Undergraduate Abstract

Jesse Padron
May 2006

Getting the Water Right: Monitoring the Implementation
of the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan

A Thesis submitted in partial satisfaction
of the requirement for the degree of

Bachelor of Arts

In

Department of Environmental Studies
University of Nevada Las Vegas

By

Jesse Padron

May 2006

Content and Class Advisor:
Dr. Timothy Farnham, Department of Environmental Studies, UNLV
Timothy.Farnham@UNLV.edu

ENV 499 A & B

ABSTRACT

The Central and South Florida Project (C&SF) was implemented in 1948 to provide flood control, and drain wetlands for development and agriculture. In accomplishing these two goals the project was successful. However, C&SF would have wide-spread ecological consequences. In 1988 the United States Federal Government sued the State of Florida for deteriorating water quality in the Everglades National Park. As a result a restudy was done of C&SF by the Army Corp of Engineers, which found that C&SF had caused extensive ecological damage to the South Florida ecosystem by heavily interfering with the natural "quality, quantity, timing, and distribution" of water flows. The Army Corp of Engineers released a draft plan to make changes to C&SF that will be necessary to mitigate the problems C&SF has caused, called the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP). CERP was passed as Title VI of the Water Resources Development Act of 2000. WRDA2000 and the programmatic regulations were interpreted to determine the responsibilities required by them and identifying the parties those responsibilities were allocated to. A literature review was done to track CERP's implementation from WRDA2000 to the present, in order to determine if CERP's implementation will be successful in the future. It was found that because it covers an entire state and takes approximately forty years, CERP is filled with uncertainties. Because this is an adaptive management plan changes seem inevitable, and so does a constant rise in budget requirements. It was also found that there has been a failure to instill objective third-party monitoring, such as the independent scientific review panel required by WRDA2000. Political polarization in local environmental issues, rising price tags, and lack of reliably objective, third-party scientific monitoring threaten smooth implementation of this restoration plan.