Army Corps hopes to have Lake Okeechobee release options narrowed to 8 or fewer by end of week

A federal agency charged with managing Lake Okeechobee discharges and levels is conducting a public workshop this week to gather input on several proposed alternatives to the current release plan. 

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers met Monday with about 150 online viewers. 

Discussions focused mostly on hydrological modeling that considered more than 100,000 water management scenarios or iterations for the lake. 

"Iteration 1 is done," said Col. Andrew Kelly, head of the Army Corps' Jacksonville office. "Holy smokes. It’s been a long time coming and lots of great work by everyone to get us to this point, and the reality is we are here now where we’ve got a plethora of data that we’ve gotten through Iteration 1. Now it’s about applying that information and coming up with a finalized plan in July." 

This week's meetings focus on what's called the Lake Okeechobee System Operating Manual, or LOSOM, and will resume Friday at 8:30 a.m. 

LOSOM will be a new set of lake regulations that will be implemented in 2022, replacing the current rules, the Lake Okeechobee Regulation Schedule, or LORS (2008).

Kelly said the Army Corps wants to narrow the list down to five to eight options, with each working to achieve differing goals. 

The goals include sending more water south from Lake Okeechobee, reducing damaging releases to the Caloosahatchee River, cutting discharges to the St. Lucie River, addressing algae issues in the lake and estuaries, and to improve water supply while keeping the lake healthy. 

"(Let's) see where balance meets," he said. "But balance is in the eye of the beholder. And one way to look at balance is total performance, and there might be a small trade-off in one area to achieve significant changes in others." 

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In other words, it's going to be difficult to get the proper volume of water to various places across the historic Everglades when those areas need water. 

Plans that worked best for the Caloosahatchee River and its estuary would mean more discharges to the St. Lucie area. 

The rivers are sometimes used to dump massive volumes of water during heavy rain events like tropical storms or hurricanes. 

The Caloosahatchee River often needs some Lake Okeechobee water to keep salinity levels balanced in the estuary, but environmental advocates in the St. Lucie area say they never want lake water. 

The collection of models that do the most to cut down on St. Lucie discharges increases the amount of lake water that would be sent to the Fort Myers area. 

Sending more water south would be good for both estuaries, according to Army Corps records. 

Kelly stressed that the Army Corps wants to achieve balance across the system while also maintaining the flexibility to deviate from the LOSOM regulations should there be a large blue-green algae bloom on Lake Okeechobee during the summer months. 

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The Army Corps used a deviation in LORS to conduct higher-volume discharges in recent weeks but slowed the flows because the lake was receding too fast for protected species like snail kites. 

Other agencies, like the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, spoke during the presentation as well. 

"The recovery of the snail kite is heavily dependent upon the ecology of the lake and we can see that in the past two years," said Andrew Eastwick with FWS. "There was no nesting in those years. We want to make sure there is still an area for the lake as well as areas outside the lake that the flows impact." 

Lake levels were just above 14 feet above sea level Tuesday, according to the South Florida Water Management District. 

During LORS, the Army Corps has typically maintained lake levels between 12.5 and 15.5 feet above sea level in order to protect communities around the lake while also providing water for millions of South Florida residents and what's left of the historic Everglades. 

Some who participated in the meeting said they were concerned that the Army Corps may not be able to achieve a well-regulated scheduled while also being flexible in its operations. 

"I’m trying to understand the concept of flexibility that we’ve seen in that last couple of years," said Tom MacVicar, president of MacVicar Consulting, a water management firm that works with the agriculture industry in the Lake Okeechobee and Everglades watersheds. "I don’t think you can have a balanced schedule with flexibility."

Connect with this reporter: @ChadEugene on Twitter.