Finally, a good deal on Florida swampland

In the long, shady history of Florida swampland deals, this is by far the most promising - a plan to buy U.S. Sugar Corp. for $1.75 billion and incorporate its 292 square miles into a long-overdue restoration of the Everglades.

Florida Gov. Charlie Crist announced the tentative deal last week, to the delight of environmental groups who've been skeptical of an expensive, cumbersome re-engineering plan for the Everglades that state and federal officials have been ploddingly pursuing for years.

U.S. taxpayers - owners of Everglades National Park, the third largest national park in the lower 48 states - should be pleased, too. With the state's purchase, the restoration project - most recently estimated to cost $11 billion, with half from the federal government - could be accelerated and end up involving far fewer moving parts.

The purchase, due for completion this fall, would free up 187,000 acres of sugar fields that have severed the natural flow of water to the Everglades from Lake Okeechobee.

If that flow is restored, officials could scrap costly plans to build hundreds of deep wells as part of an attempt to recreate the marshes that developers, who viewed the Everglades as expendable swamp, began destroying in the late 19th century.

The benefits of the purchase are potentially much broader. In addition to restoring habitat for plants and wildlife, the deal would substantially reduce the amount of pollution that flows from cane fields into waterways near and far.

In recent years, phosphorous runoff from U.S. Sugar and others has been blamed for pungent algae blooms that have killed marine life in the Gulf of Mexico and caused respiratory problems for residents near the coastline.

The late Marjory Stoneman Douglas, whose 1947 book on her beloved "River of Grass" launched a long campaign to save the Everglades, would no doubt point out that the devil dwells in the details.

But, at this bend in the river, the purchase and closure of U.S. Sugar certainly looks like a sweet deal for a fragile ecosystem that has seen more than its share of flim-flams and false promises.