A plan to drill for oil in the Everglades again won a major legal victory Tuesday, one day after a false alarm in which an appeals court issued an ordering affirming the proposal and then withdrew it as “issued in error.”
The First District Court of Appeal announced that its decision in favor of Kanter Real Estate’s drilling plan would stand, despite a request by the state of Florida, Broward County and the city of Miramar to rehear the case.
The order will almost certainly not be the end of the fight over a project that has generated intense opposition in Broward County and received worldwide attention as threat to South Florida’s famous wilderness.
Kanter, which owns about 20,000 acres in the Everglades, plans to drill an exploratory well about six miles west of Miramar. Although the Florida Department of Environmental Protection refused to issue a permit, the company challenged the denial and won a series of court victories.
Even if Tuesday’s court order stands, the company still faces significant hurdles. It would need several permits from Broward County, as well an agreement from the county to reclassify the land, which is currently listed as conservation land. The well itself would only be an exploratory well. If enough oil were found to be worth extracting, that project would require another round of environmental reviews and permits.
John Kanter, the company’s president, said the court’s decision again showed that the company’s plans complied with the law.
“Our focus on being responsible applicants and operators has been validated once again by yet another judicial proceeding,” he said. “We are happy to be finally moving forward.”
Florida Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried issued a statement denouncing the decision.
“This is infuriating,” she said. “I hope that lawmakers and the Department of Environmental Protection will consider changes to protect the Everglades — our most precious natural resource, the only wilderness of its kind on Earth — from future oil drilling and fossil fuel profiteering.”
A three-judge panel of the First District Court of Appeal found in favor of the company last month, ordering the state to issue a permit. Under Gov. Ron DeSantis, the state had asked the full court to rehear the case, arguing that it was of high public importance. Joining the state in the request were Broward County, the city of Miramar and the South Florida Wildlands Association.
But the court on Tuesday refused the request.
“Motion for rehearing en banc filed by the appellee, Florida Department of Environmental Protection, on February 20, 2019, is denied,” stated an announcement posted on the court’s web site.
In a revised opinion released Tuesday, the court said that Noah Valenstein, secretary of the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, abused his discretion and misinterpreted the law in overriding a lower court’s ruling approving the project.
The lower court, the state Division of Administrative Hearings, had found that the site of the proposed well was already environmentally degraded and isolated from the surrounding land.
In rejecting that court’s conclusions and refusing to issue Kanter a drilling permit, the environmental protection department invoked the significance of the Everglades as “world renowned for its unique environmental characteristics.” But the appeals court Tuesday said relying on such a characterization in rejecting the permit would amount to creating a new rule, without legal authority, banning all oil drilling in the Everglades.
The Florida Department of Environmental Protection, which had led the court fight against the project, said it was studying the ruling and would comment later.
Broward County Commissioner Beam Furr, the most vocal opponent of the project on the County Commission, said the county will be refiling an appeal.
“We continue to fight alongside the Department of Environmental Protection to have this permit denied,” he said.
Matthew Schwartz, executive director of the South Florida Wildlands Association, said the project would threaten South Florida’s underground supply of drinking water and its wildlife habitat, with the possibility of spills of oil or drilling fluids. He said the lower court was wrong to describe the area of the proposed well as degraded and isolated.
“Kanter’s experts claimed that the area was isolated and degraded and had ‘no hydrological connection’ to either the Everglades or the aquifer,” he said in an email. “Though that assertion was contested by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection’s own geologist and hydrologist, it was unfortunately accepted as a “finding of fact” by the administrative law judge in the first hearing. And from there it was passed along to the 1st DCA as is.”
dfleshler@sun-sentinel.com, 954-356-4535