Florida's ambitious and controversial land buyout to make way for Southern Golden Gate Estates restoration has reached a milestone, but the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians is not celebrating.

Collier County Circuit Judge Ted Brousseau signed an order May 17 forcing the tribe to give up more than 800 acres it owns in the restoration area in exchange for $2.2 million from the state.

The tribe's land was the last of some 19,000 parcels the DEP has been trying to acquire since 1983 across 55,000 acres of the failed subdivision. The land cost more than $111 million, according to state figures.

State and federal money paid for it.

"It's the end of an era," said Nancy Payton, a field representative for the Florida Wildlife Federation.

The Miccosukee decision comes after high-profile holdout landowner Jesse Hardy agreed in April to sell his 160-acre homestead in Southern Golden Gate Estates for $4.95 million.

With land in hand, the DEP plans to restore natural water flows across Southern Golden Gate Estates to the Ten Thousand Islands by installing pumps, filling in canals and digging up roads that developers cut through the landscape decades ago.

The Miccosukees aren't through fighting just yet, though.

Attorneys for the tribe filed a motion May 18 with Brousseau for a rehearing of his decision that the tribe had waived its right to object to the state's eminent domain claim.

The case raised sensitive legal questions about tribal sovereignty and more practical arguments about whether the state had served tribal leaders properly with notice of the eminent domain claim.

The tribe and the DEP are familiar foes. The Miccosukees have been at the forefront of legal battles over the pace of efforts to clean up the Everglades and provide more water to part of Everglades National Park.

Ernie Barnett, the DEP's ecosystem restoration director, said he hopes the eminent domain case will not harm what he calls the DEP's "positive working relationship" with the tribe.

The tribe acquired one Southern Golden Gate Estates parcel along U.S. 41 and the Miller Boulevard extension for $15,000 in 2001.

Two other larger parcels southeast of the Estates' grid of platted lots were acquired [by the tribe] in 1998 for $438,000.

Attorneys say the tribe uses the land to collect palm fronds for traditional chickees and to gather materials for tribal medicines.

A consultant for the Miccosukees took the DEP to task Thursday for forging ahead with eminent domain against the tribe, instead of working out some other mechanism by which the state could use the land for restoration and the tribe still could own it.

"They (tribal leaders) want to use it in its natural state," said retired U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Col. Terry Rice, now an engineering consultant for the Miccosukee Tribe.

Col. Robert Carpenter, Jacksonville district engineer for the corps, said Thursday that he had been trying to work out such a deal.

The Corps of Engineers is the federal partner, with the South Florida Water Management District, for Everglades restoration, which includes the Southern Golden Gate Estates project.

Under a special financing scheme, Florida is using its own money to restore Southern Golden Gate Estates instead of waiting for federal money.

Carpenter said he had been unable to get his talks with the tribe to the point where he could be confident that tribal activities wouldn't interfere with the restoration.

"The state did what they needed to do, the right thing, to continue to move forward," Carpenter said.

Barnett said it was only fair for the state to seek title to the tribe's land because the DEP had pursued title to every other parcel in the buyout area.

"In the eyes of the state, they are a landowner like any other landowner," Barnett said.

He said Florida allows the Miccosukees to use public land in other parts of South Florida for their tribal customs, and Southern Golden Gate Estates, also known as Picayune Strand State Forest, ought to be no different.

"We would like to pursue this type of opportunity within Picayune Strand, as well," Barnett said.

The DEP's court fight with the Miccosukees puts a contentious cap on what has been a rocky and prolonged buyout.

To this day, the buyout is a rallying cry for property rights advocates upset with the way the state treated landowners in Southern Golden Gate Estates.

Southern Golden Gate Estates landowners from all over the world filed lawsuits in 1988 and 1992 charging that the state had effectively condemned their land by putting it on a state acquisition list, asking low prices for it and making it difficult to build there.

In 1997, thousands of landowners agreed to a settlement by which the state and landowners would agree on new and binding appraisals.

The settlement, followed by a $25 million infusion of federal cash, jump-started the buyout.

Starting in 2002, Governor Jeb Bush and the Cabinet authorized the DEP to use eminent domain to acquire land in Southern Golden Gate Estates.

Collier circuit court judges handled some 1,800 eminent domain cases in Southern Golden Gate Estates.