House Backs $7.8-Billion Everglades Restoration Project

The House on Tuesday approved the first phase of a $7.8-billion plan to restore the Florida Everglades, one of the nation’s largest such environmental projects.

More than half of the 300-mile-long Everglades ecosystem has been destroyed through decades of flood-control efforts that, while benefiting farms and new housing communities, disrupted the natural flow of water. The legislation, part of a larger water resources bill, authorizes the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to begin a 36-year project to restore the water flow into the Everglades.

The water resources bill was approved by the House, 394 to 14.

The Senate approved a similar version of the bill in September, virtually assuring that the Everglades restoration project will become law. But differences between the two bills must be reconciled. Included in the House version, for example, but not in the Senate bill, is a $25-million initiative to clean up contaminated ground water in the San Gabriel Valley and surrounding areas.

The Everglades is the largest remaining tropical and subtropical wilderness in the United States. In 1948, however, Congress directed the Corps of Engineers to reroute the natural water flow to control flooding in southern Florida, which was then on the verge of a population boom. The work changed the balance of the ecosystem, threatening indigenous plants and animals with extinction.

Rep. Sherwood L. Boehlert (R-N.Y.), chairman of the subcommittee that drafted the House bill, said that it represented “our best hope to save the Everglades, to protect the egrets and alligators and to restore the balance between the human environment and the natural system in South Florida.”

Under the legislation, the Corps of Engineers would work to restore more than 1.7 billion gallons of fresh water a day to the natural system--water currently lost to the sea.

Other provisions in the bill would authorize various flood control, waterway navigation and environmental restoration projects by the Corps of Engineers.

Under the House bill, the corps would allocate funds to the San Gabriel Valley Water Quality Authority to oversee the cleanup of the vast San Gabriel Basin aquifer, which serves 1.4 million residents, and prevent further spread of contamination into the Central Basin, which serves more than 2 million residents stretching from Montebello and Pico Rivera to Long Beach.

Ground-water pollution has closed one-fourth of the San Gabriel Valley’s 366 water wells and threatens to spread to other parts of Los Angeles County, according to the initiative’s supporters.

Much of the effort will go toward removing perchlorates, a toxic component of rocket fuel, from the water supply.

Rep. David Dreier (R-San Dimas), who pushed for the measure, said that during the Cold War defense buildup in the 1950s and ‘60s, “companies were disposing of spent rocket fuel [in and around the San Gabriel Valley]. . . . I believe that those companies that were responsible should shoulder the burden in this. [But] this could be drawn out in the courts for many, many years. During that time, perchlorates will continue to seep into the ground water. So that’s why this legislation is so important.”

Nearly two decades have passed since dangerous chemicals were discovered in San Gabriel Valley ground water, with the largest concentration in Irwindale and Baldwin Park. But little actual cleanup has occurred.