The long-sought environmental education center at Se7en Wetlands Park is a go. The Lakeland City Commission has approved a $1.2 million contract with Rodda Construction to build the center near the 1,600-acre park’s northern entrance. The work will be funded with a $977,165 grant from the Florida Department of Environmental Protection and $259.927 in city funds. The park, which opened in 2018, contains a trail system that is popular for wildlife viewing. It contains a number of treatment wetlands designed to remove nutrients from the city’s sewer discharges before the water reaches the North Prong of the Alafia River and a pipeline that supplies cooling water to TECO’s Polk Power Station.
For the time being the efforts of the Polk County Regional Water Cooperative are focused on developing a network of Lower Floridan Aquifer wells, treatment plants to remove impurities and a pipeline system, to deliver water to utilities and their customers to feed the growth machine. But utility officials have admitted the Lower Floridan Aquifer, like the Upper Floridan Aquifer they have been tapping for more than a century, is not an inexhaustible source of water. And for now the timeline stretches only to about mid-century. Beyond that there is talk of drilling even deeper into the aquifer where water quality is even worse and treatment more expensive. But in the meantime they are also talking about tapping surface water. That means scraping whatever water is available from the Peace River and maybe the Alafia River when there’s extra water to be had after maintaining enough flow for fish movement and a healthy ecosystem. But, as Shakespeare told us long ago, there’s the rub. Current conditions provide a good example. 2025 was the third driest year in Winter Haven since figures began to be collected in 1941. This is significant because the Winter Haven lakes form part of the headwaters of the Peace River. Current flow in the Upper Peace River is about a quarter of the long-term average. Downstream in Zolfo Springs and Arcadia flow is about15 percent of average and this is just the beginning of the dry season. One of the needs any utility has is a dependable supply of whatever it needs to operate, be it fuel, water or anything else. No one knows what our climate future will be. Will droughts become more regular of will rain-soaked hurricanes be the new normal? That’s the dilemma since both scenarios have their obvious downsides. Guess we’ll have to stay tuned, keeping in the back of our minds that somewhere out there lies a limit. on growth that we will not be able to overcome, no matter how many billions of dollars they throw at it.
Now that the latest state-sanctioned bear hunt is over, some observations are in order.
–It was a bear hunt not a bear “harvest.” These are living creatures not oranges, –The fact that only 52 bears were killed is not surprising. Unlike the earlier hunt, which was a free-for-all, this hunt involved a limited number of permits, some of which were snatched up in a guerilla campaign by Sierra and other groups. –It seems likely that even among the people who actively tried to kill a bear they may have been unsuccessful because bears are not that numerous and may be hard to find unless you have some staked out as occurred in the earlier hunt. –The rationale for the hunt was always questionable because the hunt areas were mostly areas with little growth pressure –FWC was secretive about how the hunt was going, which aligns with the general way information is withheld from the public under the DeSantis administration. –The FWC reportedly will present a report on the hunt results sometime later this year. It is unclear whether that delay is needed to make sure they have good data or to figure out how to spin it to enable the next hunt.
