New findings by U.S. EPA showing persistently high levels of toxic mercury and oxygen-robbing phosphorus across much of the Florida Everglades should serve as a bugle call to Congress and the Bush administration not to waver in their commitment to restore the endangered wetland, stakeholder groups say.

The latest scientific assessment on the Everglades' ecological health, released yesterday by EPA's Southeast regional office, sought to strike a balance between good news and bad, with some indicators showing signs of improving conditions, while others point to ongoing problems with "legacy pollution" that has settled across more than half of the 2,063-square-mile wetland.

"It's a big problem, and we're not there yet," said Peter Kalla, a senior EPA scientist and co-author of the 100-page study, in describing the Everglades' pollution threats. "Everybody's goal is to get better, and overall the data show we're moving in a positive direction."

Authors of the EPA study said the report is intended to help the two primary federal agencies in charge of Everglades restoration -- the Army Corps of Engineers and the Interior Department -- enhance their knowledge of how pollution is moving through the system and where it is most concentrated.

But stakeholder and watchdog groups monitoring the state and federal government's multibillion-dollar Everglades restoration efforts say the data reveal just how difficult that road ahead will be for returning the River of Grass to its former splendor.

Moreover, they say the Everglades will continue to languish until the government gets serious about enforcing water quality standards for criteria pollutants such as phosphorus, which appears at even higher concentrations in soil than a decade ago.

"As a factual matter, water quality going into the Everglades is not at a level that will save the Everglades. It will simply keep getting worse until the federal government forces a change," said former U.S. Attorney Dexter Lehtinen, who represents the Miccosukee Indians in their long-running litigation battle against the federal and state governments over Everglades water management.

While the state claims to have removed more than 2,600 tons of phosphorus from water entering the Everglades through better farming practices and the construction of massive water treatment ponds, those efforts appear insufficient to reverse conditions.

'Makes us sit up and take notice'

As such, stakeholder groups say the federal government cannot ease off its commitment to fund and implement the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan, which now is expected to cost upward of $9 billion.

"What these findings tell us is that the Everglades needs continued sustained attention," said Mark Kraus, vice president of the Miami-based Everglades Foundation, which serves as an umbrella organization for 15 nonprofit groups involved with restoration efforts.

"While it looks like things have stabilized with some of the pollution inputs, it really begs the issue of how bad the situation has been and continues to be across much of the Everglades," he added.

For example, while mercury concentrations in mosquitofish, a popular food source for wading birds and larger game fish, dropped markedly over the past decade, according to EPA's findings, the heavy metal remains at elevated levels throughout 65 percent of the marsh, including portions of Everglades National Park.

Nick Aumen, an aquatic ecologist with Everglades National Park, said EPA's findings largely agree with analyses done by the Park Service using its own data. But he added the geographical extent of both mercury and phosphorus pollution came as a surprise to the agency.

"The fact that it's still spreading certainly makes us sit up and take notice," Aumen said.

He attributed the problem in part to the park's location at the southernmost part of the Everglades ecosystem, where a combination of inadequate water flows from the north and continued encroachment of subdivisions along the park's Eastern boundary have allowed old pollution to linger while fostering new threats to air and water quality.

"There's been a lot of attention and money spent to address those problems, but we still have a ways to go in solving them," he said.

Call for funding

Other groups used yesterday's report to stress the importance of keeping the Everglades a national priority, even as funding continues to fall short of what is necessary to implement many of the projects authorized by Congress under CERP.

John Adornato, director of the South Florida regional office of the National Parks Conservation Association, said EPA's findings "highlight the need to stay focused on the goals of improving conditions in the Everglades."

NPCA and other groups have accused the Bush administration of underplaying the continued environmental threats to the wetland and overstating the progress made in meeting restoration goals. As evidence, they point to this year's lobbying effort by the Interior Department to remove the Everglades from the United Nations' list of "World Heritage in Danger" sites.

In a statement, NPCA Everglades Restoration Program Manager Sara Fain said EPA's findings provide an important counterweight to the Interior Department's claims of improving conditions, noting that the data provide "additional scientific information that restoration is not yet successful."

Click here to review the EPA study.