Green Horizon Land Trust is sponsoring a swamp buggy tour of Lake Kissimmee State Park on Saturday, beginning at 9 a.m.

The tour will take you to Gobbler Ridge on the shore of Lake Kissimmee, one of the majestic headwaters lakes of the Everglades where you may see Snail Kites, Crested Caracaras and more.

The tour will also include Buster Island, a natural area that lies along the shore of Tiger Creek, one of the lake’s tributaries and a good place to see other interesting wildlife.

Suggestion donation to support the local land trust is $20, plus park admission is you don’t already have an annual state park pass.

To reserve a space on this unique outing, contact the land trust at greenhorizonlandtrust@gmail.com . See you there.

Lake Kissimmee State Park is located at 14248 Camp Mack Road, Lake Wales.

You never know when the effects of the current government shutdown over President Donald Trump’s border wall demands will hit next locally.

Add habitat restoration in a local national wildlife refuge to the list.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had planned to host a volunteer work day Saturday to remove some wildlife barriers and other work at the section of the Everglades Headwaters National Wildlife Refuge off Hatchineha Road in Polk County.

That effort has been canceled until further notice because of the shutdown that has furloughed staff.

Meanwhile, another report revealed that Trump is ordering staffing of any federal refuges that are necessary to allow scheduled hunting seasons.

What next?

The Polk County Planning Commission voted 5-1 Wednesday to recommend denial of a proposal to change the development code to allow the County Commission to quit accepting roads in new subdivisions for maintenance.

The idea was proposed last year by County Commissioner George Lindsey, a Lakeland developer, as a way to reduce the county’s future financial burden for road maintenance costs.

But planning commissioners questioned the wisdom of telling future homeowners they’re on their own when it comes to maintaining the road and drainage systems on the streets where they live.

One issue that the proposed changes didn’t address is what kind of notice people buying homes would get.

The other issue raised was the uncertainty on how much of a financial burden maintaining local roads was on the county budget. No information was available during Wednesday’s hearing other than generic costs of road maintenance in general.

This appears to be a unique approach among county governments among other urban counties in central Florida, according to a staff analysis. In fact, one adjacent county—Osceola—discourages private road subdivisions.

The case will now go to the County Commission to determine whether it will overrule the Planning Commission or reconsider the policy.

The legal fight over the long-delayed implementation of a 2014 constitutional amendment approved by a 75-25 percent margin continues in Tallahassee.

The amendment was intended to restart the stalled Florida Forever program and resume major conservation land purchases on the state’s priority list.

Instead, Florida legislators have diverted money to cover routine agency operational costs and have appropriated much less money for land acquisition than the amendment authorized.

Several environmental groups, including Sierra, sued legislators in 2015 to enforce the amendment’s proper implementation.

Environmentalists won in circuit court last year. Legislators appealed and now the case is before the First District Court of Appeal in Tallahassee.

During the past month a number of outside groups on both sides of the dispute have filed motions with the court.

On the environmentalists’ side, briefs were filed by Florida Conservation Voters, The Trust for Public Land, The Everglades Foundation and Florida Audubon Society.

On the legislators’ side, briefs have been filed by the South Florida Water Management District, the Florida Shore and Beach Preservation Association, the Florida League of Cities, the Florida Stormwater Association, the Florida Rural Water Association and the Florida Water Environmental Association Utility Council.

Copies of the briefs are not viewable by the public on the appeal court’s website, but according to a report by Bruce Ritchie at Politico, opponents of the environmental case are arguing the amendment could harm Everglades restoration and beach renourishment funding and delay solution of the algae pollution plaguing south Florida coastal areas. Critics also claimed there probably isn’t enough conservation land left of buy anyhow to spend the $18 billion the amendment authorizes.

The fact is that there are other legitimate funding sources for these programs besides the Amendment 1 funds, which is at the heart of the debate.

The latest estimate to buy just the lands on the state’s top priority list comes to $2.5 billion, which is only a small fraction of the other projects on the state’s acquisition list. In addition, more funds are needed to match local environmental land acquisition purchases. Added together, you get pretty close to the $8 billion figure.

But this argument is really irrelevant.

The simple fact is that Florida voters voted to fund land acquisition, legislators opposed the effort and have been doing what they can to thwart it. Local governments have joined the fight on the legislators’ side because they see the fund as giant piggy bank they can use for public works projects to support more development.

By the time this is over, we’ll know whether the Florida Supreme Court views the Florida Constitution as a suggestion or the law.

