The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and Florida finalized a deal Tuesday to have the state take over and speed up work on a critical piece of Everglades restoration needed to deliver water to chronically dry marshes.
Called the Blue Shanty Flow-way, the project essentially provides the plumbing needed to move freshwater from Lake Okeechobee to the Everglades and into Florida Bay.
Speaking at a signing ceremony just north of Everglades National Park, superintendent Pedro Ramos said this year's drought highlights the urgency of the work.
" I don't want to alarm anybody, but the salinity levels at Florida Bay have been spiking. Those of us in the game have been paying attention to that," he said. "This is exactly what we need to be doing in order to avoid having to be concerned about what happens downstream every single year when we have events like this, drought and water not getting to the right places at the right time."
READ MORE: Everglades advocates mark 40 years of highs and lows in the work to save the River of Grass
More than two months after this year's rainy season started, extreme drought conditions remain in the middle of the marshes where water naturally flowed. Without that water, Florida Bay can become too salty and vulnerable to seagrass die-offs, algae blooms and fish kills.
The agreement that was approved in a memo of understanding earlier this year between the Army Corps and Gov. Ron DeSantis has the state assuming control of building parts of the project, rather than the Corps. The Corps and Florida reached a similar deal to complete pumps that are part of a massive Everglades Agricultural Area reservoir in Palm Beach County.
These kinds of deals free up the Corps to focus on the bigger, earth-moving work it normally constructs, like the nearly 11,000-acre EAA reservoir.
"This is a tangible reduction in federal red tape," Col. Brandon Bowman, the district commander for the Army Corps' Jacksonville district, said at the signing ceremony. "It streamlines permitting, accelerates project delivery, and allows us to deploy our resources faster and more efficiently.
Cleaning and moving water from Lake Okeechobee, the headwaters for the shallow River of Grass, and into Florida Bay was the primary goal of the sprawling comprehensive Everglades restoration plan approved by Congress in 2000. But over the years, as conditions changed — including a booming population, rapid development and shifting politics — work has ebbed and flowed. Some projects were scrapped; others were dramatically revised. The cost of work rose from about $8 billion to what's expected to exceed $23 billion as the timeline for completion stretched out.
Record-high funding in recent years has allowed work to speed up, the National Academies of Sciences noted in 2024 in its last report-card on progress. That's allowed the infrastructure for plumbing — reservoirs needed to hold water and paths for water to flow — to fall into place to move water.
But the National Academies warned that getting water clean enough to move into the Everglades remains a concern. A settlement between the state and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency sets strict limits on phosphorus pollution. Just one of the five treatment marches built to scrub phosphorus, the National Academies said, is meeting the limit.
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