This was a long time before Earth Day. Most Floridians saw the Everglades as an impenetrable tract of soggy land on which they couldn't farm or build, and they were determined to civilize it. They believed, as the legendary Gov. Napoleon Bonaparte Broward declared, that water was "the common enemy of the people of Florida."
The history of Everglades drainage, however, is a history of spectacular failures and scandals, the stuff of enduring jokes about Florida real estate sold by the quart. In 1881, a Philadelphia industrialist named Hamilton Disston paid $1 million for 4 million acres of the Everglades; he managed to drain only 50,000 acres before committing suicide in his bathtub in 1896. Broward, a boat captain who had smuggled guns for Cuban revolutionaries, stumped for governor in 1904 on a drain-the-bog platform, unfurling giant maps of his plan to turn a "pestilence-ridden swamp" into an Empire of the Everglades. "It would indeed be a commentary on the intelligence and energy of the state of Florida, to confess that so simple an engineering feat . . . was above their power," Broward taunted his audiences.
Broward's empire spawned a frenzy of real estate schemes, fueled by corrupt surveyors, credulous reporters and huckster salesmen pitching the Promised Land, the Tropical Paradise, the Land of Destiny. "In the Everglades you simply tickle the soil and bounteous crops respond to feed hungry humanity," one newsman gushed. The lure of cheap homesteads and easy money sparked an Everglades land boom, but the drainage was rarely efficient enough for good farming or dry housing. A series of floods left millions of developed acres underwater and thousands dead, their corpses piled up and incinerated at roadsides.
It turned out that draining the Everglades was indeed above the power of Florida. This was a job for the Army Corps of Engineers. After horrific floods in 1926 and 1928, the Corps began building the Herbert Hoover Dike, the forbidding wall of earth and grass that encircles Lake Okeechobee. After another disaster in 1947, Congress ordered up the flood-control and water-supply project that today includes 1,700 miles of levees and canals, 150 control structures and 16 pump stations -- some powered by engines cannibalized from nuclear submarines -- to shuttle water around the region. The northern Everglades was drained by canals into 550,000 acres of fertile farmland that now produce one-fourth of America's sugar. The central Everglades was carved with levees into five isolated "water conservation areas" that are still sawgrass plains but are used as glorified sumps and reservoirs.
The project now keeps 6 million residents dry during floods, and helps them water their lawns twice a week during droughts. It supports 37 million annual tourists and snowbirds. "The project reflected the values of its time," said Punnett, the Corps hydrologist. It also crippled the Everglades.
Death in the Swamp
The signs of decline are all over Florida's southern thumb. A Chicago-size blob containing 50,000 tons of phosphorous sits at the bottom of Lake Okeechobee. Gin-clear Florida Bay has turned a sickly green. Fish in the St. Lucie estuary have lesions so wide their entrails drag behind them. Muck fires are rampant because the Everglades is too dry. Tree islands wash away because the Everglades is too wet. Sawgrass prairies turn to dense cattail plains because the Everglades is polluted with nutrients.
The arena for the Florida Panthers of the National Hockey League sits so close to the edge of the Everglades that an errant slap shot could almost land in the swamp; the actual Florida panther is at the edge of extinction because runaway sprawl has wiped out its habitat.
The most-repeated Everglades statistic is that 90 percent of its wading birds are gone. Ornithologist John Ogden, the water district's chief Everglades scientist, explains that the unnatural pooling of water in man-made compartments of the Everglades "sends confusing messages to their little pea brains," luring them into areas where they drown, starve or fail to feed their young. Their decline is typical; South Florida is home to 69 endangered plant and animal species, from the Okeechobee gourd to the Everglade snail kite to the Cape Sable seaside sparrow. "The crayfish and otters crashed, too. The entire food base collapsed," Ogden said.
The main problem in the remnant Everglades -- an area the size of Delaware plus Rhode Island -- is that the water is all wrong. The natural southerly sheet flow has been blocked and rerouted by levees, highways and canals. The overdrained and overpaved marsh can no longer hold water all year long. Sugar farms and urban areas dump excess water into the natural system in wet seasons and suck needed water out of the natural system in dry seasons. That runoff from farms and cities contains nutrients -- exactly what the Everglades can't tolerate. Since Lake Okeechobee can no longer overflow naturally to the south, water managers regularly send huge pulses of lake water east and west during storms to avoid a catastrophic dike collapse, destroying the delicate balance of freshwater and saltwater in the St. Lucie and Caloosahatchee estuaries.
