MARCO ISLAND, Fla. – Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis held a news conference Friday morning at a resort in Marco Island to announce a new agreement with the U.S. Army that he says will quicken the completion of the Everglades Agricultural Area (EAA) Reservoir.
“What this means is that there will be projects in the EAA that will be completed by the state of Florida on behalf of the Army Corps. It will be using the allocated federal funds and it will allow us to accelerate the commitment and the investment in the project to ensure that we’re not waiting until 2034,” DeSantis said, referring to how construction completion can now apparently be expected in 2029 instead of 2034 and blaming the farther date on a purported lack of “any real cooperation” by the Biden administration.
Friday’s announcement comes several years after DeSantis in April 2021 announced a similar agreement with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to begin constructing the EAA Reservoir.
“This project, essential to our environmental mission, represents an important step in the Biden Administration’s goal of restoring the Everglades ecosystem,” Jaime A. Pinkham, former acting assistant secretary of the Army for Civil Works, said in 2021.
At the time, according to the South Florida Water Management District (SFWMD), construction of the 6,500-acre wetland component of the project was expected to be complete by 2023 while the 10,500-acre, above-ground reservoir component of the project was said to break ground later that year.
The 2021 agreement called for a 50/50 state-federal cost split with few exceptions, according to the SFWMD. This story will likely be updated to include specifics from the latest agreement once it’s in our hands.
“This project is authorized, it’s funded, it’s under construction,” DeSantis said Friday. ”The Corps is obviously doing some parts of it. There are certain things that haven’t started yet that we’re going to be able to come in and really drive on that. This is not something that I think a lot of people thought was possible ten years ago, this seemed like a lot of this stuff was running in place. There wasn’t a lot of momentum behind a lot of these projects and now here we are.
The event at JW Marriott Marco Island Beach Resort also featuted Acting Assistant Secretary of the Army D. Lee Forsgren and Florida Department of Environmental Protection Secretary Alexis Lambert, according to a news release.
Marco Island is located in Collier County, the same county in which the state recently directed the rapid installation of “Alligator Alcatraz” at the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport.
Watch the news conference again in the video player below or by clicking here.
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