You figure the Florida House has to be playing games.

As Legislators continue to wrangle over the state budget, one nut proving hard to crack is funding for CEPP — the Central Everglades Planning Project which includes the vaunted EAA Reservoir.

As of this writing the Senate is proposing $424.7 million; the House’s current offer is $249.3 million.

The idea that the House might underfund the EAA Reservoir seems… unlikely. Yes, Gov. Ron DeSantis has made the reservoir a huge priority and yes, House leadership and DeSantis don’t get along.

And this isn’t the first time the House has failed to share DeSantis’ initial enthusiasm for Everglades funding. Last year DeSantis and House Speaker Danny Perez fired verbal salvos at one another after the Governor said the House opposed funding just because he wanted it.

But in fact the reservoir has become more than just a priority for DeSantis — it’s an imperative. The state has taken the lead on key parts of the project from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and shortened the timeline; originally slated to be completed as late as 2034, officials now say it will be done by 2029.

Indeed, just last week the South Florida Water Management District Governing Board approved an item allowing the construction of temporary housing on a parcel next to the reservoir site so workers could live and work around-the-clock on the project.

The House is going to underfund this?

We are not among those who think the EAA Reservoir is “the answer” to the Lake O/discharge problem. We hope it’s everything its boosters claim; if so it will help immensely but we’ll still need more land, more storage to “Rescue the River of Grass.”

So it may make political sense for the House to use this “crown jewel of Everglades restoration,” as DeSantis has called it, as a bargaining chip. But ultimately we expect the House to up its offer. The question is, what will it get in return?