The Polk County Commission voted June 20 to buy 120 acres on the south shore of Lake Lulu in the Winter Haven Chain of Lakes for an environmental restoration project.
The $480,000 purchase from Harmony on Lake Eloise is part of a $1 million planned appropriation from President Joseph Biden’s American Rescue Plan for land acquisition and design for a wetlands treatment and wildlife habitat restoration project.
No money for construction of the project was listed.
A canal flowing out of Lake Lulu connects to a series of drainage canals that eventually reaches the Peace River near Bartow.
The need to reduce the flow of pollutants from Lake Lulu, where one of Winter Haven’s sewer plants was once located, has been an issue for decades.
That sewer flow was mentioned in a 1953 scientific paper that discussed the contributions of pollution into the Peace River system from Polk County that affected red tide occurrences downstream in the Gulf of Mexico at a time when sewer discharges in Florida were largely unregulated.