Naples Council votes to spend $1 million to improve Naples Bay water quality

The City Council unanimously approved a $1 million project to improve the water quality of Naples Bay, which has violated the state's pollution standards for years.

The project, scheduled to start in April, will target a pollution hot spot near Naples Landing, where a pump station at Broad Avenue South and Ninth Street has been estimated to dump 450 million gallons of rain runoff in a typical year. 

The runoff carries pollutants such as nitrogen and phosphorus from fertilizers that can cause algae blooms, and copper, which is found in compounds used to treat water retention ponds and can harm marine life.

"The nitrogen levels in Naples Bay are something to be concerned about," said Gregg Strakaluse, the city's streets and stormwater director. 

Naples Bay violates state standards for copper, and the Florida Department of Environmental Protection has set pollution limits for nitrogen and phosphorus. 

Previously:Naples Bay project to improve water quality on track for 2018 start

And:Naples City Council applauds removal of stormwater beach pipes

The pump station also puts tons of contaminated sediment into the bay, creating a toxic shoal next to the U.S. Coast Guard auxiliary station.

Strakaluse said the city has completed other projects to try to alleviate the problem, but that the time has come to address the issue head on. 

“We’ve done many, many things upstream of this pump station to try to improve the water quality before discharge," including adding a detention center that captures and filters between 11 percent and 15 percent of the area's stormwater, he said, "but we still need to discharge a great quantity of flow out to the bay to protect (from) flooding."

The project would remove the shoal, fix a scour hole created by the outfall and rebuild a channel to allow sediments to settle before they move into the bay. The project will also create a "living shoreline" north and south of the outfall by planting cordgrass and building oyster reefs that will help filter the water.

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The initial project plans included installing a device upstream of the pump station to filter sediments out of the runoff. However, the device costs $150,000, which would have put the project over budget, Strakaluse said.

Councilman Terry Hutchison said he hopes the city will be able to implement that device later. 

"This is a good example of taking meaningful steps to improve our water quality," he said. "I would favor such a thing if the money could be found."

Vice Mayor Gary Price said the city needs to make sure it has the data to support spending $1 million.

"What do we get for a million dollars in terms of water quality?" he asked. "How do we know that it's been effective? What would you call success from a numeric perspective, from a data-driven water quality perspective?"

Strakaluse replied: "I think a successful project would be one that addresses a point where we're discharging an awful lot of water, where we have a lot of potential to do as much as we can, as opposed to locations that don't discharge as much water." 

However, Price said he wanted hard numbers.

"I'm not sure your definition of success is the same as mine," he said. "I want to know that I can go and look five years from now and say, 'We made a 10 percent improvement in water quality because we spent $1 million.' I don't want to spend another $1 million if I can't get an answer."

Councilwoman Linda Penniman, who later in the meeting announced her resignation, said the city shouldn't expect to see immediate improvements in the water quality since a county project to reduce flows from the Gordon River to Naples Bay has been pushed back to 2024. 

"It's a little bit Sisyphean when that project hasn't started, since it is the biggest polluter," she said. "We still have to continue to do these backup things so when that's done, this whole thing kind of comes together as one big enormous project. That's the big elephant in the room."

Eric Staats of the Naples Daily News contributed to this report.