"We know we're creating huge environmental impacts, but there's nothing we can do," said Strowd, who moves water around South Florida from a West Palm Beach control room full of flashing lights and satellite images. "We can't put lives or property in jeopardy."
An internal e-mail exchange obtained by The Post illustrates how economic interests -- in this case, the sugar industry, which pollutes the Everglades, blocks its flow and sucks away its water -- outmuscle nature when their demands collide.
During the drought of 2000, water district managers decided that Lake Okeechobee was so low that they could not release any more water for irrigation. Tom MacVicar, a former district deputy director who represents sugar growers, warned district supervising engineer Luis Cadavid: "Users will never sit still for zero water-supply releases."
Cadavid replied that he had to be consistent with district guidelines, that any releases "can be seen as a priority switching." MacVicar demanded a meeting, and on the next business day -- while Clinton signed the Everglades restoration plan into law and the Supreme Court heard Bush v. Gore -- he got one.
The district promptly agreed to switch priorities without a public hearing, giving the industry half its usual releases. "Thanks for all your work and for continuing to improve the process," MacVicar wrote. "We . . . really appreciate your kind words and recognition," Cadavid replied.
In the end, Lake Okeechobee dropped below nine feet for the first time. A third of the lake disappeared until the summer rains, along with most of its bass fishing and boating. The region was battered so badly that Jeb Bush declared an economic state of emergency. The sugar industry enjoyed its fourth-largest harvest ever.
To Get the Water Right
The historical Everglades can never be restored. That's because millions of people live and farm in it. Suburbs such as Sweetwater and Kendall and Wellington have sprouted in the swamp, which is why Floridians filed a record 17,000 complaints about nuisance alligators last year. The city of Weston, for example, is bordered by the Everglades on three sides. But its population has increased tenfold in the 1990s, and no plausible plan could convert the properties of former Miami Dolphins star Dan Marino and 53,000 of his neighbors back to wilderness. This dilemma, restoration-plan documents acknowledge, must "preclude any serious consideration of achieving true restoration."
Instead, the plan envisions a new Everglades, an unnatural Everglades that would look and act more like the real thing. The official goal is to "Get the Water Right" -- quantity, quality, timing and distribution -- for the ecosystem, while also capturing enough water for sugar fields, citrus groves, sprinklers and faucets.
This emphasis on human needs is no coincidence. The plan's blueprint was first floated in 1996 by Gov. Lawton Chiles's Commission on a Sustainable South Florida, an assortment of homeowners and home builders, sugar and citrus growers, business and tribal leaders, water managers and environmentalists. Chairman Richard Pettigrew, a former speaker of the Florida House, knew the state legislature would never pass an Everglades plan opposed by developers or agribusinesses. With blandishments and compromises, he engineered a unanimous vote.
"That was the key: Everybody had to be on board," Pettigrew said. "We wanted the wars to end. We had to come up with something for everyone."
The federal government is not usually in the local water-supply business, but federal officials decided to turn the commission's something-for-everyone vision of "sustainable growth" into a plan to reduce human reliance on the Everglades. They figured the more water they could supply for people, the less water people would have to draw from the Everglades.
The plan's basic idea is to stop squirting so much storm water from summer rains out to tide and start storing it in 180,000 acres worth of reservoirs -- the size of more than four District of Columbias -- for use in the dry season. The plan also calls for 333 Aquifer Storage and Recovery wells to pump water 1,000 feet underground for use in later years.
With the extra storage space, water managers hope they won't have to use the central Everglades and Lake Okeechobee as holding tanks, and won't have to blow out the estuaries with mini-tidal waves of fresh water. The goal is to manage the natural system for nature, while capturing new water to serve 6 million additional South Floridians and protecting them all from floods. Still, the reality of rerouting South Florida's water without offending anyone proved far messier than the commission's tidy outline.
"CERP isn't brain surgery," Appelbaum likes to say. "It's much more complicated."
The most serious technical challenge is the plan's unprecedented reliance on the aquifer wells. Restoration planners had hoped to store more water in big reservoirs, but they were stymied by $40,000-an-acre land prices in the south, the sugar industry's reluctance to sell land in the north and high evaporation rates everywhere.
