On the edges of the sugar fields that lie between Lake Okeechobee and the Everglades, state and federal officials have spent decades and billions of taxpayer dollars to build canals, pumps, water filtration systems and reservoirs designed to restore the River of Grass.
A Tennessee-based contractor called Phillips Heavy says it wants to build the people of Florida an extra water reservoir on land owned by U.S. Sugar and Florida Crystals. But first, those companies want to mine several million tons of rock from the site to sell as road and building material over the next 34 years. They call their proposal the Southland Water Resource Project, and they say it will help restore the Everglades.
Neither the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers nor the South Florida Water Management District asked for the Southland reservoir. It’s not part of the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan. In fact, state and federal officials publicly worry that blasting, pumping and mining at the site would threaten the neighboring, $4 billion Everglades Agricultural Area Reservoir, dubbed the “crown jewel of Everglades restoration.”
Environmentalists have been crying foul since the project was proposed in 2024, arguing that it’s an excuse to build a destructive mine to enrich wealthy sugar growers who are responsible for polluting the Everglades.
Even so, the Southland proposal has won key approvals from Palm Beach County and the Florida Department of Environmental Protection. The Florida Department of Transportation announced its intention to grant $5.9 million to build a railroad to transport rock mined at the Southland site. Throughout the process, lead contractor Phillips Heavy has offered few details about how it would build its proposed reservoir.
Now, a deadline is looming for Phillips to clarify its plans — and a key group of state regulators appear to be losing patience with the company’s lack of detail.
The South Florida Water Management District has been asking Phillips since April 2025 to explain how it would blast holes in the porous, fragile limestone bedrock without damaging the nearby Everglades Agricultural Area Reservoir or polluting the water. Phillips has missed three deadlines to provide answers, but the district has granted it an extension every time. The latest deadline is Dec. 1.
Although Phillips still hasn’t answered questions about its plans, it submitted a new permit application in September, this time asking the South Florida Water Management District for permission to pump 45.36 million gallons of water a day at the Southland site through 2039. The company wrote that it would lower local water levels by as much as 10 feet “to facilitate mining and mitigation at the Southland Water Project.”
South Florida Water Management District governing board members expressed consternation at the application in their latest public meeting on Oct. 8. They took the unusual step of asserting their power to hold a public vote on the permit instead of letting the district staff approve or deny it behind closed doors.
“Why would you apply for a permit when we don’t know what the permit is for?” said governing board chair Chauncy Goss. “I think all of the board is sort of scratching their heads a little right now.”
“I’ve certainly gotten a lot of phone calls from stakeholders with an awful lot of concerns,” said Ron Bergeron, a board member and businessman who used to operate an Everglades rock mine and made a failed attempt in 2009 to expand his mining operation in the Everglades Agricultural Area.
Board member Charlie Martinez said the Southland project deserved extra scrutiny because of its proximity to the Everglades Agricultural Area Reservoir.
“It’s too much work, too much time and too much money on behalf of all the stakeholders to take a chance on this being impacted,” Martinez said. “I hope we tread very, very, very carefully.”
It’s unclear when the water management district board will vote on the permit application, because the board members said they want to wait until after Phillips submits technical details about the project, and Phillips has not met any previous deadline to do so.
The board members may never get a chance to vote on the project if governor-elect Byron Donalds decides to fire and replace them all when he takes office Jan. 5, just as his predecessor Ron DeSantis did when he took office. U.S. Sugar, Florida Crystals and Phillips directly donated $955,000 to Donalds’ political committee this year, and the companies funded other political committees that gave Donalds even more money.
The project also needs approval from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which did not answer emailed questions about its review timeline.
Phillips declined an interview request, but sent an emailed statement saying its project would boost South Florida’s water storage capacity and help with Everglades restoration.
“We are grateful to our partners at the Florida Department of Environmental Protection for recognizing the value of this important water resource project,” wrote Matt Eidson, a senior vice president at Phillips. “We will continue to work with key stakeholders, both on the state level and in the region, to restore and protect the health and long-term sustainability of our water resources for the benefit of all Floridians.”
An unsolicited proposal
It may seem strange that a private company would insist on building a public water reservoir. But that’s one of the few ways to legally mine within the Everglades Agricultural Area.
