The Sun asks, "Why was the new Everglades law needed this year?" The answer is that technology and progress had overtaken the 1994 Everglades Forever Act.

The Water Management District needed both the authority and the funding guarantee to enter the next phase of the water cleanup. That phase will optimize the cleansing capacity of the treatment areas that filter all water flowing from the agricultural area. It will also begin to address the huge issue of water coming from Lake Okeechobee and the urban and suburban areas, including Central Florida.

Environmental lobbyists, the same people who opposed the 1994 law, pushed to impose in state law a new standard in a technologically impossible time frame over the 2.5 million acres involved. It would have put the state in legal "non-compliance" even though the actual cleanup is ahead of schedule. They need a bogey man and an excuse to try to seize more private farm land. This policy debate has a long history in Florida, and Florida is where it should have stayed.

However, by taking their campaign to Congress and sowing hysteria there, those lobbyists have undermined the fragile national consensus over CERP's $8 billion in funding. Representatives from other states were always reluctant to send that much federal money to enlarge a 1.5 million acre wetland wilderness to 2.5 million acres when they have mountains, lakes and streams in their districts that need attention. A Washington Post series last June spread considerable doubt about CERP on Capitol Hill.

Florida environmental lobbyists now have let that genie out of the bottle by maligning their own state government and environmental agencies, which by any honest assessment have done more to clean, protect and enlarge the Everglades than was anticipated in the 1994 law. We can only hope they will be able to stuff that genie back in the bottle before the scramble for the CERP money turns into a feeding frenzy.