So they will spend $1.7 billion on wells, more than one-fifth the plan's cost. The wells are supposed to store 20 times as much water as the world's largest aquifer storage site in Las Vegas, and many geologists fear the proliferation of wells could fracture the aquifer's rock formations and contaminate South Florida's drinking water. No one is even sure how much of the stored water will be recoverable.
"Obviously, there are a lot of unknowns, a lot of serious concerns," said William Logan, a groundwater geologist at the National Academy of Sciences.
The plan relies on three other technological risks as well: a $1 billion plan to convert two limestone quarries into reservoirs, a $280 million subterranean "seepage barrier" designed to stop water from escaping the Everglades underground, and an $800 million effort to recycle wastewater into Biscayne Bay that even Appelbaum describes as "problematic." The plan does include $100 million worth of pilot projects to test these technologies, but by the time they're done, billions of dollars will already have been spent.
"Hopefully, they'll work," said MacVicar, the former district official. "If they don't, uh-oh."
U.S. Geological Survey ecologist Ronnie Best calls the restoration a SWAG. That stands for Scientific Wild-Ass Guess. And Best is co-chair of the restoration's science team.
On Dec. 31, 1998, officials at Everglades National Park flagged an even more fundamental problem with the plan: It wouldn't get the water right. They declared in a letter that it "does not represent a restoration scenario for the southern, central and northern Everglades." Environmentalists began threatening to torpedo the plan unless major ecological improvements were assured by 2010.
The Clinton administration scrambled to insert environmental commitments into the plan's final draft, from a promise of 79 billion more gallons for the park to a pledge that restoration would be the primary goal. In response, Corps officials quietly declared war on their bosses, skipping meetings and ignoring requests for data. "The recalcitrance of Corps headquarters," Clinton aide Michael Davis wrote in a memo, "is unacceptable."
The commitments were made. But they wouldn't last long.
'Motherhood and Apple Pie'
"Let's get it done!"
It was July 1, 1999, and Vice President Gore had just delivered the 10-volume, 23-pound plan to Congress. Robert Smith (R-N.H.), then chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, had once quit the GOP because he thought it had strayed too far left. But Senate Bill 2437 -- and the Everglades -- was so popular that Smith led the charge with throwback liberal rhetoric, dismissing the cost as "just a can of Coke per U.S. citizen per year."
"The Everglades became motherhood and apple pie," Smith said. "Everybody wanted to be seen as a supporter of the Everglades."
There was one major sticking point: the late environmental additions. At a Senate hearing in May 2000, Jeb Bush, a former Miami developer -- flanked at the witness table by Florida Sens. Bob Graham (D), whose family runs a prominent South Florida development firm, and Connie Mack (R) -- ripped the Clinton administration for shattering a fragile consensus, for subjecting the state to a "master-servant arrangement."
Florida's legislature had just approved the plan with only one dissenting vote, but Bush hinted it would withdraw its support if Congress insisted on the new language putting restoration first, while only providing flood control and water supply "to the extent practicable."
Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.), irked that the Everglades was in line for 50 times as much money as he had ever wrangled for the Chesapeake Bay, argued that restoration of South Florida's 11 federal parks and refuges should trump local water demands. But Mack countered that imposing a "number-one objective" could be "disastrous to this effort."
"The foundation of [the plan] was that there would be an equal commitment to the natural system, to flood protection and to water supply," Bush said.
Senators and Clinton aides, all desperate to pass an Everglades bill before the session's end, hashed out a compromise, a series of assurances to be converted into legal documents later. "This was a political plan, and we had to deal with that," said former interior secretary Bruce Babbitt. "Some of the big decisions were pushed down the road."
So the promise of 79 billion gallons to the park was downgraded to a study. The battles over how to allocate the project's water and ensure ecological progress by 2010 were punted to a future federal-state agreement -- now known as the Agreement Between the Bushes -- and a crucial set of future regulations that would "ensure the protection of the natural system." While restoration was enshrined as the plan's "overarching purpose," the plan was legally committed to meeting the "water-related needs" of South Florida -- practicable or not.
Those needs, however, were rarely mentioned during the Washington lobbying campaign for the plan. Instead, the focus was "America's Everglades," a slogan Graham invented to dispel the notion of a parochial Florida project. Strategists figured lawmakers from drier states might wonder about a multipurpose water project for a subtropical mecca that gets 55 inches of rain per year.
