Florida's Formula
Water, water everywhere
By Kate Wiltrout - Savannah Morning News - February 15, 2003
How much is a million gallons of water? A
bathtub holds about 50 gallons; it would take 20,000 bathtubs to hold a
million. Or think of it this way: a swimming pool would have to be the
size of a football field more than 4 feet deep to contain a million
gallons.
History's biggest restoration project
Although restoring the Upper St. Johns
River basin has been a major effort, it pales in comparison to the
Everglades plan, the most ambitious ecosystem restoration project
undertaken in U.S. history.
One of the state's five regional water
bodies -- the South Florida Water Management District -- is working with
the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on the $7.8 billion, 50-year plan to
improve the health of the Everglades, which now cover half the territory
they did 100 years ago.
The demise of the Everglades, which
originally stretched from Orlando to cover most of the lower reaches of
the state, began in the early 1900s when Gov. Napoleon Bonaparte Broward
pledged to drain the Everglades. Six canals and channeled rivers were
linked up with Lake Okeechobee for drainage and navigation.
As in the case of St. Johns, the changes
wreaked havoc when hurricanes hit, drowning hundreds when the lake
flooded.
Since then, the number of wading birds in
the Everglades declined 95 percent. More than 65 plant and animal
species are threatened or endangered. The population of south Florida =
was 500,000 in 1950; now it's home to 6 million residents.
Free market forces
The water that washes your dishes and
quenches your thirst isn't free -- though it might seem like it in
comparison to bottled water.
Consider this: People in Savannah pay, on
average, $1.41 per 1,000 gallons of water pumped into their homes.
Buying that much bottled water would cost upwards of $15,000 -- more
than 10,000 times as much.
Still, taxpayers often grouse about water
bills rising $15 or $20 a month, and politicians sometimes highlight
wholesale price increases as a reason not to expand infrastructure or
look for alternative sources of water.
Those days may soon pass, officials say.
"It's not that we're running out of
water," said John Wehle, the assistant executive director of the St.
Johns River Water Management District in Florida. "We're running out of
the cheapest water."
Wehle envisions a future where water of
varying qualities meets various needs. The purest (and most expensive)
water would be used for drinking, bathing and cooking. A rougher grade
could clean laundry and manufacture products; less filtered and
processed water might be used to water lawns and irrigate crops.
He expects filtration technology to push
the "real" cost of water to about $5 per 1,000 gallons. Though that's
quite a bit more than we may be paying now, it's still a fraction of
what most people pay each month for bottled water.
What you pay depends on where you live:
Athens-Clarke: $3.30
Atlanta: $2.26
Augusta: $1.84
Columbus: $1.80
Dalton: $1.14
Forsyth County: $3.72
Gwinnett County: $3.87
Macon: $2.00
Savannah: $1.41
Valdosta: $1.58
Georgia average: $2.80
National average: $2.36
(Average charge for 1,000 gallons, based
on typical bills for residential customers using 7,500 gallons per
month. 2001 Georgia Water/Wastewater Rate Survey by Black & Veatch.)
Florida's PLAN
The Water Resources Act of 1972 created
five regional water management districts and set up a permit system for
them to allocate water use.
DISTRICTS: Northwest Florida, Suwannee
River, St. Johns River, Southwest Florida and South Florida water
management districts.
BASED ON: Hydrologic boundaries.
FUNDED BY: A tax typically reserved for
local governments.
RESPONSIBILITIES: Water supply, water
quality, flood protection and natural systems management.
GOVERNING BOARD: Members are appointed by
the governor and approved by the state senate. The legislature and the
governor's office monitor their budgets. The districts are loosely
overseen by the state's Department of Environmental Protection.
ACQUISITIONS SO FAR: Over the last 25
years, the state has acquired 2.1 million acres of land for conservation
and recreation.
State legislators will decide long-term
water resource issues in Georgia, and it could have serious implications
for the Coastal Empire. Over the coming months, the Savannah Morning
News will provide the information you need to get involved. A team of
reporters and editors, assisted by a grant from the Pew Center for Civic
Journalism, will offer continuing installments of its series, "Water:
The Power, The Profit."
Engineering falls short
It isn't fair to directly compare current
Georgia and Florida water situations.
Florida has had a five-decade head start.
It first adopted aggressive water management strategies in the mid-1900s
after a series of devastating hurricanes made flood control a top
priority.
In eastern and central Florida, achieving
that meant drastically altering hundred of miles of northeastern
marshland along the headwaters of the St. Johns River, which starts
southeast of Orlando and flows north 310 miles to Jacksonville.
