By the time the Polk County Commission gets to the point of setting next year’s tax rate, the consensus has already been reached on whether any changes are coming.

During Tuesday’s meeting, however, there was a slight dissent after Commission Chair Melony Bell announced she would not support the proposed tax rate to pay to eventually pay for projects to preserve lake quality in Polk County.

The tax rate is 10 cents per $1,000 of taxable property.

Bell cited the fact that the tax was approved to meet the requirements of federal mandates passed down to state and local officials. She also was the lone dissenter in approving the 2013 ordinance that authorized the tax.

The proposed tax rate was set over her dissent and will be formally considered during budget hearings in September.

A couple of points.

Yes, there is a federal mandate under the Clean Water Act to work to prevent pollution as much as is practical and financially and technically feasible. The law was passed by Congress in 1972, but it took nearly a quarter century of lobbying to finally persuade the County Commission to establish a stormwater utility, which they did in 2013 after rejecting the idea as recently as 2012.

The federal mandate issue cuts both ways, however. I expect some local officials realize the need to fund lake cleanups and let the feds be the bad guys who are forcing them to do this to provide themselves with the political cover to do the right thing.

Unincorporated Polk County was tardy in approving some kind of stormwater utility. Lakeland and Winter Haven, two cities that grew up around lakes, approved stormwater fees decades ago.

In fact, Lakeland just approved an increase in its fee this year to keep up with the expense of performing lake management work.

That’s because other jurisdictions realized that their lakes were declining and they had to do something before it was too late to preserve their communities’ quality of life.

This is not about the feds, but about the future.

Officials in Alachua County recently put a number to water conservation from a new irrigation enacted in 2015, the Gainesville Sun reports.

The figure was 9 million gallons in the past year.

That was accomplished by tightening irrigation design standards for new development.

In addition to regulations on the total acreage where high-volume (as opposed to micro) irrigation is required, the code also requires certification of irrigation contractors to make sure only qualified people are installing the systems, sets standards that avoid irrigation systems that irrigate sidewalks, driveways, streets and building walls and reinforce the requirement that all irrigation systems be equipped with a functioning rain sensor.

This goes farther than the Polk County landscaping ordinance, which is primarily devoted to landscape buffers and the choices of landscape plants. However, the Polk development code specifies micro or low-volume irrigation should be installed for at least half of the landscape and all of the non-turf landscape.

It is generally acknowledged that turf irrigation creates most of the residential irrigation demand and the potential for surface water pollution from runoff of fertilizer and other chemicals.

As local elected officials pursue future water supply planning, it might be interesting to take a look at current irrigation standards for new development and for significant redevelopment projects to see if there are some potential savings to be had.

Saving 9 million gallons of water a year may not seem like much—Polk County residents and businesses use around 300 million gallons a day—but you never know what kinds of savings we can achieve until we put a pencil to it.

It would be an interesting exercise in water planning.

Residential automatic irrigation systems shouldn’t be operating often in the summer in peninsular Florida where rainstorms drift inland from the Atlantic Ocean or Gulf of Mexico regularly.

Now that the Florida Legislature has approved and Gov. Rick Scott has signed legislation updating how the public is informed about pollution incidents, the implementation is coming.

What incidents are reported will depend on what contaminant is involved and in some cases whether a water body is threatened.

Pollution incidents and other events, such as road blockages, train wrecks and school lockdowns, are reported to the State Watch Office.

If you want to subscribe to the Florida Department of Environmental Protection’s notification system, go to this link. This link will also take you to notices that are published under the new law.

As you may recall, this law was prompted by massive sewer spills in St. Petersburg that local officials initially tried to cover up and by a sinkhole in one of the gypsum stacks at Mosaic’s New Wales plant south of Mulberry.

Although Mosaic officials promptly reported what its consultant to opaquely described as “an anomaly likely connected to the Floridan aquifer system,” to state and local officials, the public was left in the dark..

When word finally surfaced to the public that there was a sinkhole, it caused a firestorm of criticism from residents in the area who were concerned about private drinking water well contamination. As it turned out, Mosaic kept the contamination on its own property by cranking up its pumps and recirculating the contaminated water that flowed into the sinkhole.

Mosaic had taken the same approach following a much larger sinkhole several years earlier.

