A full-time job

Controlling exotic species costs taxpayers millions

Charlotte Sun
Aug. 11, 2008
 
By NEIL HUGHES
Staff Writer

Far more than pests, exotic plants and animals are a multi-million dollar annual burden on Florida taxpayers.

And worse, invasive exotics aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. The best we can do, said Chad Lach, park manager of the Gasparilla Island State Recreational Area, is hope to control them.

“Our main goal is to try to maintain all of the exotics within all of the parks at a maintenance level,” Lach said. “It’s a never-ending battle. But it’s not one that you want to overlook and have it become a huge project.”

It costs Florida taxpayers about $38 million per year to handle exotics on public lands, about 80 percent towards aquatic, said Ed Freeman, an exotic plant expert with Sarasota-based environmental group Wildlands Conservation.

“Basically, it’s to remove hydrilla and hyacinth from rivers,” Freeman said of state money spent to control exotics. “A lot of that is a result of the freshwater fishing industry in North Florida.”

That $38 million expense is pretty close to the bare minimum, as it would cost an estimated $980 million to adequately address invasive exotics, according to Freeman.

And even that near-billion-dollar investment would only bring exotics under manageable control — and only on public lands. They cannot be completely removed, and the spread of plants from private land continues.

“You’ve always got it just waiting in the winds on the private land,” said Dave Sumpter, executive director of Wildlands Conservation.

Wildlands Conservation has created management plans for more than 50 parks, preserves and private land owners across Florida. A large part of the organization’s focus is on exotics.

On one 500-acre preserve the nonprofit manages, half of the money for management is spent on security and fire maintenance, and half is on controlling exotics.

“Exotics exacerbate management and probably double the cost in Florida,” Sumpter said.

On Gasparilla Island, staff devotes at least one day per week to work on removing exotics from a specific area of the park.

Lach said exotic plants and animals get about an equal amount of attention in the park. Removal of both is typically financed through grants.

“What we’re trying to do is just maintain the area of what it was back when the settlers first came to this area,” he said.

One recent major project helped to scale back exotic invasive plants on the island to a maintainable level. The endeavor cost $100,000.

“A lot of it is just manual labor — going out there, uprooting the plants, physically chopping them down,” Lach said.

Problems with upland plants on Gasparilla Island are the same all of Florida faces: the Brazilian pepper tree, the lead tree and the Australian pines. The animals that prowl there are typical, too: Feral hogs, wild coyotes and iguanas.

Such animals are not only nuisances that cost money, but they can also push out or kill off native species.

“The coyotes, they will dig up a whole sea turtle nest and eat all of the eggs,” Lach said.

With effort, things can get better. Take, for example, Cayo Costa Island State Park, which used to have a major problem with wild hogs. But state grants and coordination with the U.S. Department of Agriculture have helped to curb the population.

But even with progress, fighting exotics in Florida is a never-ending battle. Plants like cogon grass require a seemingly paranoia-induced level of care to prevent their spread.

Cogon grass can often be found along power lines and roadways, and that’s because mowers and maintenance vehicles will inadvertently transport the plant’s seeds with them.

With such a successful dispersal strategy, Sumpter and Wildlands Conservation must make an effort to clean each vehicle that enters a property.

And even then, animals and the wind will still help to carry and spread exotics.

“You really can only control these things,” Sumpter said. “You never can fully eradicate them.”