Engineers drained marshes, built a
channel, dug canals and converted the coastal ecosystem into farmland.
By the 1970s, 62 percent of the river's
marshlands were gone, replaced by oranges, potatoes and cattle.
New problems replaced old.
Freshwater storm runoff diluted the nearby
Indian River Lagoon; the change in salinity killed shellfish. Wading
birds and other wildlife went elsewhere to nest and feed.
Unexpectedly, the changes in the physical
landscape altered wind and temperature patterns, worsening growing
conditions for farmers.
In 1988, the St. Johns River Water
Management District turned to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to find a
way to undo the damage.
They focused on Fellsmere Farms, near Vero
Beach. In the mid-1980s, the district bought 4,000 acres of farmland
from Sun Ag Inc., one of Florida's biggest produce companies, and turned
it into a reservoir.
Mark Sanchez, Sun Ag's general manager and
executive vice president, said the Upper Basin Restoration has been a
boon for the area. The company profited from the sale and plowed the
money back into the business.
Marshes are regenerating.
Birds such as the Everglades kite, the
crested caracara and the wood stork are back. The Indian River Lagoon is
cleaner.
"Mother Nature is pretty forgiving," he
said. "It's amazing sometimes how fast she can correct the things that
man has messed up."
Some were skeptical the restoration would
work. But with the $200 million project almost complete, most consider
it a success.
About 235 square miles of marshland -- an
area about 1.5 times the size of Atlanta -- have been restored. Another
31 square miles have been converted into reservoirs. The majority of
that land is open for public recreation.
Even as it tackles other issues, the
district continues to buy land for conservation. Sun Ag recently sold
another 4,000 acres to the district for a second reservoir near the
original one.
Flexible and taxable
"It's an environmental restoration, flood
control and water supply project all in one," said Bill Kerr, an
ecological consultant and one of the nine members of the district's
governing board.
Kerr credits the water management district
as an efficient operation that doesn't rely solely on its government
powers to get projects done. It has more flexibility than most
government agencies.
To acquire the land for the Upper Basin
Restoration, Kerr said, the district could have frustrated farmers with
tight water use restrictions to convince them to sell. It could have
used its limited powers of eminent domain to appropriate the land.
Instead, said Kerr, a board member since
1999, it approached the land acquisition as a private organization
would, buying the land outright from those willing to sell.
The bill wasn't cheap.
Kerr estimates the land acquisition cost a
few hundred million dollars over a decade. Done today, the price tag
would probably top $1 billion, he figures.
Which brings up another crucial element:
money.
The Florida legislature gives the five
districts limited taxing power, making board members the only
non-elected officials in the state who can levy taxes.
The water districts aren't state agencies:
they don't follow state pay scales or civil service rules. The districts
are loosely overseen by the Department of Environmental Protection but
come under the governor's purview. Each board member is appointed by the
governor and approved by the state senate.
The districts are limited to levying less
than 1 mill, or a dollar for every thousand dollars worth of property.
In the St. Johns River district, the tax
rate is .6 mills. Applied to property owners across 19 counties, the tax
funds a $193 million annual budget, including the costs of a 700-member
staff.
As Georgia considers how to best regulate
water policy, it shouldn't get scared by those big numbers, cautions
John Wehle, the St. Johns River Water Management District's assistant
executive director.
What's most important, he said, is getting
started.
"We got here over a long period of time,"
Wehle said. "You have to be careful of what you try to thrust down
somebody's throat because they're liable to spit it out and run over
you."
It took a bleak outlook for Floridians to
accept the need for a different way to manage water, Wehle said. Three
things converged to make the message clear: a key lake went low, the
aquifer below Miami became contaminated and cities started squabbling
about over pumping.
In Georgia, a similar set of circumstances
has made water policy a pressing topic.
Lake Lanier outside Atlanta has been at
record low levels. Hilton Head Island's wells into the Floridan aquifer
have salted up, causing the state to halt new permits for groundwater
around Savannah.
A truce in the water wars
For decades, the cities and counties in
the Tampa/St. Petersburg metro area squabbled over who pumps how much
water from the shrinking aquifer below. The area is well-known to water
officials in other parts of the state, who shake their heads at how
contentious governments got.
Things have changed.
In 1998, the governments of Hillsborough,
Pasco and Pinellas counties as well as the cities of Tampa, St.
Petersburg and New Port Richey made a radical decision: Each would give
up control over their water production facilities to create a local
water network.
