By Michael Moline for Florida Politics
[dropcap]S[/dropcap]enate President Joe Negron on Tuesday defended his plan to store runoff from Lake Okeechobee instead of sending it into coastal estuaries where the nutrient-rich water can feed noxious algae blooms.
One of the Stuart Republican’s top priorities for 2017 is to spend $2.4 billion to buy 60,000 acres of land south of the lake to store excess water and ease the effects of discharging polluted runoff.
![By Farragutful (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons](https://flylifemagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Screen-Shot-2016-12-21-at-10.15.30-AM.png)
By Farragutful.
During a briefing with reporters in his Capitol office, Negron acknowledged that his plan faces opposition from homeowners, developers and agriculture interests. But he added that the solution has been obvious since Jeb Bush was governor.
“There was a general scientific consensus that additional southern storage was necessary as an indispensible component of this project,” Negron said. “It is not a radical idea. It is not a new idea. It simply says, the time has come to stop talking about it and do it.”
The voters in 2014 approved Amendment 1 to the Florida Constitution to mandate use of 33 percent of the state’s take in real estate taxes to buy land when necessary to protect the environment.
“We should stay well within fiscally prudent amounts in terms of our bonding, and I think we will. Secondly, Amendment 1 not only authorizes bonding, it anticipates bonding for purchases of environmentally sensitive land,” Negron told reporters.
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