The common ground between people affected by Lake Okeechobee’s pollution is not ground at all. It’s water.

More than 400 people made that message clear to the South Florida Water Management District’s Governing Board at its monthly meeting, held Wednesday at Florida Gulf Coast University in Estero.

Clewiston Mayor Mali Chamness said her city relies on agriculture, but like coastal communities, it also depends on cleaning up Lake Okeechobee.

“We’d like to find that common ground, that we can work together as communities. Because we not only share common ground, we share common water,” Chamness said.

For more than three hours board members listened to people talk about a filthy Lake Okeechobee, the east and west coast estuaries it pummels with dirty water in the rainy season and the importance of maintaining rural life in the Everglades Agricultural Area where the lake once flowed.

Busloads of people came from Sanibel Island, Fort Myers, Bonita Springs, Moore Haven, Clewiston, South Bay, Belle Glade, Stuart and everywhere between.

“The problem is that we’ve created a cesspool of Lake Okeechobee. I made a statement seven years ago that I felt Lake Okeechobee was too big to kill. Last year, I retracted that statement; we have killed Lake Okeechobee,” said Alvin Ward, a Glades County commissioner. “The estuaries ... that’s become the drainfield to the cesspool.”

Ward told the board that the mud must be removed from the lake’s center or the lake will never bounce back to health.

The district’s nine-member board, appointed by the governor, makes decisions on water quality and drainage matters from the Kissimmee Chain of Lakes to the tip of the peninsula. The district also collaborates with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on managing water flow into and out of Lake Okeechobee.

On both coasts and in the agricultural areas, everyone wants water from the lake, just not too much and not too dirty.

More than 40 years of untreated stormwater runoff pouring in from dairy farms, citrus farms, sugar fields and vegetable crops has ruined the lake’s water. Urban sprawl throughout the watershed is adding to that problem, Wade and others said.

From years of sediments washing down the Kissimmee River, a mud pit chock-full of algae-causing phosphorous covers 300,000 cubic yards of the lake’s bottom, said Susan Gray, director of the Lake Okeechobee division for the South Florida Water Management District.

Gray said the district is looking into the possibility of removing the mud.

Hurricanes in 2004 and 2005 churned up that mud and stirred it into the water column so efficiently that the sediment is almost as emulsified as salad dressing. That’s the same water that at times flowed at 48,000 gallons a second into the Caloosahatchee River.

Over the past three years, a yearly average of 2.3 million acre-feet (an acre-foot equals about 326,000 gallons) was discharged as excess from Lake Okeechobee, said Calvin Neidrauer, an engineer with the water management district.

All that water coursed down the Caloosahatchee River and the St. Lucie Canal and killed oyster beds and sea grasses in the estuaries. The murky water spread for miles into the Gulf of Mexico and chased crabs and salt-water fish from San Carlos Bay’s prime fishing spots. Managers at J.N. Ding Darling National Wildlife Refuge attribute the lake waters to a recent explosion of mat-forming algae along Sanibel’s bayside shoreline.

Located in the Gulf of Mexico, opposite the mouth of the Caloosahatchee River, it’s no wonder the City of Sanibel Island is up in arms over the damage the lake releases have caused to the estuary.

No one should tolerate such horrible water conditions, said Carla Brooks Johnston, Sanibel’s mayor.

“This is not a fight between regions. This is not a fight between coastal and inland. This is a matter of living with polluted waters. People inland can’t live with polluted waters; people on the coast can’t live with them. People on the coast or inland can’t live with carcinogens in their water,” Johnston said, addressing the governing board. “It’s nice that you’re working on things for five years from now, three years from now, 10 years from now, but you know, we’re dialing 911 and you can’t build a hospital first. We need relief now.”

Arguments over where excess flow should go have historically pit ecological, tourism and fishing interests in the coastal estuaries against sugar growers south of the lake. Though emotions still ran high Wednesday, comments from more than 30 people throughout South Florida centered more around working together than pointing fingers.

Leaders from the agriculture-dependent towns of South Bay, Pahokee, Belle Glade and Clewiston said converting sugar farm fields south of the lake for water storage would decimate their economy and do away with their livelihood.

Janet Taylor, a Hendry County commissioner, said past projects to protect the Everglades from the lake’s polluted water by building stormwater treatment areas on former farmlands diminished county coffers by removing land from the tax roll.

Now, she said, more attention needs to be placed on the remainder of the greater Everglades ecosystem.

“The system as a whole needs to be addressed and saving one portion at the expense of the others is not acceptable,” Taylor said.

The governing board echoed the sentiments of the rural communities and asked for cooperation from coastal residents and community leaders.

The board also emphasized that it is re-evaluating lake restoration ideas, such as dredging the lake, that it had deemed unworkable in the past.

Alice Carlson, the only governing board member who lives on the west coast, said South Florida residents should continue to voice their opinions, offer suggestions and expect results. She urged residents to also keep the pressure on Congress to fund Everglades restoration projects.

“We do not have a problem with you holding our feet to the fire. Please do,” Carlson said.

Erick Lindblad, executive director of the Sanibel-Captiva Conservation Foundation, said he came away from Wednesday’s meeting feeling hopeful that communities throughout South Florida will be able to come up with mutually beneficial solutions to the water quality problems.

“We need to find solutions that will have a positive effect on the rivers, the estuaries, the Everglades and the health of the lake. I think that’s evolving and that we’re not trying to draw lines in the sand between communities,” Lindblad said. “We really want to search for solutions that are beneficial environmentally to all communities.”

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