The Miami Herald

Posted December 3, 2005

VERBATIM

Protect national parks from sprawl

Below are excerpts from a recent letter to the Miami-Dade Commission from Mark Lewis, superintendent of Biscayne National Park, and Dan Kimball, superintendent of Everglades National Park.

Biscayne National Park and Everglades National Park certainly share the belief that planning for greater development should be conducted in a holistic manner, allowing for a comprehensive analysis of impacts. To that end, several plans have been initiated to help provide context for proposed development, the South Miami-Dade Watershed Plan being one of the most crucial.

This plan will most likely be finished within the next few months. It will help guide the development of an integrated land-use and water-management strategy for South Miami-Dade that will ensure protection and enhancement of the area's environmental, agricultural, economic and community values. The two parks strongly encourage you to allow these planning processes to come to conclusion before any consideration of expanding the UDB.

We are also concerned that modifications in the UDB without complete planning may affect the success of the Biscayne Bay Coastal Wetlands project. This is a critical component of Biscayne Bay restoration and an important element of the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan. We are concerned that elevated pollutant loading and flows, resulting from these dense developments outside the current UDB could reduce the ability of this CERP project to restore the Bay.

Moving the UDB closer to these important natural areas increases the likelihood that pollutants associated with urban growth would enter the parks, resulting in increased nutrient loading and decreased ecological health. These components of development are currently being studied in the South Miami-Dade Watershed Plan.

The watershed plan will also examine the role that farm fields and low, open lands perform as default water-storage areas for Miami-Dade. These lands, which are primarily outside the UDB, hold the water received in heavy rain to help prevent flooding, provide good aquifer recharge and moderate the quick pulse of water the canals pump into Biscayne Bay and Biscayne National Park.

The fields and low, open lands protect the bay from short-term, high-freshwater discharges, which cause salinity reversals and dramatic salinity fluctuations. For the bay, long-term low salinity is very important, but short-term dramatic pulses of fresh water can be very destructive.

Finally, several sites requesting UDB modifications before you today are located in basins already identified by the County as failing to meet existing standards of flood protection. Development in these sites will almost certainly lead to requests for even-greater flood protection, which would undoubtedly effect ground-water movement, potentially impacting both parks.

The County Department of Planning and Zoning has determined there is ample land within the UDB to accommodate growth for many years. As such, we encourage the County Commission to carefully examine whether there is any need to move forward with UDB modifications at this time. Further we certainly hope the Commission will resist attempts to shortcut the process of modifying the UDB without adequate analysis of impacts.