News

The Glades Trade

The state has a big job in trying to save the Everglades. Question is, Does it know what it's doing?

By Jim Gaines 

Twenty years ago Jahib Daher bought ten acres of mosquito-ridden, melaleuca-choked swamp in far western Broward County. The land around his still looks the same, but Daher has turned his property into a private Eden. The 53-year-old, his wife Dalva, and their three children share their land with five dogs and two horses. Country music drifts from the hand-built horse barn as Daher sits beneath the thatched roof of a cypress-log picnic shelter. Peanut, a small black, white, and brown dog, scampers over to him before shaking off a spray of water after a dip in the pond. Butterflies drift among the tall palms. "Years and years of sweat and money it has cost me to do this," he says. "I built this: my time and my money."

Daher's children -- 15-year-old Jammell, 11-year-old Brianna, and 6-year-old Jarret -- have never lived anywhere else and can't imagine leaving the peace and freedom they've found on the edge of the Everglades. Their friends in nearby Weston line up to visit the potholed gravel of SW 202nd Avenue for a weekend of horseback riding, fishing, and romping in the country. "This is paradise," Daher says.

But sooner or later, Daher's family will have to depart. In 1994 the South Florida Water Management District (SFWMD) designated their land as part of a water preserve area. It's now one piece of the $8 billion Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan. By 2006 the district plans to begin construction of a dike surrounding Daher's property and many others in western Palm Beach, Broward, and Miami-Dade counties, then to flood the area with millions of gallons of water. "They've had us under the gun for five, six years," Daher says. "Not much we can do."

The district hasn't even made him an offer, Daher says. Not that any amount would be sufficient. "How can you put a price on what you've created? I can't ever go anyplace and find something like this. I won't ever be this happy. You really can't experience it until you see my little boy crying: "Daddy, they can't make me leave; I don't want to leave.'"

Daher and dozens of others have been awaiting offers from the district for years. Because of the impending inundation, they can't sell their land to anyone else for a decent price, despite the fact that vacant lots a quarter-mile to the east are selling for more than $300,000 per acre. Daher and two dozen of his neighbors sued the SFWMD late last year in an attempt to force the district either to move ahead or give up on the land purchases.

Records of the district's land buys so far make clear just how fast land values are rising in the targeted area of western Broward County. The district paid $11,472 per acre for a 26-acre parcel in 1996. By this year the cost had risen to $104,750 per acre.

The idea for a buffer zone between the Everglades and the mushrooming subdivisions to the east was floated by the National Audubon Society in the early 1990s. The group's members urged the state to buy a strip of about 66,000 acres along U.S. Highway 27 stretching from Palm Beach County to Miami-Dade. In 1994 the district adopted the East Coast Buffer Zone plan and started notifying landowners in the project's path that they'd have to move.

New Times was unable to obtain records of land sales for the program in Palm Beach and Miami-Dade counties. But a list of Broward County purchases begins with the 26-acre buy and continues with the purchases of 17 more properties in 1997, averaging $21,000 per acre.

In the late 1990s, the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan was gathering steam, and authorities incorporated the buffer-zone project into it. The area to be bought and flooded was revised downward to about 40,000 acres, says Erin Deady, environmental counsel for the Miami office of the Audubon Society.

"The effort is to create places to store water that is now being lost to the ocean," says Charles Lee, senior vice president of Audubon of Florida. "This water storage would, in effect, recharge the Biscayne aquifer," from which South Florida gets its drinking water. The buffer would also stop contaminants from seeping into the Everglades.

As the nature and scope of the project have changed, so has the type of land the district is trying to buy. Many of the purchases made early in the project had been empty and covered in tangled melaleuca. And many of the lots were held by absentee owners, who were willing to sell on easy terms because they weren't using the land. But now the empty, cheap land is largely gone. What the district has left to buy in Broward County is almost entirely in use by half a dozen homeowners, 15 tree nurseries, and the Weekley Brothers asphalt plant, rock mine, and rodeo headquarters. None of them wants to leave, Daher says.

Meanwhile, Daher and his neighbors charge, the district has been trying to keep owners from developing their land by pressuring local governments to deny zoning changes. As proof they cite a 1997 letter about the project from Samuel Poole, then SFWMD director, to Jack Osterholt, who was Broward County administrator at the time. "We continue to request your denial of proposals which would intensify land use," Poole wrote. "Working together as partners in this effort, we can develop the most economical and effective means of meeting these demands."

Yet the district doesn't even have a solid idea of what buying the rest of the land will cost -- development or no development. The land has never been accurately appraised, says Hansler Bealyer, a realty specialist for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Until now the district has relied on a preliminary (and not very detailed) study the corps did in 1998. John Fumbero, general counsel for the district, admits the numbers are imperfect. "There were a great deal of assumptions that were made when those numbers came out. There're so many variables. It's just a project manager's rough guesstimate."

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