Governor’s support for Hoover Dike repair draws criticism

FORT MYERS, Fla.  The $200 million that Gov. Rick Scott wants spent on repairs to the Herbert Hoover Dike won’t resolve the problems emanating from the lake it surrounds, a prominent clean water activist said.

Daniel Andrews, who heads the nonprofit Captains for Clean Water, insists the only solution to Lake Okeechobee overflows blamed for blue-green algae and brown murky water in the Caloosahatchee and St. Lucie rivers is to build a reservoir south of the lake.

Scott expressed support for the reservoir project this week but also urged state lawmakers to put $200 million toward dike repairs.

“Fixing the Herbert Hoover Dike is an important problem, but it has nothing to do with the Everglades, and it’s not going to do anything to alleviate our discharges,” Andrews said.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers lets water from the lake into the rivers during rainy season in an effort to keep the dike, last fully renovated in the 1960s, from breaching.

Federal authorities have been promising dike repairs that wouldn’t be finished until 2025. Scott wants the $200 million to go toward finishing the project three years sooner.

“If we can start working to fix the dike, we can help solve a lot of water issues we have seen with Lake O,” Scott said.

Army Corps spokesman John Campbell called repairing the dike a “significant public safety issue,” given the threat of a breach, but he told The Associated Press that ecological consequences have not been studied yet.

“We could be trading one ecological problem for another,” Campbell said.

The Florida Senate approved a bill last week to borrow more than $1 billion to build the reservoir. While Scott said he supports reservoir construction, he’s not in favor of having the state buy private property to house it.

That element of the Senate’s initial reservoir proposal drew sharp criticism from U.S. Sugar and other agricultural interests, prompting a Senate committee to revise the bill before it passed.

Only land already owned by the state would be used, at least at first, under the plan that cleared the Senate. It would be up to the South Florida Water Management District to determine the best layout for storage in the reservoir and to determine how much additional land may still need to be acquired through purchase.

State Rep. Heather Fitzenhagen, a Republican whose district covers Fort Myers, co-sponsored a companion bill still making its way through House committees, some of which have shown hostility to the reservoir idea.

Like Scott, Fitzenhagen supports both the reservoir and dike repairs.

“I am extremely encouraged that we have come this far and we will continue to address this to be the right thing for all of Florida,” Fitzenhagen said.