Lake County commissioners are scheduled later this month to consider an ordinance that would limit the use of fertilizers containing nitrogen and phosphorous near water bodies.\n<\/p>\n
If commissioners pass the ordinance, it will joining a growing list of Florida counties, mostly in coastal areas, that have approved some kinds of restrictions to reduce lake, river and bay pollution caused by fertilizer runoff from lawns.\n<\/p>\n
Neither Polk County nor its cities has passed such an ordinance despite the large number of lakes that could benefit.\n<\/p>\n
The ordinances have produced some pushback in the Florida Legislature because of lobbying by fertilizer and commercial landscaping interests to ban local restrictions.\n<\/p>\n
Although there are enforcement provisions in these ordinances, their main value is in educating homeowners to adopt more environmentally-friendly practices to avoid further damaging water bodies near their homes.\n<\/p>\n
Enforcement remains an issue, though.\n<\/p>\n
Although Lakeland and other cities have ordinances that prohibit putting grass and other yard debris in the street where it will end up in storm drains, the leaf and grass blowing crews that homeowners and business owners hire for lawn maintenance widely ignore the restriction.\n<\/p>\n
The result is tidy yards and sidewalks and lousy lakes.\n<\/p>\n
Remember, there’s no such place as away. Everything ends up somewhere. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Lake County commissioners are scheduled later this month to consider an ordinance that would limit the use of fertilizers containing nitrogen and phosphorous near water bodies. If commissioners pass the ordinance, it will joining a growing list of Florida counties, mostly in coastal areas, that have approved some kinds of restrictions to reduce lake, river […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-209","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gci"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=209"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":210,"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209\/revisions\/210"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=209"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=209"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=209"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}