Bait and Switch

In the summer of 2004 Audubon had sent me to the Cocohatchee Slough to investigate this federal lawlessness as it pertains to Florida panthers. At that time Andy Eller, formerly assigned to panthers and, to a lesser extent, wood storks—accompanied me on the same flight Lauritsen and I made this past December, and we checked out most of the same development from the ground (see Going Catatonic, September-October 2004). Eller had been assigned to write a BiOp for the Mirasol project, which, then as now, clearly threatened the existence of panthers and wood storks.

Among the many problems identified by Eller was a three-mile-long, 200-foot-wide drainage ditch that would serve Mirasol and four other developments, including Saturnia Falls and Parklands. Mirasol promoters were hawking it as a “regional flow way” that would be a blessing for wildlife (in that it supposedly would restore historic water levels) and for humans (in that it supposedly would protect them from floods). Eller warned that it could drain Corkscrew Swamp.

When other developers complained to Fish and Wildlife Service brass about Eller, he reports that he was ordered to rewrite a BiOp with a “positive” spin, and that when he refused it was rewritten for him. Accusing him of insubordination and all manner of other fictional offenses, his superiors fired him. But aggressive intervention by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility got him reinstated.

Starved for funding, manpower, and (in its upper echelons) integrity and commitment, the Fish and Wildlife Service now farms out its BiOps to the developers themselves. In assessing how their projects might affect wood storks, panthers, and other listed species, developers are provided with templates and told to fill in the blanks. The data, supposedly subject to agency vetting, is as credible as that collected by department store Santas on who’s been naughty and nice.

Nowhere are results of these bogus BiOps more obvious than in Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary, traditionally the nation’s most important wood stork rookery. In the 1960s it produced an average of 4,490 fledglings per year. In the past 10 years it produced an average of 978. None were produced in 2005, 1,550 in 2006, and none in 2007. While the 2005 and 2007 failures were mostly due to drought, the species is obviously careening toward extirpation in south Florida. But you’d never know it by reading the non-jeopardy BiOps on Mirasol hatched after Eller was yanked from the project.

The first Mirasol BiOp—released in 2003 and the one Eller helped write—found that the project would degrade or destroy 3,164 acres of the wood stork’s core foraging area, resulting in the deaths of 292 chicks per year. This was a fact developers and politicians didn’t want to know. So the Fish and Wildlife Service scrapped the BiOp. The second version, released in 2005, reduced its projection of core foraging area degradation and destruction to 962 acres and the annual incidental take of chicks to 47. But even these were deemed wrong answers. Before the final and current Mirasol BiOp, released last May, Mirasol did away with its regional drainage ditch but replaced it with a network of canals, pipes, and artificial impoundments that will have similar impacts. The new BiOp proclaims that the project will be a net benefit to wood storks, increasing the population by 16 clutches a year.

Golf-condo sprawl is now good for wood storks? By what miracle? Mostly by phony “mitigation” in the form of onsite melaleuca removal.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has grave concerns about Mirasol. On September 22, 2006, it wrote the Corps that the wetlands, despite their melaleuca, “still provide important biological and hydrological functions that include filtering and cleaning surface water runoff, storing flood waters during the rainy season, recharging groundwater, and providing flood and refuges for wildlife.”

The EPA can veto a wetlands permit but bowed out of the Mirasol battle because the Fish and Wildlife Service dropped its objections. According to published reports, Porter Goss—shortly to become CIA director but then a U.S. representative (R-FL)—had pressured the federal agencies to hurry up with Mirasol’s permitting.

On the strength of the second Mirasol BiOp, the Corps had broken with long-standing tradition and denied a dredge-and-fill permit in December 2005. On the strength of the latest BiOp, it issued the permit last October.