Conventional wisdom has long held that the fate of the Everglades would hinge on a death match between environmentalists and Big Sugar.

Last month, U.S. Sugar Corp. cried uncle, agreeing to cease operations and turn over its Everglades Agricultural Area holdings to Florida in exchange for $1.75 billion.

Now there are new questions: Is that enough? Is the company's 300 or so square miles of property south of Lake Okeechobee the critical missing piece in the unfinished, often baffling restoration puzzle?

Several of Florida's most influential restoration advocates have offered an unequivocal, enthusiastic answer: Yes. But they caution that critical details remain to be worked out, including how the newly purchased land will be incorporated into the $11 billion Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP) launched by the federal and state governments almost nine years ago.

"This opportunity comes but once in a lifetime, or maybe several lifetimes," said Nathaniel Reed, vice chairman of the Everglades Foundation, assistant Interior secretary under Presidents Nixon and Ford and an environmental adviser to eight Florida governors.

"It is our one opportunity to make corrections that will, over a surprisingly short period of time, reap huge benefits for the Everglades and make this restoration the best that it can be," Reed said in an interview.

Bob Graham, the former Florida governor and U.S. senator, said the deal sends a strong signal to Everglades advocates, many of whom have grown skeptical that restoration would be completed in their lifetimes, that the state is committed to moving forward.

"It has an important psychological effect in that the Everglades has been sort of in limbo almost since the federal-state partnership was established in 2000," the Democrat said from his office in Miami Lakes.

Graham said the purchase would tamp down speculation that the sugar industry's two dominant players -- U.S. Sugar and Florida Crystals Corp. -- intend to sell their lands to developers that would convert the historic mill towns of Clewiston and Belle Glade into sprawling residential or commercial properties.

But the sugar deal, expected to close by November, cannot by itself resolve the complicated -- some say intractable -- problems that have vexed federal and state agencies overseeing the restoration since it began in earnest nearly nine years ago.

Criticism

While the U.S. Sugar sale will eventually bring vast tracts of farmland into the state's conservation portfolio, allowing for the construction of large new water storage and treatment reservoirs, the deal will not provide what some advocates consider the hydrological "holy grail," a flow-way that would allow water to move unimpeded from Lake Okeechobee through the Everglades to Florida Bay.

Creating such a watercourse will require a series of land exchanges with the state's other major sugar producer, Florida Crystals Corp. of Palm Beach County. While state officials say they are optimistic about negotiating such deals, no announcements have been made. "Everybody seems to be counting on the swap," a Florida Crystals spokesman told the Palm Beach Post late last month.

Critics, including the Miccosukee Tribe, whose ancestral lands lie within the heart of the Everglades, have tongue-lashed the state for allowing sugar farmers to gradually phase out their operations, even as runoff from sugarfields continues to diminish water quality throughout the region.

"To announce something is going to happen six years from now with no plans for how they're going to do it while diverting funding away from essential projects is a tragedy," Dexter Lehtinen, the tribe's senior attorney and a former federal prosecutor, said last week.

Another attorney for the tribe suggested the state's purchase of U.S. Sugar was "an impulse buy," and that the South Florida Water Management District, which will issue bonds to finance the purchase, risks losing momentum on other critical projects, such as those authorized under the state's Acceler8 program.

Proponents of the deal said such criticisms are unfounded, especially given the broad consensus among Everglades stakeholders that the only path to full restoration is for the sugar industry to give up much of the Everglades Agricultural Area (EAA) immediately south of Lake Okeechobee.

"The notion that buying large tracts of land in the EAA is somehow a newfangled, impulsive type of strategy is simply out in left field," said Shannon Estenoz, vice chairman of the water district's governing board and a longtime advocate for restoration.

"We have always understood that storing water in the EAA was a critical piece of the program," Estonez added. "That's where the natural system held all of its water, so that's where the water needs to go in a properly restored system."

David Reiner, president of the nonprofit group Friends of the Everglades, which like the Miccosukee Tribe has battled the water district over many of its Everglades management policies, said his organization has long believed that the restoration was hamstrung by insufficient water storage. The U.S. Sugar deal, he said, "is a big step in that direction."

Getting water flowing

But a revamped storage plan by itself will not solve the Everglades' problems, which are as much about where water flows as about where it is stored.

Major structural impediments to flow, including the Tamiami Trail highway, which keeps water from reaching Everglades National Park, remain unresolved even after Congress ordered the Army Corps of Engineers to speed up its efforts to elevate potions of the highway so that water can flow underneath into the park.

Terrence "Rock" Salt, the Interior Department's top restoration official in Florida, said last week that the corps expects to begin the first phase of the Tamiami Trail elevation project, known as Modified Water Deliveries, by the end of this fiscal year.

Phase 1 of "Mod Waters," as the project is known locally, calls for building a 1-mile bridge across the easternmost stretch of Tamiami Trail to allow water to flow underneath, while also building up the roadbed along adjacent sections of the highway to protect vehicles from higher water levels necessary to encourage flows.

"I am very encouraged with respect to Mod Waters," Salt said, adding that senior Bush administration officials in Washington have maintained pressure on federal agencies in Florida to keep the project moving forward. "I think we're on a path to having this important start on the improvements to Tamiami Trail. We don't want to take our eye off of that ball."

Other projects that also continue to move forward, and that should aide the broader implementation of the restoration effort, include the Kissimmee River restoration north of Lake Okeechobee; the replumbing of Picayune Strand in Everglades National Park's next-door neighbor, Big Cypress National Preserve; and the construction of a major water distribution project, called the C-111 Spreader Canal, in Miami-Dade County.

Officials also say they remain committed to completing eight projects fast-tracked by former Gov. Jeb Bush (R) under the state-led Acceler8 program. So far, the state has invested more than $2 billion toward completion of these projects, several of which involve the storage and treatment of polluted stormwater runoff in the EAA and around Lake Okeechobee.

The water district has already suspended work on one Acceler8 project, a 16,500-acre reservoir under construction in western Palm Beach County, though the agency maintains the work-stop is due to a lawsuit filed by environmentalists, not the pending land purchase.

Controversial well project

Ken Ammon, the water management district's deputy executive director and chief overseer of Everglades restoration, said the Acceler8 reservoir project may prove unnecessary if the state completes the U.S. Sugar deal, thus allowing for much greater storage capacity southwest of Lake Okeechobee. In that event, the reservoir project probably would be reconfigured as a stormwater treatment area, he said.

Officials said another major initiative that could be reconfigured under a new water storage scenario is the highly controversial and expensive aquifer storage and recovery (ASR) project, which calls for pumping as much as 1 trillion gallons of water into underground wells.

The Corps of Engineers has spent roughly $10 million on ASR test wells on the north side of Lake Okeechobee, with mixed results. Some of the water pumped out of the test wells, for example, had elevated arsenic levels, possibly caused by chemical reactions between the water and underground rock formations.

With a greatly expanded surface reservoir system on former sugarcane fields south of the lake, officials say the ASR project could be scaled back by as much as two-thirds, resulting in savings of more than $1 billion.