The process is simple. Give away or sell dirt cheap swampy “wasteland” to whoever will buy it. Get federal and state subsidies to grow cash crops on it ‘til the soil is used up. Mine it for aggregate to be used in road & building construction. Then either fill it in and build thousands of cookie-cutter homes or, even easier, leave it open and sell it back to the government for “Everglades Restoration.”

The Lake Belt
Still think Everglades Restoration is about ecological integrity? Read a little about Miami’s Lake Belt. A few years back, the Army Corps of Engineers & US Fish & Wildlife permitted rock mining on 22,000 acres of sensitive Everglades land in Miami-Dade county. Not only did they issue the permits, they even offered to, in 35 years, buy the 80-foot deep pits left by the mining operations for $1 billion so they could be converted into water storage reservoirs as part of CERP (Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Project, see EF!J Sept-Oct). Did the safety of this new, untested process matter? Of course, they said, in fact we’ll study that….in 2011.

Not a surprising run of events when corporate mining interests, in this case, Gerardo Fernandez, ex-vice president of construction materials giant Rinker, head up the state Lake Belt committee, and when Rinker makes 5 digit donations to the Republican party. As Michael Grunwald reported in the Washington Post, “Even an internal Corps e-mail called it ‘a steal’ for the miners, noting that ‘political entities play an enormous role in this particular beast.’”

Don’t worry, well-funded national environmental groups to the rescue! A 2002 lawsuit brought on by the Natural Resources Defense Council, Sierra Club and National Parks Conservation Association, asserted that the mining permits violated multiple environmental laws and pointed to the threat of parasites entering the drinking water system via these quarry-reservoirs. They cited the 1993 health crisis in Milwaukee when water-borne cryptosporidium caused intestinal illness in 400,000 people, including 4,000 hospitalizations and at least 50 deaths. In fact, in Miami, several large wells had to be shut down because of benzene contamination in the groundwater, attributed to diesel-based explosives used in limestone mining.

Furthermore, the lawsuit asserted, required mitigation was not being carried out, in part because the low fees the companies were paying did not come close to covering land acquistion costs for the designated mitigation sites.

On March 22, 2006, federal Judge Hoevler ruled that the agencies in charge had indeed violated federal law . He wrote, “The court cannot ignore the obvious: The Corps did not exercise the full range of its authority, but rather allowed negotiations with miners to result in procedural shortcuts and other abuses of the discretion that has been entrusted to the agency.” His ruling revoked 10 permits, affecting 5,400 acres.

Back here in Palm Beach County
Unfazed, Palm Beach County is holding the door open for rock miners seeking to dig deeper into the region known as the Everglades Agricultural Area. The industry has been in the area for a while, blasting land north of the Arthur Marshall Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge & south of the JW Corbett Wildlife Management Area, and further west in the sugar cane fields. Palm Beach Aggregates has been pushing various development schemes for its exhausted mines, including a 2,000-unit residential development or the West County Energy Center, a now 3800-MW natural gas plant proposed by FPL. These old quarries are also being converted into, yes, you guessed it, CERP water reservoirs, with a purchase price of $189 million. Does it matter that the sale and development of these mining lands were recently the keystone in a corruption scandal that landed County Commissioner Tony Masilotti in prison? Well, it hasn’t slowed things down yet.

Last February, public pressure resulted in the county authorizing a 3-4 year study of the impacts of rock mining on the area and drinking water supply, but the realization of that study is now being questioned. Either way, permitting won’t be held up until the results are out. The county Zoning board already approved opening up more western agricultural land for mining. Rinker is gathering permits for a 3,000 acre mine just west of the Loxahatchee NWR and will seek approval from the Commission in early January.

Not only will rock mining in the EAA destroy wetlands & agricultural land, open up ground and surface waters to contamination, and pave the way, literally, for sweeping sprawl development, it will permanently close out the option for a flow way between Lake Okeechobee and the southern Everglades, the only proposal that comes close to restoring the Everglades system to its natural state.