Washington is funneling more than $2 billion to the Army Corps of Engineers' Jacksonville office to speed up completion of a massive reservoir being built south of Lake Okeechobee by more than five years.

The man-made complex of reservoirs and wetlands, the size of Manhattan, is the lynchpin of the multi-billion-dollar, multi-decade Everglades restoration.

The reservoir is designed to clean water released from Lake Okeechobee, which is polluted with nitrogen and phosphorus washed into it during more than a century of farming around its shores. The lake is also replete with chemicals carried in by rivers like the Kissimmee, which has drained much of what is now suburban Orlando.

After a long, slow treatment process, the water from Lake Okeechobee will be directed into the Everglades to restore the southward flow of the River of Grass into Florida Bay.

Erik Eikenberg, chief executive of the Everglades Foundation, said in a statement that the federal government targeted the $2 billion for the Army Corps to help pay for the faster completion of the reservoir.

"America's Everglades is a unifying bipartisan issue across administrations in Washington," Eikenberg said. "The (reservoir is) the crown jewel of Everglades Restoration and one of the most significant water infrastructure projects in the United States.”

The combined 17,000 acres — 10,500 acres of reservoir and 6,500 acres of wetlands — is the same size as the city of Miami proper.

The Everglades restoration is designed to undo more than a century of development pressure, including hundreds of miles of drainage canals crisscrossing South Florida.

The reservoir sits at the heart of the restoration effort for a reason.

Without it, the system has no way to capture and clean the enormous volumes of lake water at the scale the ecosystem needs. Every other piece of the restoration puzzle depends on the reservoir producing water clean enough to join the River of Grass and then benefit the all-important mixing zone between fresh and salt water in Florida Bay.

Three of the other keys to the Everglades restoration involve Tamiami Trail, a reshaping of the landscape where a botched real estate development was started in the Picayune Strand in Collier County, and a water management project at the southern tip of the system.

Together, they address what generations of canals, roads, and misguided engineering did to one of the most complex ecosystems on Earth.

Drinking water for more than nine million Floridians also comes from the Everglades.

Tamiami Trail — completed at ground level in the late 1920s — acted as a dam across the northern edge of Everglades National Park for nearly a century, starving the marshes to the south. Engineers have raised roughly 10 miles of it onto bridges and elevated roadway, letting water flow south as it once did.

In Collier County, crews spent more than 15 years removing 260 miles of roads and plugging 48 miles of canals across 55,000 acres of Picayune Strand wetlands — a project completed earlier this year.

At the system's southern end, a water management project spreads freshwater west into the Everglades and south toward Florida Bay, improving water quality and salinity across an estimated 252,000 acres of coastal habitat that had been slowly dying from thirst.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis championed the agreement between Washington and the state last year that he says will accelerate completion of the reservoir to 2029 — five years ahead of the original 2034 deadline.

Representatives of the Trump administration joined DeSantis in the middle of the Everglades this week to mark the $2 billion milestone.

The original Everglades will never return — Naples, Fort Myers, Miami, and West Palm Beach are not going to be torn down.

The hope is that the world's largest environmental restoration will repair much of what's left — about the size of New Jersey.

"This investment provides the financial certainty needed to keep construction on an accelerated track," Eikenberg said.

Environmental reporting for WGCU is funded in part by VoLo Foundation, a nonprofit with a mission to accelerate change and global impact by supporting science-based climate solutions, enhancing education, and improving health.

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