Lake Okeechobee Lunacy: Stuart City Commission Wants Government to ‘Take’ Private Land
“That’s how it appears in Stuart, where hysteria so gripped the Stuart City Commission at its last meeting that it voted to ask government agencies to seize huge tracts of private land owned by sugar and agricultural farmers so it can be flooded to relieve estuary pollution.
Stuart wants the land for a flow-way so tainted water from a full Lake Okeechobee can be discharged south over hundreds of thousands of private acres owned by sugar, citrus and agricultural farmers large and small. Only problem is, there’s no flow-way. Just the thousands of people, ordinary rural Floridians, living in small towns in the Everglades whose generations-old way of life would be ruined.
John Smith of BizPacReview has written a blistering editiorial, not only on the sanctity of private property rights as they are enumerated in the Constitution, but “that Martin County politicians and eco extremists want to fix their dirty water problem by flooding out farming in other counties.”
Smith says the harm to the St. Lucie and Caloosahatchee estuaries was not caused by farming south of the big lake. It was caused by heavy rainfall into the water system south from Orlando. And by the dirty stormwater and hundreds of thousands of septic tanks that account for more than 95 percent of the water volume and 95 percent of the phosphorous in the lake.”
Smith, Nancy. Sunshine State News 3 September 2013.