"We were told not to talk about water supply," recalled Fred Rapach, a Palm Beach County water official. "Everyone said: 'Don't worry. You'll get what you need. If you want to get this through, just talk about the environment.' "
The bill breezed through the Senate, 85 to 1.
In the House, the plan's main skeptics were Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) and then-Rep. Bud Shuster (R-Pa.). Hastert relented after an Everglades trip with Rep. E. Clay Shaw Jr. (R-Fla.), who was in a tight race for reelection at a time when the GOP majority -- and Hastert's speakership -- was at risk. Shuster, a noted dispenser of pork, agreed to paste S2437 into a Corps bill in exchange for a slew of local water projects. His aides called the result the Altoonaglades, after a city in Shuster's district. It passed the House, 394 to 14. So on that icy December day at the White House, Republicans and Democrats set aside an electoral crisis to celebrate something they had in common.
"In a time when people are focused on politics, and there's a little acrimony -- I don't know if y'all noticed -- this is a good example of how bipartisanship is still alive," Jeb Bush said.
A Matter of Trust
Everglades restoration, the plan's leaders say, is like the moon mission -- a bold leap into the unknown, backed by a fervent commitment to the destination. They hope to start moving dirt in 2004, but they don't pretend to know exactly how to get to their moon.
"We don't know if the moon is made of cheese," Ogden said. And he's the plan's top scientist.
Even if the plan's questionable technologies all work wonders, no one is sure the funding will continue long enough to restore the original hydrology. No one is sure restoring the original hydrology would really bring back the biology. No one is even sure what the original hydrology was, and in floor-flat South Florida, warned Corps project manager Michael Ornella, "uncertainties of even a tenth of a foot can lead to gross miscalculations."
Developers and speculators -- and in one case, the Miccosukee tribe -- are already buying up land needed for the restoration. Babbitt even fretted about rising seas: "What do we do when the Everglades migrates north?"
Still, Ogden described the plan as a noble effort to save a dying wonderland, unavoidably constrained by Florida politics and the limits of scientific knowledge: "I'm as familiar with the uncertainties as anyone, but I've convinced myself there's a chance this can work."
The plan, after all, is not etched in stone. Congress specifically noted that it did not expect "rigid adherence to the plan," and the plan's leaders emphasize their commitment to "adaptive management," science-speak for flexibility.
"We know there will be rocks and shoals along the way," said John Fumero, the district's general counsel. "People are going to have to trust us to do the right thing."
But many conservation groups argue that trust has failed the Everglades in the past, that the plan's success depends on the strongest possible legal assurances that restoration will come first. The moon launch, after all, was not a multipurpose project. And the behind-the-scenes fights over the plan's assurances, postponed in 2000, are resurfacing now.
On Jan. 9 of this year, Jeb Bush returned to the Oval Office -- this time, on better terms with the occupant. Before heading to a $5,000-a-plate fundraiser for Jeb's campaign, the two brothers signed the Agreement Between the Bushes, designed to force Florida to reserve water for the Everglades. "We're going to do this the right way," Jeb Bush said.
But now President Bush's aides are finalizing the regulations required by the plan to ensure "restoration success," and Jeb Bush's aides -- backed by almost every Florida interest except environmental ones -- are lobbying to keep them as vague as possible.
The initial Corps draft of the regulations was almost devoid of restoration assurances. One section even created water-supply and flood-control assurances. Reps. Joe Skeen (R-N.M.) and Norman D. Dicks (D-Wash.), the chairman and ranking member of the plan's funding subcommittee, wrote that it fell "far short of meeting the Congressional intent." The members of the Everglades Coalition -- including Audubon, the plan's most reliable environmental cheerleader -- threatened to withdraw their support unless the rules are strengthened.
"The great amount of discretion granted the Corps and the state, and the lack of meaningful restoration standards, perpetuates the dominance of political influence over science, which has historically allowed the destruction of the Everglades," the coalition wrote.
President Bush's administration will unveil the rules soon. But the plan's leaders argue that trust and broad discretion will be the keys to averting a repeat of their old mistakes, that strict mandates would just lead to more litigation. The point, they say, is that this is a new era. They stand ready to take the Marjory Stoneman Douglas test, ready to help save the planet. They are willing to learn as they go along.
"We don't have 100 years of experience on this," Appelbaum said. "If people can show us problems, we'll fix them."
© 2002 The Washington Post Company