Environmental Intersection by George Lindemann

A hot topic in South Florida right now with serious implications for the Everglades and us all...

Florida issues new water pollution standards

By Craig Pittman, Times Staff Writer
Posted: Nov 02, 2011 05:07 PM

Nutrients such as phosphorous and nitrogen flow into waterways from fertilized lawns, golf courses, leaking septic tanks and malfunctioning sewer plants. In the past 30 years, nutrient pollution has become the most common water pollution problem in Florida —- but the state's rules for how much nitrogen and phosphorous are allowed in waterways were only vague guidelines. The EPA told all states in 1998 to set strict limits on nutrient pollution, and warned it would do it for them if no action was taken by 2004. DEP officials started working on new standards in 2001, but 2004 passed without any change. In 2008, Earthjustice and a coalition of other environmental groups sued the EPA to force it to take action in Florida. A year later, the agency settled the suit by agreeing to impose nutrient pollution standards -- and the complaints began boiling up from Florida industry leaders about costly, unnecessary federal regulations hurting the economy. Attorney General Pam Bondi, on behalf of Agriculture Commissioner Adam Hasner, sued to block implementation of the rules, and on Wednesday she filed a motion accusing the EPA of exaggerating the threat from nutrient pollution. EPA officials have said all along that they would drop their pollution limits if the state would come up with some new standards. In the EPA's letter Wednesday, agency officials said that if the state's Environmental Review Commission and the Legislature ratify the new state standards, and the EPA gives its formal approval of the final version, the agency would then withdraw its controversial pollution standards. Craig Pittman can be reached at craig@sptimes.com [Last modified: Nov 02, 2011 05:08 PM] Click here for reuse options! Copyright 2011 St. Petersburg Times

WASHINGTON — A new fast-track planning effort could shave years off the next phase of Everglades restoration, putting more fresh and clean water into the central and southern portions of Florida’s "River of Grass" more quickly.

A restoration task force that met Thursday in West Palm Beach, Fla., announced a rapid planning effort that, if approved by Congress, could transform how large public-works projects across the country are built. It’s also expected to cut the planning process for the next major restoration project in the central Everglades from six years to 18 months.

“The reality is the ecosystem has continued to degrade,” said Dawn Shirreffs, the Everglades restoration program manager for the National Parks Conservation Association. “We’re running out of time. We don’t have the time to spend six years on a project anymore.”

Thursday’s announcement came out of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ effort to streamline large projects nationwide. The Army corps decided to use the planning process for the next major restoration project, which will provide more a natural flow and deeper clean new water through the central Everglades and Everglades National Park, as a pilot.

Previous plans were overly detailed, expensive and time-consuming, the Army Corps of Engineers found. The time — as well as data — being invested in studies wasn’t leading to a better product, officials said in materials that were prepared for Thursday’s task force meeting.

Also, projects in the Everglades had a tendency to be addressed one by one rather than simultaneously, Shirreffs said. But there are three components of Everglades cleanup, all intertwined, and all best addressed together, she said. Water can’t be moved unless it’s clean, it can’t be cleaned unless it’s stored and it can’t be stored unless it gets to the places designated for storage.

Cleaning up the pollution that's flowing into the Everglades requires reducing the phosphorus in the water to 10 parts per billion. Amounts any higher won’t stop changes in plant and animal life in the Everglades, a delicate ecosystem of marshlands and forests that's home to a variety of threatened species.

Because of high levels of phosphorus, cattails have been taking over the saw grass in the Everglades for decades. The pollutant has flowed from fertilizers on sugar and vegetable farms and the sprawling suburbs of South Florida.

The state was supposed to get to its phosphorus-reduction goal by 2012, but the Florida Legislature pushed back the deadline to 2016. Earlier this month, Florida Gov. Rick Scott met in Washington with Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and offered some alternative plans for resolving some of the legal disputes over water quality in the Everglades, but he also said that Florida would need another six years.

The state's plans call for downsizing some construction projects and relying more on water storage on public and private lands. The plan, Scott said, puts to use land that's already in public ownership so that projects can be authorized and built promptly "at a reasonable cost to the taxpayers."

Specifically, the state will be looking for opportunities to use publicly owned land to store and treat water in the Everglades Agricultural Area — where farmlands exist amid the Everglades' water system — and move the water south to water conservation areas and Everglades National Park.

That’s expected to achieve more natural water circulation and tie together the state’s work north of the conservation areas and the Interior Department’s Tamiami Trail bridging project, along the highway that runs from Tampa to Miami, passing through the Everglades.

