{"id":3294,"date":"2026-08-25T16:10:52","date_gmt":"2026-08-25T20:10:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/?p=3294"},"modified":"2026-08-25T16:10:53","modified_gmt":"2026-08-25T20:10:53","slug":"polk-stormwater-management-enters-new-era","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/?p=3294","title":{"rendered":"Polk Stormwater Management Enters New Era"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Polk County Commissioners recently disbanded the Stormwater Technical Advisory Committee, which was part of Polk County’s long-delayed efforts to deal with stormwater pollution and flooding issues.
Dave Carter, longtime Winter Haven professional engineer who chaired the committee, said the decision was recommended by the committee because they felt they had accomplished their mission.
The committee was originally formed to oversee Polk’s drainage staff to make sure they were properly spending the recently approved Polk County stormwater tax in 2013 and initially included people who were critical of the tax.
As it turned out there was never any serious controversy about the projects the tax funded, all of which required County Commission approval anyway.
A lot of work involves monitoring pollution to comply with state and federal law, which was the catalyst for adopting the tax, which this year is .094 of a mill.
But it took a while to get here.
The County Commission had been dealing with flooding issues for decades and had commissioned and then ignored engineering studies recommending ways to deal with the issue, citing lack of money to implement them.
Sierra Club and other environmental organizations had pressed commissioners to do something about stormwater pollution, which was responsible for algae blooms and occasional fish kills on local lakes.
Commissioners did not formally discuss the idea of a stormwater tax or fee until 1990, but kept delaying action as other local governments such as Lakeland and Winter Haven enacted their own fees.
After an on-again. off-again discussion, commissioners finally acted.
The results have been promising.
Water quality in many lakes and streams has improved and the tax, which sometimes attracted matching funds, was also used to complete some major regional projects such as the Lake Gwynn outfall in Wahneta and the Peace Creek Drainage Canal project in Dundee.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Polk County Commissioners recently disbanded the Stormwater Technical Advisory Committee, which was part of Polk County’s long-delayed efforts to deal with stormwater pollution and flooding issues.Dave Carter, longtime Winter Haven professional engineer who chaired the committee, said the decision was recommended by the committee because they felt they had accomplished their mission. The committee was […]<\/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-3294","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\/3294","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=3294"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3294\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3299,"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3294\/revisions\/3299"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3294"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3294"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3294"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}