Kick Ass: Selected Columns of Carl Hiaasen

By a slim vote, the South Florida Water Management District last week launched one of the nuttiest schemes in its long nutty history:

Widening the 18 miles between the mainland and the Florida Keys from two lanes to three, with a fourth phantom lane to be prepared but left unpaved.

The new paved lane will be northbound, ostensibly to improve hurricane evacuation. The unpaved Mystery Lane will run southbound, and nobody in authority has convincingly explained its purpose.

Why scrape an extra swath along sensitive marshlands if it's not meant to be paved? Because it is meant to be paved, as soon as local opposition dies down.

Widening the so-called Stretch isn't about hurricane egress or driver safety, it's about cramming more warm bodies into the Keys. It's about selling more rum runners, T-shirts and time shares.

And, most significantly, it's about boosting road capacity to allow a wave of new construction along the islands.

Those most eager for the project are commercial interests and land speculators in the Middle and Lower Keys. The people most adamantly against it are those who live in the Upper Keys and, ironically, drive the hairy Stretch more than anyone.

Originally, the plan called for widening the entire 18-mile leg, which is now two-laned with intermittent passing zones. Opposition to four-laning was so fierce that planners devised a bizarre alternative—two lanes north, one lane south, and the unpaved "footprint" of another southbounder.

In case of what? Unless you're traveling to the Keys by horseback or by wagon train, an unpaved lane is of little use.

Nobody down here was fooled by the phony "compromise." Opponents remained vocal, but the county pushed ahead.

A state hearing officer eventually approved the project. Incredibly, he ruled that expanding the main corridor into the Keys would have no secondary effects; not on the environment, not on growth, not on the quality of life.

Just as Alligator Alley hasn't had an impact on traffic and crime in Naples and Fort Myers. Just as the Sawgrass Expressway hasn't disastrously urbanized northwest Broward. Much.

Safety is a bogus issue. Widening a fast highway always draws more cars, and more cars mean more serious accidents.

Supporters of a new Stretch also invoke images of hurricane stampedes as a reason to widen the road—a groundless argument meant to mask the true agenda: to bring in more people.

The Mystery Lane is no mystery at all. Paving it at a near-future date will be easy, because the water management board will say yes. A slave to politics, the board virtually always says yes.

For folks who live in already-crowded Key Largo, and who don't especially want the Turnpike in their front yard, the last hope lies with two men—Col. Terry Rice of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and former U.S. Attorney Dexter Lehtinen.

Lehtinen, a longtime advocate for the Everglades, plans to appeal the state's decision, on behalf of Keys conservation groups. He'll argue that four-laning the Stretch will imperil the water and wildlife of the islands.

In the meantime, construction cannot begin without a green light from the Army Corps. Rice, the agency's chief troubleshooter on Everglades restoration, has serious concerns about the far-reaching effects of expanding the entry to the Keys.

Rice is also curious about why the state agreed to the weird idea of a phantom southbound lane. "Why should we fill wetlands," he asked, "to make a lane they say they aren't going to pave?"

Sounds like a ploy to run a big-city freeway straight into Key Largo, but maybe it's not. Maybe it's just the world's most expensive jogging path.

The Everglades and Big Sugar

Tainted bass a warning for all of us March 10, 1989

What a winter for the Everglades. First the sawgrass catches fire, and now the fish are contaminated.

Health agencies have warned anglers not to eat any largemouth bass or warmouth caught in Conservation Areas 2 and 3. They've also suggested reduced consumption of bass pulled out of the Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge.

The reason: Samples of these fish show high and potentially harmful levels of mercury.

Such a warning is unprecedented for any freshwater species in Florida. When bass (the state fish) are in jeopardy, it's a startling signal that something very bad is happening out in the black muck of the Glades.

The story goes way beyond the culinary concerns of weekend fishermen. What's happening—invisibly, bewilderingly—is the poisoning of the source of our water and of the food chain that it supports. Animals that ingest mercury don't necessarily die, but they sometimes stop reproducing.

The sprawl of the contamination is boggling. They're not talking about a backyard pond or a patch of marsh or even a whole creek. The danger zone encompasses more than 1,200 square miles of vital watershed.