Our friends at VoteWater took a deeper look at the unfair breakdown in cost of STA maintenance, even as Big Sugar reaps most of the benefits. Read their latest Deep Dive below: In our last “Deep Dive,” we noted how the stormwater treatment areas (STAs) — 62,000-acres of man-made wetlands south of Lake Okeechobee designed to clean water headed to the Everglades — could be used to help mitigate harmful Lake O discharges to the St. Lucie River and Caloosahatchee River estuaries. Instead, the STAs — built with $1.2 billion of taxpayer money — are used almost exclusively to clean water coming off the farmland (mostly sugarcane fields) of the Everglades Agricultural Area to keep it [...]

Our friends at VoteWater took a deeper look at what’s happening in the Glades, and what the sugar industry could be doing to help fix the problem.  Read their latest Deep Dive below:As billions of gallons of polluted water poured out of Lake Okeechobee and into the St. Lucie and Caloosahatchee River estuaries and Lake Worth Lagoon, a familiar question kept being raised: Why isn’t that water going south?And a familiar answer from the South Florida Water Management District was: We’re sending as much water south as we can.The discharges that began Feb. 17 have dumped close to 60 billion gallons of lake water in the St. Lucie estuary alone. That’s more than double the almost 25 billion gallons [...]