They Were Here Before the Government Changed the Water

The Las Palmas Community did not begin with DERM, Garcia, or today’s appeal in the Circuit Court. Roads, drainage, farms and human use existed here generations earlier. A small flood-protection system and roads appear on County maps before 1936, the community’s 22-mile secondary drainage system provided positive drainage from the late 1930s, agriculture is documented in aerial photographs from the 1950s, and Miami-Dade County’s own Property Appraiser records document a residence built in 1965. Families established homes, orchards, nurseries, farms and livelihoods on land the County permitted, taxed and recognized as private property.

Then government changed the water. In 1983 Congress authorized the Experimental Water Delivery Program, allowing the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the South Florida Water Management District and Everglades National Park to raise water levels experimentally for the benefit of the Park. Congress itself recognized that these changes could damage existing homes: the same legislation authorized flood-protection measures specifically for homes affected by modifications to the water-delivery schedule. The water-management program moved forward; the promised protection did not.

In 1989 Congress acted again. The Everglades National Park Protection and Expansion Act directed additional changes to restore water deliveries to Everglades National Park while expressly requiring protection of the already-settled community those changes would affect. Congress “authorized and directed” the Secretary of the Army to construct a flood-protection system for the developed Las Palmas Community. The system was designed and federally funded, yet the protection Congress ordered was not delivered as originally planned. Later, the record cited in the community history concluded that Test Iteration 7 — Experimental Program of Water Deliveries to Everglades National Park played a major role in the flooding.

What followed was years of government-controlled high water, blocked drainage, flooded roads, farms and homes, restrictions on private property, and increasing pressure to acquire the very community Congress had ordered protected. Families who wanted to remain on their land were pushed toward becoming so-called “willing sellers.” Garcia v. United States, No. 01-801-CIV-Moore was the community’s federal-court response to that contradiction: government had been directed to protect Las Palmas, yet the course of government action had moved toward flooding impacts, acquisition and condemnation of the farms, homes and families that were supposed to be protected.

The struggle did not end with Garcia. Today, Miami-Dade DERM and the South Florida Water Management District remain part of the regulatory system affecting these same lands. The present investigation asks whether land whose hydrology was altered through government water-management decisions is now being treated as naturally occurring wetland, subjected to enforcement and regulatory restrictions, and assigned ecological or mitigation value that can be converted into mitigation credits and financial transactions. In other words: were conditions created or intensified by government action later used as the regulatory basis to restrict, devalue, acquire, or condemn the same private properties—and then convert those conditions into mitigation value?

That is the question MiamiDade.watch is following from the flooding, through Garcia, through DERM enforcement, and into the modern mitigation-credit system.

READ GARCIA v. UNITED STATES — COMPLETE COURT RECORD →

LAS PALMAS EXISTED → GOVERNMENT CHANGED THE WATER → CONGRESS RECOGNIZED THE DAMAGE RISK AND ORDERED PROTECTION → THE PROTECTION WAS NOT DELIVERED → FLOODING AND ACQUISITION PRESSURE CONTINUED → GARCIA FOLLOWED → TODAY THE INVESTIGATION FOLLOWS THE REGULATORY CLASSIFICATION, THE MITIGATION CREDITS, AND THE MONEY.