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Water board director resigns to take new job
By CRAIG PITTMAN, Times Staff Writer
E.D. "Sonny" Vergara, widely credited with helping to broker a peaceful solution to the Tampa Bay area's bitter and expensive water wars, resigned Monday after five years as executive director of the Southwest Florida Water Management District. Vergara, who turned 60 in October, said in his four-page letter to his bosses that he wants to quit his $162,000-a-year post Jan. 17 because he does not want to hang around another two years waiting for retirement. "I don't want to wrinkle into old age," the Tampa native said in an interview. "I'm already wrinkled enough. I've got a lot of juices and fire." The other motive, though, is that he's got a new job lined up in the private sector, a job he would not discuss in detail. All Vergara would say about the job is that he can continue to work on water-related issues and live on a Hernando County hilltop overlooking Spring Lake, tending the muscadines in his vineyard. He explained the timing by saying, "This private sector opportunity has ripened to a certain point and so I decided this was the time to do it." Based in Brooksville, Swiftmud regulates every aspect of water use, from utility pumping to wetlands development, across a 16-county region. Board members are picked by the governor, and they hire the director. Vergara was hired in 1997 to oversee the 735-employee water board. News of his resignation surprised many involved in the region's water issues. "I would've thought he would've stayed until he reached retirement age," said Ed de la Parte, who was Pinellas County's attorney during the water wars, when Pinellas, Hillsborough and Pasco counties spent millions of dollars suing each other. After years of bitter battles, Vergara helped to broker a peaceful solution, according to Honey Rand, a former Swiftmud employee who has written a book about the water wars. Although others got the process started, de la Parte said, "people had enough trust in Sonny . . . and were comfortable enough negotiating with him" that he was able to end the conflict. But Vergara, a former director of the St. Johns River Water Management District, was hardly a popular choice when hired. One state senator grumbled that Vergara would do little to stop "a bureaucracy growing out of control," and another suggested that Vergara had promoted politics over science at the St. Johns board. But Vergara, who has also run his own cut-flower importation business, overcame those objections to win confirmation to the powerful post. During his tenure, Swiftmud has not raised the tax rate or added a single employee to its workforce, while still helping to finance a $110-million desalination plant on the shores of Tampa Bay to end environmentally damaging overpumping in Pasco County. "You've got to believe that wouldn't have happened if Sonny hadn't wanted that to happen," said Swiftmud vice chairman Tom Dabney, who praised Vergara's "incredible grasp on the issues." Not everyone will be sorry to see him go. "I thought we'd never get him out of there," said Clay Colson of the Naturecoast Sierra Club, a frequent critic. Colson has blasted Vergara for not doing enough to curb development that continued to put pressure on the region's water supply during the drought. Vergara's predecessor, Pete Hubbell, predicted plenty of applicants to replace Vergara. But finding a new director will not be easy, Dabney predicted. So did Vergara. "I think it will be hard in this sense: a lot of people will be interested in whether the person who comes in is not anti-this or anti-that -- and that's people in agriculture and industry and the environment," Vergara said. "They're going to try to make their voices known to the governing board. The person who sits in this chair is going to have to confront every water problem for 10,000 square miles." -- Staff writer Jeffrey Solochek contributed to this story.
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