The St. Petersburg mayor's ideas are doused at every turn at a Tampa Bay Water meeting on supply options.
By CRAIG PITTMAN
Published December 16, 2003
CLEARWATER - Tampa Mayor Pam Iorio wanted to narrow the area's search for more water and move faster. St. Petersburg Mayor Rick Baker wanted to keep all of the options open and move slowly.
The winner at Tampa Bay Water's board meeting Monday: Iorio.
Over Baker's objection, the board approved Iorio's proposal to drop plans to pump an extra 4-million gallons of water a day from beneath east Pasco. A busload of worried Pasco residents sat in the audience.
"Let's just deal with the ones that fewer people are really angry about," said Iorio, who made the motion that deleted the proposed expansion of the Cypress Bridge well field near Zephyrhills.
Baker also lost an effort to block the construction of a small desalination plant in Pinellas Park. That project stayed alive despite objections from nearby residents and Pinellas County Commissioner Bob Stewart as well as the St. Petersburg mayor.
Tampa Bay Water experts figure the region's thirst will increase by 8-million gallons a day by 2013, so the utility is searching for new sources. Its goal: three projects that together will bring in 8-million to 12-million gallons a day.
Baker and Stewart fretted that by rejecting the Pasco project and another in Brandon, the board had chosen to pursue only the most expensive options for future water supplies.
The Mid-Pinellas Brackish Desalination Plant, for instance, is expected to produce water that costs $2.47 per 1,000 gallons. The Cypress Bridge project in Pasco, by contrast, would have produced water that cost $1.04 per 1,000 gallons.
The people complaining about the projects have similar concerns. Both would draw millions of gallons of water out of the ground, raising fears of sinkholes and dry private wells.
Baker and Stewart did not want to delete any projects from the list. They wanted to pursue permits for all of them, then make a decision in 2006 about which ones to build.
"I would strongly recommend we continue to look at all of them, rather than reject the two least expensive because there are more people in the room against them," Baker said.
Baker's complaints carry some weight because, in order for the mid-Pinellas desalination plant to work, St. Petersburg must agree to take the water into its piping system and send it along to Tampa Bay Water.
But Iorio said it would be a waste to spend the utility's time and money chasing permits for projects that would never be completed.
Besides, she said, "you get people riled up who don't necessarily need to be."
Last month, the board reviewed a long list of alternatives and cut the list to five options, in four different configurations.
That vote shelved plans for expanding the troubled $110-million desalination plant in Apollo Beach and building an expensive new desalination plant at the mouth of the Anclote River north of Tarpon Springs. The widely publicized problems in finishing the Apollo Beach plant convinced the board that desal might not be the wave of the future after all.
Instead, the biggest project that remains on the list is a complex plan to draw up to 15-million gallons of drinking water a day from the Alafia and Hillsborough rivers and the Tampa Bypass Canal, all in Hillsborough County.
Tampa Bay Water would replace what it takes out with millions of gallons in treated wastewater from Tampa's sewer plant. The wastewater would be put into the waterways so the flow into Tampa Bay would not be harmed. No wastewater would mix with drinking water.
Cost estimates for that plan run from $74-million to $124-million, depending on which waterway is used. It would produce water that is expected to cost up to $2.37 per 1,000 gallons.
The project also requires cutting deals with both Tampa and Hillsborough County, getting money from the Southwest Florida Water Management District and drawing permits from the district and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
The third project approved by the board calls for tapping the water supply used by Crystals International, a Plant City company that makes freeze-dried fruit flavorings, to draw up to 3.5-million gallons of water a day into the Tampa Bay Water system.
