News Cast for October 21st:
County supports fishing and hunting amendment
The Okeechobee County Board of County Commissioners directed staff to draft a resolution of support for the constitutional amendment that would protect hunting and fishing rights in the state.
Commissioner Kelly Owens said the bottom line is the industry will still be regulated by the state as it is now.
“It is just a matter of protecting ‘the right’, to where if enough people were entrenched in the legislature down the road, it would take another constitutional amendment to take away people’s ability to fish and hunt in our state.”
Owens said activists have tried to interfere in the right to fish and hunt in other states,
“There are a number of states that have already started to see the consequences of the interference.”
Okeechobee County staff has held several meetings with the Florida Turnpike Authority in an effort to get quicker access to the turnpike for Okeechobee ambulances and fire trucks.
This would require another onramp to the turnpike in Okeechobee County.
Deputy County Administrator Richard Reade said the emergency access could have design done by September 2025.
“Hopefully by the end of 2025 they will have construction completed. That is the intent.”
The Rivers Coalition of Stuart heard from the new commander of the Jacksonville District of the US Army Corps of Engineers, Col. Brandon Bowman.
He gave an update on LOSOM, the C-44 reservoir and the Everglades Agriculture area reservoir.
On LOSOM Col. Bowman said they tried to make it fair to all stakeholders.
“More than 500,000 model runs were ran to see the different lake conditions. We did these runs mainly to allow every stake holder to see their ideal conditions to understand that if you get what you want, someone else will probably be impacted in a negative way.”
Col. Bowman said they should not see any releases to the east coast 95 percent of the time. The former plan said there would be no releases to the east coast about 35 percent of the time.
He said they were also considering a Lake Okeechobee drawdown this winter. “If we do decide to have lake recovery operations, that changes release schedules for the lake. We don’t do that without talking to all of our state partners, and all of our stakeholders in the area. That would not be a decision that would be automatically posted on our FACEBOOK page. It would be communicated well in advance so that folks understand our decision-making process