Interior Dept.: DOT grants help Fla. Everglades

Interior Secretary Sally Jewell said Monday that a $20 million grant that was issued by the Department of Transportation (DOT) to help construct a bridge in Florida will help preserve the state’s Everglades.

The grant is scheduled to be used to help pay for a 2.6-mile bridge in the Miami area Jewell said in a blog post on the transportation department’s website would “restore the flow of water through the Everglades.

“The Everglades in Florida is one of America’s great treasures, a natural wonder that is home to thousands of species of fish and wildlife and Indian tribes who have called these lands home for millennia,” Jewell wrote.

“It is also one of our most imperiled ecosystems, threatened by loss of water quality, well-intentioned but ecologically damaging water control projects of the past, and invasive species – all further exacerbated by the effects of a changing climate,” she continued. ” I commend the strong leadership of Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx and the State of Florida for making this critical restoration effort a priority.”

The grant, which was issued last week, was one of $600 million worth of funding that transportation department officials said is being provided to 72 infrastructure construction projects in 46 states and Washington, D.C.

The grants are being paid for with money from the transportation department’s 2014 Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER) grant program, which was created by the 2009 economic stimulus bill. The program allows states to apply for funding for transportation projects that “will have a significant impact on the nation, a metropolitan area or a region,” according to the DOT’s website.

Jewell said the transportation department funding “when combined with the $90 million invested by the State of Florida and contributions from other federal agencies, will enable engineers to correct the unintended consequences of the construction of the Tamiami Trail in the 1920s that is choking off water to the south while drowning important habitat like tree islands to the north.

“This will be the second span of bridge to be constructed that will eventually allow water to flow under the Trail, breathing life back into the ‘River of Grass,'” she wrote. “The completion of this second span will enable the Central Everglades Planning Project (CEPP) to go forward. This massive project will capture and clean up water that is currently damaging estuaries to the north and will divert it south to flow under the Tamiami Trail bridges to Everglades National Park and Florida Bay.”