Despite the lack of evidence that shipments of waste from Fort Myers pose any health threat to anyone living in Polk, county commissioners are still receiving a regular stream of emails and phone calls from a handful of residents who are upset based on media reports.

In an effort to put the issue to rest, commissioners have scheduled a presentation at next Tuesday’s meeting by Mary Yeargan, a geologist from the Florida Department of Environmental Protection’s regional office in Temple Terrace, and James W. Clark III from Clark Environmental in Mulberry, the company that is processing the waste.

Meanwhile, FDEP officials, perhaps in an effort to reassure the public about the issue, on Dec. 19 conducted a “surprise” inspection of Clark Environmental and of the Cedar Trail Landfill, the site where the processed waste will be disposed . According to the report forwarded to county officials, the inspection found both facilities in compliance.

Tuesday’s meeting, which begins at 9 a.m., is open to the public and can also be viewed on Polk Government Television, either online or on cable.

In case you don’t know what this is all about, here’s the short version.

Fort Myers officials buried some waste from a city water plant in a pit in a predominantly African-American community called Dunbar in the early 1960s. The presence of the waste only came to light in recent years. City officials initially misled the public about the situation until local media uncovered the facts.

Although there’s some dispute about whether the material that was buried really constitutes a health threat to the Dunbar community, the presence of the dumpsite and the initial response by city officials caused it to become a political issue. That forced city commissioners to agree to remove the waste and ship it somewhere to the processed.

Although city officials originally planned to ship it to a cement plant in Alabama, the deal fell through and they decided to ship it to the Mulberry processing plant instead.

At the time the waste was first disposed in 1962, no state or federal environmental agencies with any enforcement power existed.

When residents put their recyclables in curbside bins, contamination wasn’t a problem.

Now that carts have replaced the bins, the contamination rate has shot up from 12 percent to 32 percent. Polk officials said they were surprised, though this has been a problem in other Florida counties, so they should not have been.

It seems that some people didn’t get the message and use their recycling cart as a second garbage cart.

The contamination is made up of two different types of materials.

One type involves materials such as glass bottles and single-use plastic water bottles, which were accepted under the previous recycling rules, which changed in 2016.

The other involves materials such as plastic bags and polystyrene containers, which have never been accepted.

These materials reduce the quality of the acceptable recyclables, they can gum up the processing equipment and they require more labor to pull them from the loads.

Polk has taken a financial hit as a result.

The County Commission recently approved a change in its contract with Waste Management to increase the processing fee for recycling loads from $50 to $90 a ton.

This fee increase will continue until the contamination percentage drops significantly. Anything below 20 percent is supposedly acceptable, though the lower the better.

To accomplish this, Polk has hired a marketing firm to come up with a more user-friendly educational campaign to persuade residents to mend their recycling ways.

The campaign is supposed to roll out later this winter.

In the meantime, make sure you’re not part of the problem. Talk to your neighbors if you get a chance and help them to comply.

Recycling is not that difficult as long as the rules are clear.

That has been a problem in the past.

As expected, the Polk Regional Water Cooperative and the Peace River Manasota Water Authority’s boards voted unanimously Wednesday to approve a settlement to end a pending legal battle over allocation of water from the Peace River to feed projected utility demands on both ends of the river.

Under the agreement, PRMWSA will reduce its requested maximum withdrawal from 258 million gallons a day to 210 mgd. Its current permit allowed a maximum withdrawal of 120 mgd. Most of the withdrawals occur during the summer rainy season.

PRWC had applied earlier this year to withdraw up to 18 mgd from the Peace River and 12 mgd from the Peace Creek Drainage Canal.

Under the settlement, PRWC would be allowed to proceed with that application as long as it is able to receive a tentative nod from on the permit’s approval from Swiftmud within 10 years. The settlement does not deal with a separate permit request PRWC filed to withdraw 10 mgd from the Alafia River.

During Wednesday’s meeting it emerged that water managers at both utilities are working on plans to seek Swiftmud officials to increase the maximum daily withdrawal from the river.

The limits were set to allow the river to function naturally by periodically inundating flood plains.

Cutting further into the river’s natural flow regime is expected to attract questions concerning what further weakening of the protections the river receives from overexploitation may occur in response to future water demands.

Meanwhile, any upsteam water withdrawals by PRWC will require work to locate, design and receive a permit for reservoirs that could hold as much as 10 billion gallons, said Gene Heath, who is the cooperative’s project manager.

This would require a large tract of uplands, he said, explaining that a reservoir to hold a minimal 3.6 billion gallon reserve would require one square mile, which is equal to 640 acres.