Nov 12, 2008 8:03 pm US/Eastern
Gov. Crist Announces Everglades Restoration Deal
New Deal Drops Overall Cost From $1.75 Billion To $1.34 Billion
MIAMI (CBS4) ―
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Robert Sullivan/Getty Images
An historic Everglades restoration deal has been officially revised with the significant lowering of the deal's price tag.
During a news conference in Miami on Wednesday, Gov. Charlie Crist announced details of the revised deal between Florida water management officials and U.S. Sugar, the nation's largest producer of sugar cane.
It's a deal that has Florida government, big sugar interests and environmental united.
"By having the opportunity to save jobs, and restore the Everglades is nothing short of miraculous," said Gov. Crist at the historic home of Everglades activist Marjorie Stoneman Douglas. "Doing something this big is not easy. It's hard to envision in the first place, and then it's hard to work through the details."
Crist said the lower-cost deal, subject to approval by the South Florida Water Management District, includes a land only purchase of more than 180,000 acres at a purchase price of $1.34 billion, instead of the original cost of $1.75 billion. That's a savings of 400-million dollars.
So how does it work?
Sugar cane fields, south of Lake Okeechobee, will eventually be turned into a network of filtering marshes and reservoirs to trap pollutants, like phosphorus run-off from fields and farms, so that clean water can be sent south in order to bathe, re-nourish and restore the Everglades.
Another revision in the deal will allow U.S. Sugar to keep its high tech sugar mill, and be able to keep 17-hundred workers on the job at least for the next 7 years. All that would have disappeared under the original plan.
Crist said he was pleased with the $400,000 savings and the fact that U.S. Sugar would continue to operate plants, saving jobs.
"At a time when the economy is going through what it's going through, I'm very proud of that," Crist said.
The deal is expected to be approved next month by the South Florida Water Management District and the board of U.S. Sugar. December will mark 61 years since President Harry Truman dedicated Everglades National Park, a milestone Crist referenced Wednesday.
"I am enormously proud to be able to follow in such great footsteps," Crist said.
Under the terms of the contract, the earliest the state would be able to take possession of any land is December 2009, according to U.S. Sugar vice president Robert Coker. If the state notifies the company in the next month it would have access to up to 10,000 acres the following year. Crist did not set a number of the total acres that will eventually go to conservation. Some will likely be retained for farming.
Crist had intended to announce the Everglades deal himself a day earlier but mechanical trouble forced his plane to land before he arrived in Miami.
Coker and U.S. Sugar lobbyist Mac Stipanovich said Crist was especially involved in the Everglades deal and a hard bargainer. Stipanovich said the company began seriously talking about a land-only deal with the state about three weeks ago.
(© MMIX, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
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