The perils of preservation

"Yes, there are key transferrable lessons, but the biggest mistake you can make is to take this as boilerplate," says Terrence "Rock" Salt, executive director of the South Florida Ecosystem Restoration Task Force, the coordinating agency for federal, state, tribal and local governments working on the $7.8 billion Everglades project.

The project most often compared to the Everglades restoration is the proposed $10 billion plan being assembled by federal and state agencies to restore waterways at the junction of the San Francisco Bay and the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers in California. Likewise, the Chesapeake Bay project coordinates the efforts of several states with the federal government. The Louisiana Wetlands Initiative, focused on preserving the marshes around the Gulf of Mexico, centers on the work of the Army Corps of Engineers.

Lesson 1 for the managers of these projects is to bring representatives of all interest groups to the table in an effort to agree on a set of facts and common goals. The key to Everglades advocates' ability to leverage cash from Congress and the Florida legislature was the broad outline drawn up by the Governor's Commission for a Sustainable South Florida. The 49-member commission was set up and appointed in 1994 by the late Gov. Lawton Chiles in an effort to reach consensus among the region's many-and often competing-economic, environmental and political interests.

"It's important that the commission be appointed by someone with clear authority like a governor or mayor, and that the members are told that they are not to come back without a plan," says Richard Pettigrew, a former state lawmaker and lawyer who chaired the commission. "The commission needs strong and high-quality people, not a bunch of naysayers," Pettigrew says. "And it needs time."

The full Florida commission met for two days a month between 1995 and 1999. With regular committee meetings combined with gatherings of subcommittees, the commission work took hundreds of hours a year. But the panel's 14 major reports form the basis for work done by the federal and state agency teams who assembled the restoration plan. The commission's votes on every major report were unanimous.

While getting interest groups to agree on a project's goals can be complicated, it is also hard to get agencies moving in the same direction. Some of the most vexing problems in South Florida flow from disagreements among government agencies. The Everglades restoration effort includes 13 federal agencies, seven Florida agencies and commissions, two Indian tribes, 16 counties and dozens of cities and towns.

Salt, who has been involved since 1993 in organizing the Everglades efforts, offers three pieces of advice for getting agencies to start working together.

o Respect cultural differences between the state and federal governments and among different agencies. "The vast majority of public servants are trained in a system that teaches boundaries and they take that very seriously," Salt says. "It's particularly difficult for regulators. They are accustomed to being combative in an effort to save natural resources." o Get all the agencies to agree to a single set of facts. This is not as simple as it sounds. In South Florida, agencies have tended to view reality through a prism of their mandates and missions.

o Be prepared to pay your share. States that serve as local sponsors for Army Corps projects typically pick up about 30 percent of the tab. To show their enthusiasm for the restoration, Floridians agree to pay half the project's cost, a deal that did not go unnoticed on Capitol Hill. "The 50-50 cost share is a huge advange in South Florida," Salt says. "It's the trump card."