Everglades Illustrated: Stormwater Treatment Areas — Your tax dollars at work
Take a look at the graph above, showing data collected by the South Florida Water Management District and consider the following: There are roughly 60,000 acres of taxpayer-funded stormwater treatment areas (STAs) south of Lake Okeechobee. These man-made wetlands are designed to store and treat water before it reaches the southern Everglades. For each of the last 10 water years depicted above, the yellow portion of the bars represent the volume of water sent to the STAs directly from Lake Okeechobee. The much larger blue portion represents runoff sent to those same STAs by sources including indistrial sugarcane farms in the Everglades Agricultural Area. So what’s the problem? Coastal communities downstream of Lake Okeechobee are familiar with the horror that [...]