Palm Beach zoning laws prohibit mining in the area unless it supports “public road construction projects, agricultural activities, or water management projects associated with ecosystem restoration, regional water supply, or flood protection.” Courts have upheld that rule and blocked previous attempts to mine limestone on sugar land in the Everglades Agricultural Area.
On July 1, 2024, Phillips submitted an unsolicited proposal to build a water reservoir in partnership with the South Florida Water Management District. That’s the same day a new state law took effect streamlining the process for companies to get approval for unsolicited proposals for public infrastructure.
The proposed Southland reservoir would be built in the pits left over from mining limestone on 8,632 acres of sugar land. It would lie less than 1,000 feet from the Everglades Agricultural Area Reservoir, a $4 billion water control project that will store 78 billion gallons of water south of Lake Okeechobee when it opens in 2029. Phillips has not detailed how it will drain, blast and mine the site without undermining the neighboring reservoir, which is crucial for restoring the Everglades.
“The United States Army Corps of Engineers does have concerns about the proposed project’s impacts on Everglades restoration,” Army Corps Col. Brandon L. Bowman wrote in a July 2, 2025 letter responding to questions about Southland from U.S. Rep. Brian Mast.
Bowman wrote that he was worried about, among other things, “seepage”: Pumping tens of millions of gallons of water a day to keep rock mining pits dry right next to a water reservoir built on porous limestone could suck water away from the reservoir, causing it to leak.
Blasting away acres of limestone could also send cracks through the bedrock that weaken the reservoir and cause more seepage, according to Steve Davis, chief science officer at the Everglades Foundation, a nonprofit that funds research and advocates for ecosystem restoration. Mining and crushing the rock could also release phosphorus, a nutrient that wreaks havoc in the naturally low-nutrient Everglades, as well as other pollutants including chloride, sulfate and radium, Davis said.
“You can’t just kind of slide this in and say, ‘Well, we can make it a restoration project,’” Davis said. “There’s so much more work that would have to go in and so many questions that have to be answered before that.”
Water storage is an important piece of restoring the Everglades. But Everglades experts say the biggest need right now is more space for the water filtration marshes known as “stormwater treatment areas.” Inside these engineered wetlands, plants absorb nutrients from the polluted water that runs off nearby sugar fields and Lake Okeechobee. Water managers can only send water from reservoirs into the Everglades if it meets strict quality standards.
“If we’re not able to send that water south to the Everglades because it doesn’t meet the legal phosphorus limits, that doesn’t do us any good,” said Matt DePaolis, policy director for the Sanibel-Captiva Conservation Foundation. “All you’re doing is saying, ‘Here’s a bunch of extra polluted water.’”
But unlike water reservoirs, stormwater treatment areas don’t create a justification for mining. The plants in these filter marshes thrive in shallow wetlands, not the deep, rocky pits left behind by mines.
“If they were willing to donate or even sell that land to the state so that the state could construct a filter marsh, that would be fantastic and we would support that,” said Chris Wittman, co-founder of the environmental nonprofit Captains for Clean Water. “We don’t need more deep water storage without the ability to clean the water.”
The fate of the Everglades Agricultural Area
The debate over the Southland proposal highlights a fundamental question about the Everglades Agricultural Area: What will happen to the land when it can’t grow sugar anymore?
The rich muck soils south of Lake Okeechobee have been gradually wasting away since Floridians drained the Everglades and began farming and tilling the land. Subsidence has erased six feet of soil since 1924 at a University of Florida agricultural research station near Belle Glade. Farmers have gotten better at conserving the soil, but they’re still losing about 0.25 inches per year.
There were 37 inches of soil left at the Belle Glade research station in 2009. UF scientists have predicted nearly half of the Everglades Agricultural Area may have less than eight inches of soil by 2050, which would make sugarcane production “difficult and costly.”
“I think they’re probably running out of available soil to farm effectively, and that’s why they’re looking at the next land use,” Wittman said.
Mining the limestone bedrock beneath the sugarcane fields at the Southland site could generate about $168.3 million of revenue per year, according to the Palm Beach Post.
But Everglades advocates say they hope Florida’s biggest sugar growers, who have already extracted multi-billion-dollar fortunes from the region’s dwindling soil, won’t strip away the bedrock on their way out the door.
“If we were to stop farming in the Everglades Agricultural Area, I think there are incredibly smart folks working on Everglades restoration that could get it into a state that would be reminiscent of historic Everglades flow,” said Casey Darling Kniffin, policy director for the Friends of the Everglades.