No drinking water wells were contaminated as a result of either incident.

However the lack of transparency in the reporting process created political pressure to do a better job of letting the public know when these kinds of incidents occur.

The St. Pete sewer spills have been a recurring issue in the current mayor’s race, too.

Tampa Electric is proposing to construct a 74.5-megawatt solar farm on a 503-acre site on reclaimed phosphate land near Streamsong Resort in southwest Polk County.

TECO officials have submitted preliminary plans to Polk planning officials for the complex that will be connected to the grid nears its nearby Polk Power Station.

This is part of a growing trend to shift away from fossil fuels and to diversify Florida’s electric power production.

This continues a trend underway over the past decade as major Florida utilities have developed solar farms throughout south and central Florida.

Earlier Polk projects have include some small solar farms whose owners have contracted to sell power to Lakeland Electric.

The idea of setting aside portions of public conservation lands to relocate gopher tortoises displaced by development is gaining more support.

The first such site in the state was opened in Polk County a few years ago near Frostproof.

More recently a section of land at Circle B Bar Reserve near Lakeland was set aside for orphaned gopher tortoises.

No the South Florida Water Management District has announced a plan to turn over a site in Highlands County at Fort Basinger near the Kissimmee River for a gopher tortoise relocation site in cooperation with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Committee.

According to SFWMD officials, the site can accommodate more than 300 tortoises.

The relocations are occurring in connection with the agency’s continuing earth-moving work to restore the Kissimmee River and other work in the Everglades basin.

Gopher tortoises often dig burrows in the levees around previous construction projects.

Central Florida’s rainy season arrived early this year.

Any look at a weather radar map on most afternoons shows bands of rain moving across the landscape.

June rainfall was not record-setting in the area, but the totals were respectable.

Nevertheless, the upper reaches of the Peace River, which drains a watershed stretching to Lake Hamilton to the northeast and Lake Gibson to the northwest is barely flowing robustly enough for canoe outings and is running only about a quarter of average for this time of year in Bartow.

Rivers typically pick up flow as they course downstream.

The Peace River does not accomplish this normalcy except in times of high flow following heavy storms or hurricanes.

If you look at the flow at Fort Meade, you will see it is two-thirds of the Bartow flow.

The reason for this is well-known.

Decades ago industrial water use, which in those days was completely unregulated, began lowering the aquifer level by about 50 feet in that part of Polk County.

Historically ground water flowed from vents in the riverbed into the river to augment its flow. Nearby a second-magnitude spring called Kissengen Spring bubbled into a popular swimming hole between Bartow and Homeland.

Today the situation is reversed. River water flows into the riverbed vents before it gets very far downstream. At times, portions of the river flow backwards into an offstream sink.

Water managers have spent millions of dollars to turn Lake Hancock into a reservoir to keep the river from running dry, as it has during periodic droughts beginning in 1981.

How does this history apply to the current efforts to find more water to pump from the ground under the Polk Regional Water Cooperative?

It means we need to pay attention as the plans slowly unfold to implement already agreed-upon project to probe lower regions of the aquifer that models reportedly tell us can sustain water pumping, at least in the near future.

The main problem is that most of this will occur slowly over the period of a generation or more.

That’s why it is also important to pass along what we know today to the next generation who will experience the effects of whatever faults occur in the models or whatever political decisions occur to ramp up the pumping to feed the growth machine.

These are questions we will only ignore at our peril.

A crowd of about 75 people showed up at Colt Creek State Park to witness the groundbreaking for a new campground that will cater to RV enthusiasts.

Up until now, all of the camping had been primitive camping at a few sites within the 5,026-acre park in Green Swamp north of Lakeland.

Although a campground had always been in the park’s master plan, people credit Paula Dockery, founder of the Friends of Colt Creek State Park, for keeping it on state officials’ radar.

Tuesday’s event was attended by a crowd of state agency staff members, local elected officials and park supporters from the community.

Speaker after speaker emphasized how this project, which is expected to be completed by early next year, will expand outdoor recreation offerings in Polk County and attract more visitors to the newest local state park, which opened in 2007.

The campground site is located at the edge of an extensive pine forest with views to nearby meadows and hardwood hammocks.

It will be designed primarily to accommodate RV users, but will have a handful of primitive camping sites.