JEA has been a successful water and sewer utility

JEA does a lot for us. It gives us our power and our water and then takes care of all that water after we use and discard it.

Recent conversations about ownership often focus on the power side of the agency, sometimes the water side, but most overlook the unsexy but highly important service of sewage management.

It takes a lot of effort and infrastructure to collect, pump, pipe and treat our waste and then to responsibly return it to the environment. To dispose of our daily 80 million gallons of waste, JEA must manage 1,300 pumping stations, 3,900 miles of pipes and operate 11 wastewater treatment plants, according to its website.

Discharges into our environment are highly regulated and must be carefully managed. Nutrients in treated wastewaters must be tightly controlled and monitored, along with a multitude of other ingredients of wastewater. Biosolids, a final product of our waste, must be disposed of responsibly, a growing problem for all municipalities in growing Florida.

In this era of rising sea levels and increasing weather impacts, plans for infrastructure resiliency must be made and implemented to protect public health. These are important, complicated and expensive responsibilities and should be included in any discussions about utility ownership.

Here is what I see in JEA:

• An agency that manages our sewage so well that it can cover the city of Jacksonville's promise to the state to reduce its nutrient loading to our waterways, in addition to meeting its own obligation to do so.

• An agency that works closely with the city to identify and manage privately owned sewage infrastructure that is overseen by city government.

• An agency that regularly participates in inter-agency efforts to find and remove sources of pollution in our impaired waterways.

• An agency that has developed a long-term plan to address sewage infrastructure security during storms and flooding.

• An agency that has been largely responsive and proactive in disposing of the wastes that we all create.

I encourage the city leadership to consider how changes in ownership will affect all municipal functions of JEA.

It has been a good partner to the city in sewage management and environmental improvement. Those contributions should be acknowledged and become a factor in any decision-making about its future.

Lucy Sonnenberg is a research professor and chair of the Jacksonville Environmental Protection Board.