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Plea fails to take water plan off table
By CRAIG PITTMAN, Times Staff Writer
CLEARWATER -- With their new desalination plant nearly complete and torrential rains alleviating the pressure on their well fields, the board members of Tampa Bay Water could have basked in the warm glow of success Monday. Instead, the leaders of the area's regional water utility spent part of their monthly meeting snapping at each other, bringing up issues from the past and worrying about where the water to feed the region's growth will come from. The exchange was triggered by Pasco County Commissioner Ted Schrader's comments about a complicated proposal for Tampa Bay Water to buy water from a consortium of private water users in northeastern Pasco within the next 20 years. Schrader, saying he was "confused and alarmed" about the plan, urged his fellow Tampa Bay Water board members to drop the idea. He said he feared that after years of pumping central Pasco dry, Pinellas and Hillsborough counties were eager to siphon everything out from under east Pasco, too. "I'd like to see it off the list altogether," he said. His colleagues wasted no time in shooting down Schrader's request. "I'm not ready to take those new groundwater sources off the table," Pinellas County Commissioner Susan Latvala said. "If we don't have some inexpensive sources to keep water rates somewhat stable and low, no one will be able to live in this region. There just aren't a whole lot of places to get groundwater." "We need to look at all options and not take any of them off the table," agreed St. Petersburg Mayor Rick Baker. Latvala promised that the excessive pumping that damaged Pasco's wetlands, lakes and rivers won't happen again. "We will never again commit the sins of the past," she said. But Hillsborough Commissioner Ronda Storms pointed out that the board did, in fact, allow overpumping again during the recent drought. Because of the past environmental damage from overpumping, the Southwest Florida Water Management District is requiring Tampa Bay Water to cut its groundwater consumption. At the peak of the overpumping, the J.B. Starkey well field in Pasco had been pumping 192-million gallons a day. By the end of 2007, Swiftmud is requiring Tampa Bay Water to cut back to just 90-million gallons a day from the ground. That's why Tampa Bay Water is building a $110-million desalination plant in Apollo Beach, expected to be up and running by next month, as well as a reservoir that's just begun construction in Brandon. And Tampa Bay Water, which provides wholesale water to utilities serving 2-million people, is working on a host of other projects, such as a second desalination plant at the mouth of the Anclote River. But even with those and other plans already in the works, Tampa Bay Water still expects to need an extra 40-million gallons of water a day to supply the booming population of the region through 2020. The proposal that Schrader objected to appears to be a long shot at best because it runs counter to state law, Tampa Bay Water executive director Jerry Maxwell said. Still, even the idea was enough to worry Pasco officials. In recent months, Maxwell's staff has been contacting 20 or so private water users around the region who are not pumping the full amount they are permitted to pull out of the ground and asking whether Tampa Bay Water can acquire the remainder. Now some of those water users in Pasco, who according to Maxwell could contribute more than 16-million gallons of water a day, have joined together in a consortium. Their plan is to sell their excess to Tampa Bay Water, to the consternation of Pasco officials. "Here we go again," Doug Bramlett, assistant Pasco County administrator and utilities chief, said last month. "They're coming back to Pasco County."
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