Shame on Lee County Commissioner Ray Judah for trying to take advantage of a natural disaster to advance his own political agenda. Everybody knows that he is gearing up to run for another office, hence the political grandstanding.

The truth is that South and Central Florida have weathered an unprecedented series of hurricanes and heavy rains for the past two years, and all that water has taken its toll on Lake Okeechobee, the estuaries on both coasts, the Everglades and millions of people in South Florida.

It is unbelievable, that in the wake of the terrible flooding and devastation from Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma, that any public official would be so callous as to call for more flooding of our already flooded and damaged farms and communities instead of trying to fix the system.

Hundreds of our employees lost their homes, streets and fields were flooded, and the state's sugarcane crop has been substantially damaged with early sugar industry estimates of Wilma's impact in the hundreds of millions of dollars with damages to crop, facilities and critical infrastructure.

We still have entire farms that we can't get into because they are under water. In a 10-day span, our fields near Clewiston were inundated with six to 12 inches of rain. This killed thousands of acres of newly planted cane, damaged the harvest-ready cane, and delayed harvest and planting activities. The wet, twisted and damaged cane stalks will slow harvest activities and greatly increase the cost of harvest as well as lower the quality of the raw sugar.

It will be a long, long time before things return to "business as usual" in the agricultural area. However, it is a credit to the hard work and dedication of our employees that we have been able to resume harvest and processing activities, providing vital jobs for our work force.

While it has its obvious flaws, the flood-control system that we have did protect most people and property from the disastrous flooding that New Orleans suffered. However, the system is what it is, and until the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP) projects and the South Florida Water Management District's accelerated projects to help Lake Okeechobee and the estuaries are built, it doesn't make sense to try to push one area's problems off on another.

In the midst of a crisis situation, Judah is trying to throw other people out of the life raft just so he can get a better seat for himself.

Robert Coker of Clewiston is the senior vice president of public affairs for U.S. Sugar Corp.

© 2005 Naples Daily News