The sugar cane monoculture in the Everglades Agricultural Area south of Lake Okeechobee is the biggest obstacle to Everglades restoration, Cris Costello told Ancient Islands Sierra Club Thursday.

Costello, the lead organizer of Sierra’s Our Wild Florida campaign targets Everglades restoration and pollution issues ranging from red tide to regular burning of sugar cane fields.

Some of the main points from her talk included:

The sugar industry is very powerful politically, supporting candidates of both political parties for decades.

The industry’s political clout has allowed it to defend a federal program that inflates the price of U.S. grown sugar at the expense of $3.5 billion a year to the public.

The environmental and health impacts of the longtime practice of burning the sugar fields to cut production and transportation costs for the industry falls exclusively on the residents and workers in the areas around the sugar plantations. State forestry officials prohibit burning the fields when the winds would carry the smoke to wealthy communities to the east, such as Wellington, Mar A Lago and Palm Beach.

The Everglades Agricultural Area south of Lake Okeechobee is a key chokepoint in efforts to send more, cleaner water toward Everglades National Park.

The current reservoir plans are inadequate because they are too small and serve more as irrigation reservoirs for the sugar corporations as treatment marshes.

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Polk’s County Commission voted 4-1 Tuesday shut down plans to potentially allow more development on low-lying pasture bisected by Gator Creek at the edge of the Green Swamp.

They were unpersuaded by the assurances by the engineer representing the property owners–whose official identity has changed from one anonymous company to another in the course of the plan review, according to public records– that nothing will happen until he figures out what the flood elevations are to determine how many homes can be built where on the 39-acre site on Old Polk City Road.

Neither were they persuaded by the upbeat staff report from the county planning staff that blithely referred to the site as “a challenging and an opportunity.”

Instead, they were persuaded by a procession of longtime local residents who argued cramming urban-density development in what is really at the edge of rural Polk County was bad enough, but doing it in a flood plain makes it worse.

The recent memories of the floods following Hurricane Irma last fall reinforced the point for Commissioner John Hall, who represents that area of the county and spends enough time there to see the problems first hand.

No one really trusts the alleged standard that no more water will leave the site after it’s developed than was pouring off of it before it was developed.

County regulations, according to the testimony, require an engineering design to deal with a routine 25-year storm, not heavier storms that can and do overwhelm engineered drainage systems.

Commissioner George Lindsey argued Tuesday’s vote should only have been about whether the applicant had the right to seek more dense development, not whether any plan based on that request would actually work.

Hall responded that the problem is that if it is built and it doesn’t work, the taxpayers will be on the hook to try to alleviate any of the misery it causes.

That isn’t worth the risk, Hall argued.

The cutbacks in the amount of materials Polk County officials allow in recycling carts in unincorporated parts of the county could soon spread throughout the state if waste haulers succeed in changing the law.

Major private garbage haulers began lobbying the Florida Legislature and representatives of the Florida Association of Counties and the Florida League of Cities last year to change state law.

The proposed changes being considered in the current legislative session would allow companies to reject loads that contained too much contamination and divert the recycling trucks to the landfill.

They argue that the changing nature of the market for recycling is setting higher standards and that many materials that traditionally were allowed in recycling bins, such as glass, have no market value and simply contaminate the load.

In addition, the effort highlighted the contamination problems caused by customers who put materials that have never been considered recyclable in municipal curbside programs, such as food-contaminated containers (pizza boxes are a big one) , plastic bags and polystyrene (often incorrectly termed stryofoam) containers.

In some areas, people have also been using recycling carts as extra containers for household garbage.

Another aspect of the effort is to attempt to educate garbage customers on what to put where.

A fallback position has been to propose fining chronic violators of the recycling rules.

Meanwhile, another bill has been filed to require beverage deposits.

It was filed, assigned to three committees and has not been heard in any of them.

The Ledger published the first in a series of articles on the challenge of becoming a community of 1 million people in a few years.

Interestingly, it was accompanied by an article on the expected revenue loss to government coffers from a referendum that will allow more homestead exemption property tax breaks to owners of more expensive homes. Many of us of more modest means will not see a change in our tax bills.

The pairing of the articles is apt because managing growth is largely about the financial decisions local government officials make.

Property taxes make up about a quarter to a third of the revenue needed to balance many local government budgets.

Even without the increased homestead tax break, residential growth has never paid enough in taxes to cover the cost of the services new residents demand.

That’s where impact fees come in.

Impact fees can be used to improve roads, build roads and parks and other public facilities, finance the expansion and upgrading of utility systems and, in the rare cases where they are imposed this way, pay to expand courthouses and other public buildings when the demands of growth overtake their capacity.

Polk’s historic approach –in contrast with more progressive counties—was to pursue development on the cheap.

Impact fees were minimal, if they were collected at all.

That resulted in an infrastructure deficit, which the business community engineered via Polk Vision to make an issue and to make the general public pay for through a major property tax increase.

It’s not hard to imagine this happening again after a five-year moratorium on impact fees and a low-ball set of figures commissioners decided to charge when it was revived.

