South Florida Water Management District

We saw targets of 350 CFS.

So that's the South Florida Water Management District saying, our goal is to provide you with 350 cubic feet per second.

And the Army Corps adopted those targets as well.

And that's what they had published as their aims for the river.

But you'll notice that we're talking in the past tense because eventually, as we've all seen, if we've been down here, the rains did start.

So the water flowing through S-79 eventually started to tick up, but it wasn't because of any management decisions.

It wasn't because suddenly we were getting more water from the system based on decisions being made by Army Corps or South Florida Water Management District.

We just finally started seeing the rains.

And finally, Florida is using solar powered robotic rabbits to help combat invasive Burmese pythons in the Everglades.

Developed through a 2025 partnership between the South Florida Water Management District and the University of Florida, the decoys imitate prey with heat, scent, and AI enabled cameras.

When a python approaches, officials are alerted and trained removal agents capture it.

The technology supports rather than replaces Florida's Python Challenge and other control efforts.

Below the lake, South Florida water planers built the 105-mile, 169-kilometer East Coast Protective Levee, along with an assortment of water catchment basins and eastbound canals that whisked water directly to the ocean without flooding the urbanized east coast.

By the late '60s, the South Florida Water Management District overseeing the project had drained half the Everglades with the aid of some 1,700 miles or 2,700 kilometers of canals and levees and 16 pump stations that carefully monitored and jettisoned water away from urban and agricultural areas.

Just as the vision of Florida as a dreamy destination was carefully cultivated, so too was the actual land.

Painstakingly, expensively dried up and handed over to a wave of real estate developers who, in turn, transformed it, divvied it up, and sold it to the hordes of post-war Americans pouring into the state.

That means they, they lie in wait for prey to come within striking distance.

And helpfully, th-that kind of patience gives the robotic rabbit time to detect the predator, and then they send an alert to the South Florida Water Management District, and a trapper who's in the area, in the region, gets the location information on their smartphone and goes and catches the snake and euthanizes it.

Oh, man, I prefer the Bugs Bunny cartoon.

But these are the kinds of stories that, no, they're not vital to national interest, and no, um, you're not going to be greatly enriched by me telling you this, but it will give you some conversation to have with friends and family that's not depressing.

And I opposed to them.

We have aquifers and our current water systems and our current water South Florida Water Management District and DEP are all sending us, since I was in my city as an elected official, notices constantly saying, these aquifers are depleting.

We're letting you know, this is your warning.

You need to start planning now.