The Southwest Florida Water Management District is in the process of securing easements on public and private land in eastern Polk County to gather more information on aquifer conditions.

This is part of the Central Florida Water Initiative long-term planning to make sure water withdrawals will be sustainable.

The current conclusion is that in general there is little capacity left to withdraw large quantities of water from the Floridan aquifer, the traditional source of water in this part of Florida for most users.

So far the well sites will be located at two sites in the Green Swamp and one on the Lake Wales Ridge in Frostproof.

One Green Swamp well is on private property near Brown Shinn Road. The other will be in Hilochee Wildlife Management Area near the end of Homerun Boulevard.

The Frostproof well will be located near Lake Clinch.

These wells will be in addition to an already extensive network of monitoring wells that have existed for decades in the area.

Soil manufacturing plants seem to be popping up everywhere in Florida and some local officials may not be ready.

St. Lucie County officials approved regulations earlier this year after imposing a temporary moratorium to give them time to fairly consider the issue.

Polk County was caught flat-footed after a company opened a plant on the outskirts of Lakeland without getting state or local permits, sending state environmental regulators and county planners scrambling to deal with the operation after the fact because neither were willing to simply shut it down for operating illegally.

Polk officials became less sympathetic after odor problems that company reps claimed during a PR tour of the facility that such a thing wouldn’t happen did happen and now Polk officials are toughening regulations if anyone else seeks a permit.

More recently, Osceola County officials are dealing with a proposed plant near Kenansville in the Everglades headwaters in the rural southern part of the county. Osceola County officials are reportedly trying to come up with regulations to deal with this new land use.

The question is which could will be next on the list for some entrepreneur to propose a similar operation on an unprepared county commission and staff.

The lessons learned from activities so far are that local ordinances should at the bare minimum: deal directly with the odor issue by considering whether the operation should only take place indoors, require adequate bond or other financial assurance to take care of cleaning up the mess should the plant close unexpectedly and decide just where in the county such facilities should and should not be allowed and what kind of review they deserve.

The fact is that the material that is being processed in these plants has to go somewhere, but not just anywhere, anyhow., anytime.

U.S. Rep. Darren Soto said this week he is still moving ahead with plans to designate the Kissimmee River a Wild and Scenic River in connection with work to restore most of it.

Soto said he is planning meetings with major landowners along the river to hear what their feelings are first, however, explaining their opposition would likely doom the proposal.

The Kissimmee River was once a free-flowing meandering river until it was ditched in the 1960s as part of a misguided flood control project.

The restoration project, the largest of its type in the world, is scheduled to be completed by 2019.

It will not completely restore the river.

Some sections of the original canal will remain intact, especially in the southern reaches of the river, to provide flood control for development that encroached into the historic floodplain after the canal was dug and the floodplain was drained.

The floodplain has been restored in the remainder of the river, rehydrated historic wetlands and once again attracting waterfowl, wading birds and other wildlife to the area and providing some nutrient removal for water flowing south toward Lake Okeechobee and the Everglades.

The Polk County Planning Commission voted 5-1 Wednesday to recommend changes to the county’s growth plan and development regulations to more tightly review soil manufacturing plants.

The cases will now go to the County Commission, which is scheduled to send the changes to state officials for review. Following the review commissioners are scheduled to adopt the changes later this year.

The changes do not affect BS Ranch & Farm, a suburban Lakeland plant that already has a permit, though its compliance with its permit is still a matter of dispute.

The company’s revised operating plan is scheduled to go before the Planning Commission in October for a recommendation to the County Commission.

Despite a claim by a BS rep at Wednesday’s hearing, this is far from voluntary.

There is a pending appeal of a code enforcement case involving the plant. County officials maintain the special magistrate erred in not upholding the county’s claim there were development code violations.

That appeal is scheduled to be heard later this month.

Meanwhile, county planners are still working with BS to come up with a management plan that will address odor problems that brought the issue to the attention of county officials.

Before then, county officials were willing to grease the skids to allow the company to receive after-the-fact permits though the company never did complete the technical review required for formal approval.

In addition, an internal memo has stated that unless BS Ranch works out these issues, county planners will recommend denial of their revised operational plan.

What would happen if that occurs is unknown at this point.

There are two outstanding issues involving the overall question of regulating such operations, which attempt to turn solid waste produced by sewer plants, septic tank companies and other similar waste streams into a useful product.

One is that this waste has to go somewhere and as Florida’s population grows—the Lakeland plant is getting truckloads of this stuff from all over the state—the amount of waste will continue to increase.

The other is that there needs to be adequate safeguards to make sure these operations don’t cause environmental pollution and public nuisances and that there is enough financial responsibility in regulations and operating plans to cover the costs of cleaning up any messes left behind if these companies go out of business.

Finally, it’s past time for Polk and other inland counties to act like some economically desperate Third World country that’s eager to unquestionably accept and gently regulate new waste treatment businesses in the name of jobs and economically development. That’s a short-sighted mentality that has guided development policy for too long.

It appears local officials are finally recognizing this, but it case they haven’t, here’s another poke in the rear to remind them they need to do better.

Last month was the rainiest July on record in Lakeland since records began around 1910, according to the National Weather Service. The gauge at the airport recorded 20.07 inches

The previous record—15.67 inches– was from 1960, which was considered the last “wet year” by those who contend declines in river and spring flow in recent years are the result of changing rainfall patterns caused by something called the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation.

