Rep. Rooney, House majority leader tour Everglades, talk funding

NAPLES, Fla. There’s nothing like seeing something firsthand to understand and appreciate it.

That’s why U.S. Rep. Francis Rooney took House majority leader Kevin McCarthy on a helicopter tour of the Everglades on Tuesday.

Rooney hopes that by seeing the Everglades, McCarthy will realize the importance of funding projects to restore the area.

“The tour we just had, you can’t just walk through by just watching a map,” McCarthy said. “This is a national treasure.”

Gov. Scott on Tuesday approved expedited funding to build a reservoir south of Lake Okeechobee to store stormwater overflows and restore the Everglades, a bill that was a favorite of clean-water advocates.

There are 68 projects in the federal Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Project that have been in the works for 17 years, and Rooney is pushing to complete them as soon as possible.

“It’s like a big construction project where you do a lot of things at once and they all come together at the end and make a mosaic that solves the problem,” he said.

Rooney also stressed the importance of repairing the Herbert Hoover Dike, an idea that Scott has also pushed but that environmentalists aren’t as keen on. Rooney has called on President Donald Trump to take notice and include dike funding in his fiscal year 2018 budget.