Tampa Bay Water was born.
The wholesale water supplier manages all
the wells and water treatment plants and sets water prices for the six
governments, each of which has a representative on the governing board.
That means residents in some areas see
lower water bills because the larger customer base defrays capital
costs. Other residents pay more because they're essentially underwriting
neighbors' water expenses.
The average wholesale rate for water in
the area used to be 98 cents for 1,000 gallons, said Jerry Maxwell,
Tampa Bay Water's executive director. Today it's $1.75.
Despite what Maxwell calls "very
appreciable" rate changes, customers have been surprisingly cooperative,
he said -- possibly because people today are better environmental
stewards than when water was cheap and supply seemed endless.
"Asked if they would like to preserve the
water supply in perpetuity, managed so it doesn't harm the environment,
people almost always say yes," Maxwell said. "Even if their bills rise."
He also credits a new generation of public
officials for realizing their communities -- and the environment -- will
flourish if they cooperate instead of squabble.
The biggest case in point: a $110 million
dollar desalination plant about to come on line in Apollo Beach. The
plant, which contains hundreds of tubular membranes that filter
chlorides and other salts out of water from Tampa Bay, will be the
biggest desalination facility in North America.
The plant will turn salt water into
drinkable water while allowing the region to ease off the depleting
aquifer.
At full capacity, the desalination plant
will produce 25 million gallons of water a day, about as much as the
city of Savannah pumps each day from the Floridan aquifer.
Still, that amount is a fraction of the
"new" water that the metro area needs.
Aggressive aquifer reductions
Tampa Bay Water has pledged to pump 68
million gallons a day less by 2008. Chatham County -- where local
governments are already squabbling over ground water permits -- must
scale back by 10 million gallons of water over the next three years.
The $110 million desalination facility
requires more capital than even the six governments of Tampa Bay Water
can handle.
Enter the Southwest Florida Water
Management District, or Swiftmud.
A counterpart to the St. Johns district,
Swiftmud has committed $183 million to develop new water supplies in the
Tampa Bay area.
In addition to that, it's pledged $85
million for the desalination plant once it passes required performance
tests.
Richard Owen, Swiftmud's planning
director, contends that Florida's water districts have succeeded because
they're allowed to use just about any tools available.
Maxwell said it simply makes sense to look
beyond political boundaries when dealing with natural resources that
don't follow arbitrary borders.
"I don't think there's exactly a cookie
cutter solution," Maxwell said. "But I would urge Georgia to continue to
think that regionalism is a solution."
Would it work here?
James Kundell isn't so sure.
Kundell is a University of Georgia
professor who chaired a state study committee on water that finished its
work in September.
"It's not appropriate on a statewide
basis," Kundell said of regional water districts.
Unlike Florida, which lies almost
completely in a coastal plain, Georgia is more complex hydrologically.
Florida has five river basins; Georgia has
fourteen. The northwestern half of the state relies mostly on rivers and
reservoirs for its water; the southeastern portion uses mostly aquifer
water.
Dave Kyler, executive director of the
Center for a Sustainable Coast on St. Simon's Island, doesn't buy that
reasoning.
"That's a problem that's got to be dealt
with no matter what structure is approached," Kyler said of Georgia's
geology. "It's complex no matter what you do."
Kundell agrees that areas where water
resources are interconnected should be looked at as a unit -- like
coastal Georgia.
But Kundell warns that getting there won't
be easy. There's no intrinsic authority at the regional level; a
regional water agency would need the legislature to delegate powers that
now rest elsewhere.
Kyler thinks the real problem is sharing
power.
"Anybody with a certain amount of
authority or success is going to be wary of changing things," he said.
Savannah may be a good example.
Bob Scanlon, the environmental affairs
officer for the city of Savannah, pointed out that with its surface
water treatment plant, the city has the infrastructure to become a
regional water supplier. With more than enough water to meet its own
needs, why would the city want turn over control to a multi-government
agency?
"Savannah has already made the investment
sufficient for a regional supply," Scanlon said. "That was done at
Environmental Protection Division's request in late '80s and early '90s.
It begs the question: How do we do it equitably?"
A regional arrangement would have to be
phased in slowly, Kundell said, so that everyone knows it's coming.
Otherwise it might be seen as creating winners and losers.
St. Johns' district assistant executive
director Wehle encourages both action and patience for Georgia.
"The ability to give people an out, time
to come about, to come around and raise money and see this is what we're
going to -- it takes time," he said. "But (Georgia) will be in much
better shape than if they hadn't done it."
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