For the record, the rainfall totals elsewhere in the area were less impressive. That is reflected in Tuesday’s flow of the Peace River at Bartow, which was 148 cubic feet per second. On the same date in 1960, the flow was 2,370 cfs, according to the U.S. Geologic Survey.

Following the month’s soggy finale, courtesy of Tropical Storm Emily, The Ledger reported flooding in a mobile home park in an older section of town west of downtown Lakeland.

Unsurprisingly, city officials said the flooding was likely caused by stormwater runoff downstream from new development that prevented the floodwater flowing through a ditch in the mobile home park from draining as quickly as it once did.

This problem has been building for years because of current and past development policies that required less stormwater storage than some thought was prudent.

In unincorporated Polk County, any development built before 1992, during a period when Polk officials were still avoiding the responsibility of updating their growth plan and development regulations as required by state law, the standard was that development need only be designed to handle a storm that had a 33 percent chance of happening in any year.

Newer developments have to design for storms that have 4 percent chance of occurring in any year unless they are in a closed basin—a place where stormwater flows in and stays until it evaporates or percolates—the design standard is a storm that has a 1 percent chance of happening, the so-called 100-year storm.

The general requirement in unincorporated Polk County and Lakeland is that land where a new development is located is not supposed to generate any more stormwater runoff after it is developed than it generated before it was developed.

Judging by the comments in the article, that isn’t exactly what’s happening.

There have been other problems caused by development downstream from Lakeland’s airport in the suburbs between Drane Field Road and State Road 60.

What is occurring, from what engineers say, is that the increased development has caused both the volume and velocity of the stormwater runoff to increase, sometimes causing scouring of canals and stream channels, potentially affecting bridges and occasionally causing flash floods in homes. Very little of this land is particularly well-drained in its natural state.

There has been some discussion in recent years about the effects of climate change on rainfall patterns, which could shift some of the discussion away from the threats of sea level rise in coastal areas and onto the effect on the levels of freshwater bodies in inland areas.

This week’s flood could be a quirky event or a warning of what we might come to expect in a few decades. This should be part of the discussion of design standards for new development in Florida in 21^st century.

Although BS Ranch’s application for approval of an updated management plan for its soil-manufacturing plant has been delayed until the Oct. 4 Planning Commission meeting, two other changes in the county’s development regulations are up for consideration at Wednesday’s meeting.

The proposed changes would undo changes approved last year to accommodate BS Ranch by exempting it and other soil-manufacturing plants from the normal comprehensive review required for solid waste facilities.

County planners last year recommended and the County Commission approved specifically exempting soil manufacturing plants from a more thorough review despite the fact that BS Ranch began operating without final approval from county development officials or proper permits from the Florida Department of Environmental Protection.

The company later received after-the-fact permits from Polk County and DEP, an action Polk officials came to regret.

That’s because of the odor problems that generated complaints from area residents and business owners, despite the position by both company reps and county planners during public hearings that this would not happen.

Since then, the County Commission has reportedly decided to take a harder line on the development approval process to try to prevent a repeat of the embarrassing BS Ranch fiasco.

The change in the development code will not affect BS Ranch because it already has been approved.

That is because it is illegal to apply changes in the rules retroactively.

The best anyone living near the plant can hope for now is that the review of its revised management plan will solve the odor problems.

One further suggestion may help in deciding how to deal with new types of development is to look more widely at how such cases are handled in parts of Florida outside the nearby counties.

If that had been done, Polk officials might have become aware of the regulations that were being considered in St. Lucie County after commissioners there imposed a temporary moratorium on soil-manufacturing plants.

That could have led to a fuller public policy discussion on what kind of regulations might be justified such as requiring financial responsibility and requiring the operations to occur indoors.

Interestingly, when I mentioned those requirements to one county planner, the immediate response was that those requirements shouldn’t be considered because they might put a hardship on the applicant.

That reflects an attitude that caused the problem in the first place.

It will be to the County Commission to change that.

In 1987 the Florida Legislature approved the Surface Water Management and Improvement Program (SWIM for short) to begin to address the need to begin figuring out how to reverse the decline in water quality in Florida’s water bodies.

Polk County played a role in this through the efforts of then State Rep. Rick Dantzler of Winter Haven, who was part of a team of young legislators who worked under the guidance of veteran legislator Rep. Sid Martin, chair of the House Natural Resources Committee to bring this program in for a landing.

This was a different time in Florida environmental legislation when state officials actively supported environmental cleanups and conservation land purchases under SWIM and Preservation 2000.

The Southwest Florida Water Management District recently compiled a summary of what the SWIM program accomplished in this part of Florida.

Some figures cited included:

–Water treatment for 215,000 acres of local watersheds.

–Restored 13,000 acres of natural systems.

–Recruited 11,000 volunteers to restore natural habitats with the addition of 570,000 plants.

The Winter Haven Chain of Lakes was one of areas specifically targeted under the program.

There’s still plenty to do, based on the number of impaired water bodies listed by state officials as well as efforts to try to prevent cleaner water bodies from sliding onto the impaired waters list because it is clear after all of these years that prevention is always cheaper than restoration.

However, it is fair to point that following an initial appropriation of $30 million in the years following the programs approval, state funding has slacked off and the ongoing efforts have had to rely on local and regional funding from the water management districts and from cities and counties that levy stormwater taxes or fees.

That reinforces the need to support local funding (see previous post) since the pollution was locally generated.