The dry times were apparent in the skies of Miami as smoke from various brush fires filled the air, Tuesday. Photo by Mitchell Zachs/MagicalPhotos.com

We are besieged this week by water issues. A deep drought afflicts us throughout the state, with the smoke from brush fires at the edges of the Everglades stalling traffic on I-95. County Mayor Carlos Alvarez is threatening hefty fines to scofflaw lawn-waterers and car-washers.

At the same time, an out-of-season storm named Andrea tore up the coastline, much to the delight of local surfers, who braved a concentration of sharks that had moved close to shore. One lifeguard speculated aloud that the sharks were chasing small fish into the sand because their natural food sources farther out had been depleted.

In some places along the coast, the waves actually washed over the road. Not far from where I live, the lifeguard shacks were standing in shallow pools of water as the beach was ripped out from under them. Meanwhile, in Fort Lauderdale, a confused Arctic seal flopped exhausted onto the banks of the Tarpon River. He was captured by well-meaning interventionists and died at Sea World in Orlando. It was like watching a Carl Hiaasen metaphor spin through its inevitable life cycle.

Hurricane experts have been quoted by various media predicting 17 named storms for this season, which, by the way, doesn’t officially start for another three weeks. Global warming alarmists, among them Miami Mayor Manny Diaz, are predicting big problems if we don’t make serious efforts to fight, as he said in a recent State of the City address, “rising sea levels, a threatened water supply and a threat to one of the most fragile eco-systems in the world — our Everglades.”

“The water level doesn’t have to rise too much for us to be riding around Miami in canoes,” Manny Diaz quipped to Newsweek not long ago.

Last month (as reported by Emily Witt of the Miami New Times), University of Miami geology professor Harold Wanless told a new Miami-Dade County group called the Climate Change Advisory Task Force, all about how a good chunk of prime real estate will be under water by the end of the century, if not sooner. I’m having visions of all the buildings along our sparkling shore becoming the new Great Condo Barrier Reef.

As if all this was not enough to make you realize that we exist on this little sandbar only by the grace of meteorology, on Tuesday the County Commission considered something called the South Miami-Dade Watershed Study and Plan.

The watershed study concerns 370 square miles roughly bordered by Biscayne Bay, Tamiami Trail, the Monroe County line and Krome Avenue. This area is where much of the sprawl growth is occurring, and where the impacts on Biscayne National Park, as well as water supply, roads, schools, fire and safety infrastructure, are greatest. Of late the state has been squeezing the county because we don’t adequately conserve our shrinking water supply. A consultant spent several years juggling these considerations, and growth projections that have the population in that area doubling to 1.5 million by 2060. (See the study here: www.southmiamidadewatershed.com.)

For nearly six years, an advisory committee comprised of various environmental, agricultural, development and residential interests met to react to the plan and offer its own recommendations for the county to include in its comprehensive plan. In that time, the group was unable to come to enough consensus to actually recommend anything.

So what they did was have each member of the group vote individually on each of 68 proposals the consultants came up with to guide county decision-makers in channeling growth in that area. “The idea that consensus will be reached in that community is like utopia,” allowed Commissioner Katy Sorenson. “I don’t think it’s going to happen in our lifetime or ever.”

On May 8, activists had their hackles up over the prospect that County Commissioner Natacha Seijas, who has been known to trash manatees in public rhetoric, would somehow manage to kill the watershed study before it threatened the economic interests of her supporters.

The activists pointed to a tricky little “whereas” clause inserted in the resolution that pointed out the advisory committee couldn’t agree on anything, so the plan itself “is not satisfactory or appropriate for approval ….” But at the meeting, Seijas voluntarily removed that clause. The commission unanimously approved the study/plan, whatever it is, and sent it to the Planning Department, where, Seijas said enigmatically, it would be “shredded” by county staff who would pick out the stuff they found useful.

Commissioner Dennis Moss, on the other hand, implored “that we don’t just let this $3 million study sit on the shelf.”

Meanwhile, those pot-stirrers at the FIU Research Institute on Social and Economic Policy just today (May 10) released a study of likely voters in Coconut Grove, downtown, Midtown, Allapattah, Morningside and Little Haiti.

The FIU researchers asked focus groups of these voters about their feelings on a host of development issues, and found that most were “highly dissatisfied with the development planning process, the level of oversight by government, and accountability of developers and government officials.”

One of the researchers, Marcos Feldman, told me they were trying to get a sense of what people in different neighborhoods and economic classes of Miami were thinking about development. While there were many different issues and opinions expressed, Feldman said there was “a striking convergence of opinion that crossed socio-economic lines.” Regardless of background, these voters felt excluded by the development process and disappointed in the accountability of their local government in protecting their interests.

To recap: Arctic seals, drought, fires, traffic, sea level rise and hurricanes. What are we going to do?