VOLUSIA

County may seek compromise with opponents of Mosquito Lagoon plan

Dinah Voyles Pulver
dpulver@gatehousemedia.com
Billy Rotne, a local fishing guide, snapped this photo of the water at Tiger Shoals in Mosquito Lagoon on Wednesday. The clarity of the water has diminished because algae blooms have returned to parts of the lagoon. [Photo provided by Billy Rotne]

As if on cue, just before a public meeting to review a draft plan for protecting Mosquito Lagoon, algae blooms have returned to much of the waterway, turning the water into an all-too-familiar cloudy pea-soup color.

The proposed Mosquito Lagoon Reasonable Assurance Plan, a collaborative effort of four local governments, has been controversial from the start, but has drawn increasing opposition as the clock ticks down to a formal adoption by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The plan is a joint effort by the county and the cities of Edgewater, New Smyrna Beach and Oak Hill.

The final meeting for the public to review the plan is set to begin at 10 a.m. Friday at the New Smyrna Beach Library, 1001 S. Dixie Freeway.

Environmental advocates and fishermen are united in concern that the plan will do little to improve water quality in the troubled lagoon. They argue the draft plan lowers the water quality standards for the lagoon and fails to address the steps needed to protect and restore water quality.

“They call it the reasonable assurance plan, but it’s the unreasonable assurance plan,” said Billy Rotne, a fishing captain and guide who's beside himself with concern over the deficiencies he and others see in the proposal.

A team of scientists at Stetson University's Institute for Water and Environmental Resilience also plan to ask that the plan be rejected. It "does not give reasonable assurance that water quality standards will be achieved or that significant improvement will occur within five years," stated the Institute's executive director, Clay Henderson, in formal comments the Institute plans to submit to the state.

Despite the ongoing controversy over portions of the plan, the county's public works director, Judy Grim, said "it's a good plan."

“It’s based on good science,” she said. “It’s been reviewed by experts in the field and we are moving forward to do somewhere around a 15 to 17 percent reduction in nutrients. And that’s a very expensive undertaking.”

However, on Wednesday afternoon, after The News-Journal contacted state officials and the consultants to try to discuss the plan, Grim said the county had been discussing the plan with the state and could discuss with its partners additional changes to the draft plan before it's submitted for final approval. Grim said they hope to address some of the concerns that have been raised about water quality targets and the allowable levels of nitrogen and phosphorus. 

Also Wednesday, Dee Ann Miller, a DEP spokeswoman, added that the department will "thoroughly review the science" in the plan and ask questions "as they arise."

"For both the Department and EPA to approve the RAP, it must be based on sound science and protect the Mosquito Lagoon," Miller stated in an email.

The reasonable assurance plan grew out of a series of meetings that started in 2014 to address concerns about water quality countywide but particularly in Mosquito Lagoon, which was suffering from a series of harmful algae blooms, loss of seagrass and the deaths of manatees, dolphins, birds and other marine life. The problems in the lagoon were chronicled in a December 2013 series in The News-Journal.

[READ MORE: Mosquito Lagoon in peril]

The original goal for the assurance plan was to try to get ahead of any declaration of impairment by the DEP. However, the department has since declared the lagoon impaired. The department considers all three sections of the lagoon impaired for chlorophyll, which comes in part from algae blooms, and the central and south sections impaired for nitrogen. The south lagoon also is considered impaired because of the phosphorus found in the water and the northern end is impaired for fecal coliform, a bacteria that comes from the intestines of mammals. Pollutants like nitrogen and phosphorus can fuel algae blooms.

The plan must be approved by the state and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The department already has been criticized recently for similar action plans adopted for more than two dozen springs across the state, including Blue Spring in Orange City and Gemini Springs in DeBary. Those plans are on hold after citizen groups across North and Central Florida argued they were insufficient to protect the springs

The Institute, Rotne and others take issue with the proposal to increase the amount of pollution considered allowable in Mosquito Lagoon.

“That’s the last thing a dying lagoon needs,” Rotne said. He’s talked with other environmental advocates, and said they’re “in consensus that increasing the proposed amounts of nitrogen and phosphorus that are going into the lagoon is moving backwards, not forward.”

The Institute's letter to the state maintains the plan doesn’t meet the requirements of the federal clean water act and that proposed changes to water quality standards won’t enhance the water quality.

Part of the lagoon has been designated an aquatic preserve and an Outstanding Florida Water and is supposed to receive special protection, “with no degradation of water quality allowed,” Henderson wrote. The letter explains the proposed standards would allow levels of chlorophyll, phosphorus and nitrogen to increase across the the lagoon.

“We think the optics of reduction of water quality standards during a time of harmful algae blooms is not the best way to restore Mosquito Lagoon,” the letter stated, arguing the lagoon should subjected to higher standards, not lower.

Grim said the county has plans in place to monitor the improvements.

“We have projects that we are going to do in the first five years and we have goals for doing a certain amount of reduction,” she said. “We’ll continue to reevaluate this. If we aren’t achieving improvement in the water body, we’ll continue to do more.”

“That’s the part we don’t seem to be able to get them to understand,” she said. “This is the first step and we’ll continue to work on this until we see the improvements we need.”

Among the projects the county already has underway are a stormwater treatment facility at 10th Street, between Edgewater and New Smyrna Beach, and a stormwater park along the Ariel Canal to improve water quality. Also listed are projects to divert storm water to a borrow pit on the south side of the New Smyrna Beach Municipal Airport and a project to convert septic tanks to sewers in Indian Harbor Estates. The plan also includes public education on preventing pollution from flowing into the lagoon through sources such as fertilizers, poorly maintained septic tanks and pet waste.

Opponents to the plan claim written comments of concern provided over the past year by the National Park Service, the Marine Discovery Center, the Save the Manatee Club and others weren’t addressed. One of the most controversial pieces of the plan is the assertion by consultants that there hasn't been significant loss of seagrass beds in the lagoon. That's disputed by the Marine Discovery Center, many fishermen and the Institute.

They're also concerned that the plan addresses upgrading only 10 percent of the septic tanks within the watershed around the lagoon, and none within Oak Hill, previously identified as an area where tanks needed to be replaced.