For Release: June 12, 1997

For complete remarks: (202) 2086416

Deerfield Beach, FL In a speech before the Tenth Annual Growth Management Conference, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt today endorsed an aggressive plan to protect sensitive farmlands, forests, lakes and wetlands as part of a crucial buffer between urban development along Coastal Ridge to the east, and the Everglades watershed to the west.

The plan ties increasing water demands for 2.1 million new arrivals to South Florida, with the water needs of the wildlife and wildlands which attracted them there in the first place. Babbitt showed why and how closely the urban and natural landscapes are forever "inextricably linked."

"When engineers raised great levees to separate the Everglades and Water Conservation Areas from the urban areas along the coastal strip," said Babbitt, "they neatly partitioned land into a wild west and developed east. But they did not, and in reality could not, partition the waters."

The reason, he said, is the porous aquifers beneath both: "We cannot let subdivisions and shopping centers march right smack up against the edge of the Everglades. It simply won't work, because we would then have to choose either to sacrifice a part of the Everglades to perpetual drought or flood our subdivisions during the rainy season. There must be a transition zone designed to regulate water levels on opposite sides of the levee, one that stores enough water to both replicate natural hydro periods in the

Everglades on the west, and to allow flood control on the east, and to recharge the aquifer beneath them both."

Babbitt detailed the shape of three critical parts of this transition buffer:

1) A "Lake Belt" plan could preserve 13,000 acres of pristine wetlands; store and recharge water above and below ground; consolidate the scattered checkerboard of limestone rock mining lands into one design, later available for 24,000 acres of freshwater fishing and boating.

2)The "East Coast Buffer"plan could interconnect a series of reservoirs and marshes dedicated to receiving excess water now discharged into the sea. It would reduce seepage lost from the Everglades, enhance wetland habitat, store stormwater, and recharge aquifers.

3) The impending transfer of Homestead Air Force Base must be conditioned on the effective protection of Biscayne National Park and its adjacent shoreline lands. "I believe that the land use plan should include a progression of buffers from the watersof Biscayne Bay across a suitable interval of natural landscape to protected agricultural lands to the developed areas that will quickly sprout up around a newly developed civilian aviation facility."

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