City needs to step up replacement of polluting septic tanks

Nearly three years ago, the city of Jacksonville and JEA jointly announced a $30 million, five-year program to remove septic tanks in an effort to reduce water pollution in the St. Johns River and its tributaries.

It sounds impressive until you realize that to date, not a single septic tank has been removed under this program.

To be sure, efforts are still underway and limited progress is being made but the bulk of the actual construction work is still months away. Given the level of complexity and the number of failing septic tanks in Jacksonville, the city’s and JEA’s commitment to this infrastructure improvement needs to be increased to at least the level seen under the Better Jacksonville Plan.

Under that plan approved by voters under the John Delaney administration, $75 million was allocated to replace septic tanks in six nuisance areas. That plan ended in 2010. The Water and Sewer Expansion Authority, originally created to continue septic tank removal projects, was dissolved in 2011.

Since then, progress has slowed. In April 2016, JEA and the city announced a plan to each spend $15 million on the problem. Jacksonville Mayor Lenny Curry said, “I think it’s progress at a time when we have lost time on this issue.”

But lost time appears to be the net result of the current plan. After completing planning and engineering, a major part of this newest replacement program began in March with the opening of bids to replace 352 septic tanks and extend water lines in the Biltmore area of Jacksonville’s Northwest neighborhood.

Construction is tentatively scheduled to start this summer and won’t be finished until early 2021, according to JEA, which is administering the project. When completed, this initial project is expected to cost nearly half of the money allocated for the citywide program.

Much of the early work on the overall program consisted of determining where the need was the greatest and working with residents affected. JEA and the city ranked the Biltmore area No. 1 on a priority matrix that was developed jointly with the Duval County’s Florida Department of Health. The department listed 37 areas with a history of failing septic tanks in Jacksonville. Each area was considered for environmental factors and community considerations and the entire program was approved by the City Council in 2016.

The next section to be addressed under the removal program is the Beverly Hills area, also in the city’s Northwest, which was listed by the Department of Health as the first priority in its 2018 ranking. This area contains 749 lots and is being divided into two sub-areas, each of which will be designed by a separate engineering firm. Design work on the first part of this project is underway. No cost estimates are available but it is likely to exhaust the total funds for the joint program, leaving 35 areas of the city unaddressed pending a new initiative.

At the current rate of ridding septic tanks from two priority areas every five years, it will take the city many decades to correct the pollution to our rivers and streams on a daily basis. And it’s a problem that is only expected to get worse with higher tides, more frequent flooding and a rising water table.

According to the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, 34 waterways in Duval County are considered “impaired” because of fecal coliform pollution.

In 2009, the city agreed to help improve water quality by removing septic tanks in high priority failure areas that were within 300 meters of waterways, an estimated 4,300 of them, as well as more than 10,000 septic tanks outside failure areas by 2023. It’s simply impossible for the city to maintain that commitment at the current pace.

Of course, failing septic tanks are only part of a complicated and expensive problem. Even in areas where sewers have been installed, fecal coliform levels have not come down dramatically in nearby tributaries as expected. Part of this problem may be attributed to illegal connection of sewage waste into storm sewers and direct discharges into waterways. Hundreds of these illegal connections have been eliminated through city and JEA inspections.

While JEA has made improvements to reduce sewer overflows and failures at its own lift stations, problems still exist with private lift stations. The actual number of these is unknown but is estimated to be greater than 2,000. Failures of these private lift stations are not uncommon in Jacksonville.

All of these factors are indicators of a sewage problem that continues to impact Jacksonville and the St. Johns River. Not only does it pose health hazards to its residents, it contributes to ugly algae blooms, hurts property values and the city’s image.

Without a vigorous commitment to strict enforcement and more ambitious abatement programs, this problem seems certain to plague future generations of Jacksonville residents for many years.

Dan Dundon of Jacksonville is a member of the St. Johns Riverkeeper.