Last week, Salazar visited the Tamiami Trial project in Miami-Dade County. It’s one of the first bridges in a series of planned spans that would raise parts of the highway above the wetlands and eventually could restore the historic freshwater flow of the River of Grass to levels not seen in 80 years.

The federal government eventually would like to see 5.5 miles of bridges on Tamiami Trail, at an estimated cost of $324 million and to be built over four years. So far, it’s unclear whether money for the bridges will be budgeted, however.

Friday, officials will break ground on a separate project: a 12,000-acre reservoir in western Martin County, Fla., designed to improve the quality of the water in the St. Lucie Estuary and the southern portion of the Indian River Lagoon.

A congressional subcommittee will look next week at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s plans to acquire more land in the Everglades for conservation, how it would be paid for and what effect it would have on public access and recreation within the refuge and conservation area.

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By Erika Bolstad | Miami Herald

Down among the pipes and pumps and gauges, amid the incessant cacophony of the water works, talk of rising sea levels no longer resonates as some distant and esoteric political squabble, irrelevant to a city’s delivery of basic of public services.

Two more feet, said Hollywood City Commissioner Dick Blattner, and his city’s water plant no longer functions. Hollywood’s waste water treatment plant, he said, has 20, maybe 25 years before the projected sea level changes render it useless.

Those are the realities that ought to trump mindless chatter about global warming on cable television. Of course, city and county commissioners trying to fill the holes in this year’s piddling budgets aren’t particularly anxious to contemplate a massively expensive crisis a couple of decades away. Nor do they want to get drawn into the ferocious U.S. debate between climate scientists and climate deniers over whether the burning of fossil fuels has contributed to global warming.

Except, no matter the cause, the earth’s getting hotter. Ice caps are melting. The warming ocean’s expanding. South Florida, built to 20th Century sea level specifications, can’t simply ignore the water lapping at its infrastructure.

Just last week, Richard Muller, a physics professor at the University of California, a revered climate skeptic, funded in part by climate-denier sugar daddy Charles Koch, admitted that his Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature team’s study of global temperature readings had come up with findings that coincided with research he had previously doubted.

“Our biggest surprise was that the new results agreed so closely with the warmingÿ values published previously by other teams in the US and the UK.,” Muller wrote in the Wall Street Journal. “When we began our study, we felt that skeptics had raised legitimate issues, and we didn’t know what we’d find. Our results turned out to be close to those published by prior groups. We think that means that those groups had truly been very careful in their work, despite their inability to convince some skeptics of that.”

“Even if people don’t accept the science, there is plenty of evidence that something is going on. Just look at the facts,” said Blattner, a member of the Broward County Water Resources Task Force. “I have been bringing this up for months.”

The Hollywood commissioner said the older cities clustered along South Florida’s coastline must start planning for the inevitable problems. Low-lying neighborhoods will be inundated unless local governments find some new way to get rid of storm waters. Blattner worries that his city’s most prestigious neighborhood, the Lakes area, faces perpetual flooding.

Cities must find new well fields in the western reaches of South Florida before the encroaching sea pushes salt water into the local aquifer. “Plans should be developed now,” he said.

Without some planning, and soon, coastal cities like Hollywood, with waste-water plants on sites that were chosen back in the middle of the 20th century, are headed toward an utter dysfunctional system, without the means to treat or get rid of its own sewage.

Not much help will be coming from Tallahassee, where climate denial has been embraced as a political truism. But local governments can’t dawdle, hoping the skeptics are right and the thermometers are wrong.

Last week, Florida Atlantic University’s Center for Urban and Environmental Solutions released a study on the specific effects higher temperatures and the rising sea would have on coastal towns and on city services. FAU, using Pompano Beach as a model, calculated that the costs to salvage water and sewer services would be counted in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Hollywood may be even more vulnerable.

The water task force is composed of elected officials and technical experts from around the region. “The technical folks get it,” Blattner said. The politicians, he said: not so much.

Among the political leaders (with the notable exception, he said, of Broward County Commissioner Kristin Jacobs), “I have not seen any willingness to address this.” Blattner wants city and county governments in South Florida to devise regional water and sewer plants designed to deal with the rising sea levels. Instead, individual cities are planning and building separate utilities, oblivious to the coming crisis. His committee has seen plans for water treatment plants that will be located, he said, in areas that are clearly “doomed.”

“Buildings will go up, plaques will be installed to recognize the vision of local officials,” he said. Except that vision will be very short sighted.

One of the most pressing problems facing South Florida today...