The growth advocates on the County Commission tried to solve that problem by floating a sales tax increase, which the voters soundly rejected because they didn’t want to get taxed again to bail out developers .

Their next gambit was to increase property taxes by sleight-of-hand, diverting money approved for environmental lands acquisition to some of the same purposes—road improvements—that the failed sales tax proposal had advocated.

Meanwhile, Polk officials’ claimed concern about the revenue hit from the homestead exemption increase belies their decision to approve millions of dollars in property tax breaks to struggling corporations such as Amazon and Wal-Mart as part of the economic development extortion game.

Finally, Polk County’s approach to dealing with crowded roads has sometimes been to propose building new roads farther away from urban centers. All these roads will do is to subsidize more urban sprawl and to ultimately increase the backlog of projects needed to keep up with new residents’ demands.

The problem with this approach, apart from the expense, is that it delays the day when Polk will seriously talk about transit.

As long as it is easy to drive and the transit system is limited, no one except the poorest residents will take transit regularly.

Before Polk’s population reaches 1 million, it may be time to rethink our expectations. Is it really realistic, even today, to expect a smooth commute on major highways?

Maybe the big change should be to deal with reality, not fantasy.

The periodic update of the management plan for Highlands Hammock State Park will be the subject of a public meeting Feb. 6 from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. at the park’s recreation hall at 5931 Hammock Road in Sebring.

The meeting will be conducted in an open house format, which means there will be an initial staff presentation and exhibits around the room that attendees can view. That will be followed by a question-and-answer session.

The draft management plan is available at this link.

The comments collected at the Feb. 6 and additional information will be discussed at a public meeting of the park’s advisory committee beginning at 9 a.m. Feb. 7 in the same location as the public hearing. The meeting is open to the public.

Highlands Hammock State Park is one of Florida’s oldest state parks. The park was originally developed through the efforts of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s. A museum commemorating the CCC’s efforts is located at the park.

For more information on Highlands Hammock State Park, go to this link.

The South Florida Water Management District’s Governing Board will travel to the northern end of the Everglades basin for a regular monthly meeting Feb. 8.

The meeting will begin at 9 a.m. It will be held in the Carl T. Langford Board Room at the Greater Orlando Aviation Authority, One Jeff Fuqua Blvd., Orlando. To authority, as you might have guessed, is located at Orlando International Airport.

No agenda for the meeting has been posted yet, but a press release said the meeting topics will include an update on efforts to secure more land along Shingle Creek at the top of the Kissimmee Chain.

Unlike the Southwest Florida Water Management District, which allows brief public comments on items not on the agenda at the beginning of the meeting, the SFWMD sets the time for general public comment near the end of the agenda. There is an opportunity for the public to comment earlier in the meeting on some specific agenda items.

The meeting is viewable via a webcast. Go to the agency’s website for details.

Interestingly, the meeting is the same day Ancient Islands will be hearing an update on Everglades issues from Cris Costello, senior organizing representative for Sierra Club. Costello will speak at 7 p.m. at Circle B Bar Reserve. The meeting will be in the classroom at the rear of the Nature Discovery Center building complex.

Recently the Florida Constitutional Revision Commission rejected proposals to ask voters if they wanted to place the right to a quality environment into the state constitution, arguing it would lead to a flood of frivolous litigation that could hurt business.

That might lead many people to suspect the body would employ this caveat consistently throughout its deliberations, but they would be wrong.

This week the panel’s Local Government Committee will consider a proposed constitutional amendment that reads:

A regulation enacted by a county, municipality, or special district may not intrude upon or impede commerce, trade, or labor across the respective entities boundaries.

If something like that isn’t a litigation magnet, what is?

“Impede” is a pretty vague word. What would the threshold be? What would the remedy be? What problems would this measure solve that couldn’t solved in a more practical way?

It’s also interesting that this proposal is coming up at a time when the Florida Legislature is considering proposals to further erode the review projects with of multi-jurisdictional called developments of regional impact.

Anyway, the proposal is coming before the committee tomorrow.

Contact committee members or Sen. Tom Lee, who proposed this, to let your views be known. The contact information is below.

Commissioner Erika Donalds, Local Government Committee Chair
(850) 270-8283, Erika.Donalds@flcrc.gov

Commissioner Chris Nocco, Local Government Committee Vice Chair
(727) 847-5878, Chris.Nocco@flcrc.gov

Commissioner Emery Gainey
(850) 296-0898, Emery.Gainey@flcrc.gov

Commissioner Bob Solari
(772) 226-1438, Bob.Solari@flcrc.gov

Commissioner John Stemberger
(850) 329-0805, John.Stemberger@flcrc.gov

Commissioner Carolyn Timmann
(772) 210-4398. Carolyn.Timmann@flcrc.gov

Commissioner Nicole Washington
(786) 309-6022, Nicole.Washington@flcrc.gov

Senator Tom Lee
(850) 487-5020, Lee.Tom.web@flsenate.gov