Residents come out in support of Now or Neverglades
Hundreds of business owners and residents came out Aug. 4 to sign the Now or Neverglades Declaration at the Sanibel Chamber of Commerce.
Captains for Clean Water and 15 other organizations were the driving wheel behind the declaration. They all came together with one goal in mind: move the water south.
Daniel Andrews, co-founder of Captains for Clean Water, said meaningful progress has not been made in regards to Everglades restoration and the water quality in Southwest Florida.
“Every business, every organization, every individual, property owner living in Southwest Florida has invested interest in the quality of our water and the Everglades. This is an issue that has plagued us all of my life, I’m 25 years old. When I was a kid, we had water quality issues,” Andrews said.
During his speech at the signing, he said that in Islamorada, they lost 50,000 acres of seagrass due to a lack of fresh water flow. Meanwhile, residents in Southwest Florida are getting billions of gallons of nutrient rich fresh water being pumped out in the estuary.
“This water is desperately needed in Florida Bay and the Florida Keys to save the coral reefs and to save Florida Bay. There is no one author of Now or Neverglades, it’s all of us. We all have the same message. We need our elected officials to do the right thing for the Everglades and for our water quality here. This issue has dragged on for too long.”
James Evans, City of Sanibel natural resources director, said that we know the ecological effect of not having clean water, but now, Sanibel is starting to see the economical effect.
“You see the captains that are out here trying to make a living fishing, and it’s really difficult when you can’t see the fish you’re trying to catch or the people that come and visit your hotel walk out and they’re standing in black water or there’s algae washing up on the beaches. Those of us that were here in 2005, 2006 and 2007 when we saw massive amounts of the red drift algae washing up on our beaches what type of an economic and ecological impact it had. It’s time to start making decisions on Everglades restoration based on science, not politics,” Evans said.
Rae Ann Wessel, natural resource policy director at Sanibel Captiva Conservation Foundation, said that one of the most important things residents can do right now is to communicate with the governor and ask him to start the planning process to move water south of the lake to this summer instead of 2020.
“We just had some meetings about this and the Army Corps of Engineers, Jo-Ellen Darcy, assistant secretary of the Corps of Engineers has said that she’s in but she needs a state sponsor and that state sponsor is the governor. Take the petition and encourage the governor to move the planning up. It costs nothing. It means that we move the planning up by four years. It means that we move solutions for our coast and the east coast up by probably a decade and a half,” Wessel said.
Another speaker who made an appearance at the signing was John Scott, who is a candidate for Florida State House District 79. Scott said the next steps we need to take to ensure clean water for all, are to elect leaders who will work to to solve our water problems instead of taking enormous sums of money from Big Sugar, use Amendment 1 funds to exercise the land purchase option negotiated under the Charlie Crist administration for 153,000 acres of land in the EAA which expires in 2020 and determine all Florida legislators, House and Senate who support the Now or Neverglades solution and work with them to make it a reality.
“…Signing it was a proud moment for me personally as it represents a validation of what so many of us have been fighting for years to achieve. More importantly, it’s another step toward the inevitable purchase of land south of Lake Okeechobee in the Everglades Agriculture Area,” Scott said.
To sign the petition, go to gladesdeclaration.org.