Gary Goforth has a handful of scum.

He couldn't be happier.

In Goforth's palms, the translucent, lime-green mush squishes to the touch like soggy paper. From the air, it looks more like a golden crust plastered on the water bordering western Palm Beach County's sugar cane fields.

The scum -- in scientist-speak, periphyton -- is a floating algae mat common in healthy stretches of the Everglades. Goforth also calls it a visible symbol of a decade-old Everglades pollution cleanup that has achieved successes unknown to most people.

"We as an agency haven't done a good enough job getting our good news out," said Goforth, chief consulting engineer for the South Florida Water Management District.

So here goes: The district has spent about $600 million turning cane fields, vegetable farms and hunting grounds into cattail- and algae-filled marshes that can clean the runoff flowing into the northern Everglades. The 1,800-employee agency has assigned 217 workers to the task. And it's doing far better than it expected in cutting the Everglades' load of noxious phosphorus.

The algae mats are part of the district's arsenal of pollution-scrubbers. They've sprouted in stretches of open water -- lined with water hyacinths, hydrilla and bottom grasses -- that the district has fostered in parts of its filter marshes. They're an improvement on the fields of cattails included in the marshes' original designs.

The district's plans call for creating 44,000 acres of filter marshes with help from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and spending more than $1 billion for the cleanup. They're also redesigning marshes on the fly, adding tweaks such as berms of bone-white lime rock.

The district has a good reason for telling that news now. For the past month it has been at the center of a fierce debate on a proposed state law allowing an extra 10 years for finishing the cleanup.

Environmentalists, congressmen and a federal judge say the law would abandon Florida's promise to cleanse the Everglades by the end of 2006. Gov. Jeb Bush says the law would protect the cleanup from interfering lawsuits and provide money to finish the project.

"Even my mother-in-law (is asking), 'What are you doing over there at the water management district?' " said district senior environmental engineer Tracey Piccone.

Water managers acknowledge that by the 2006 deadline, they're unlikely to meet the 10-parts-per-billion phosphorus limit that the state is proposing for the entire Everglades.

But Goforth said they're getting close, as quickly as they can using a technology never tried anywhere close to this scale. By December 2006, the district hopes that 88 percent of the water entering the Everglades will contain phosphorus levels of 10 to 14 parts per billion.

That's far lower than the nearly 200 parts per billion of phosphorus that routinely flowed into the Everglades before the cleanup started.

The problem, some environmentalists say, is that existing state law requires all of the cleanup to be done by the deadline. Others are willing to grant the district more time, but not the carte blanche they say the bill would allow.

And other critics say the district has missed chances to move the cleanup faster.

"At some point along the way they just quit," said retired corps Col. Terry Rice, now a consultant to the Miccosukee Indian tribe, in a recent interview. "They have not had a sense of urgency."

That's untrue, Goforth said.

"Every day we come to work looking for ways to reduce phosphorus," he said. "I can tell you I've had many sleepless nights."