On the Lake Mary Watershed
A river is the report card for its watershed.
- Alan Levere-
Lake Mary Boulevard, the main artery of the city, features lush grassy medians, studded with crepe myrtle and bursting with delicate blossoms. Past Lake Mary City Hall, past the green roofed post office, past the four corners of Rinehart Road, where high school kids hold up signs for car washes on weekends, and below a second pedestrian bridge, there is a wrought iron sign behind four jetting fountains: Lake Mary, City of Lakes. On a sunny morning, the water actually sparkles.
Such a gem of a city does not come cheaply; there is a price tag and not just a monetary one. One can argue that the City of Lake Mary, in particular, and Seminole County in general have – through their scrupulously watered greens, their flowing fountains and ever-running water taps- participated in an excessive consumption of groundwater, which in turn has precipitated a water crisis, threatening the St. John’s River
Lake Mary, in Seminole county, was incorporated in 1973, it’s origins dating back to the 19th century. An early settler, Major William Randolph, named one of the city lakes after his wife Mary. What started as a small agricultural community, situated along the railroad tracks that loped between Sanford and Orlando, turned, thanks to Uncle Walt’s theme park, into a bedroom community serving Orlando, Daytona and even Tampa. Old timers like to reminisce about the sweet odor of orange blossoms, the rolling cow pastures that once bordered the main thoroughfare representing a slower, less stressful way of life.
Now approximately 14,500-15,000 people live within the roughly 10 miles of Lake Mary municipal city limits. According to statistics, most of them are married, Caucasian, home and business owners with professional jobs. From 1996-2008, the city issued thousands of permits for single-family residences. According to a City-Data web site, in 2008, the average median home value was close to $400,000.
It’s a nice place to live, the kind of place where the mayor, David Mealor, declares May 6th Occupational Health and Safety Day. Lake Mary placed 4th on the 2009 list of Money Magazine’s Best Places to Live in the US. Lake Mary High School ranks nationally in Newsweek’s annual coveted list of top high schools. Crime is significantly lower than state averages. Even unemployment is lower than state averages. According to Zillow, Lake Mary home values have dropped, but they are still higher than in surrounding cities. Powerful people such as Stan Van Gundy, head coach for the Orlando Magic, keep a high-priced home in the heart of the Lake Mary community.
Does the beauty and appeal of this community justify a quota of more water per capita- 40 percent more on average- than anywhere in Seminole County? A June compliance report for a 20 year Consumptive Use Permit (CUP) issued by the St. John’s River Water Management District (SJRWMD) and filed for by Bruce Paster, Director of Public Works for the city of Lake Mary, allocated one billion 801 million gallons per year of water for, “household, commercial/industrial, water utility and unaccounted (leakage) water use per year.
How much is almost two billion gallons of water a year? If an ordinary bathtub holds 50 gallons of water, Lake Mary’s water allowance would fill 36 million bathtubs. Or it would allow every person who lives in Lake Mary to fill his bathtub up two million times a year. On a more practical level, for a city of 15,000 people, almost two billion gallons a year averages out to five million gallons a day or over 300 gallons per person per day. It sounds like a lotta water.
Is it really that excessive? Is the city of Lake Mary the biggest water hog in Seminole County? According to a 2009 U.S. Geological Survey, the average person uses 80-100 gallons of water a day. According to Ruth Hazard of Seminole County Environmental services, the average Seminole County resident uses 140 gallons a day. According to the most recent water management district projections issued by the St. John’s River Water Management District, the next highest per capita water allocation in Seminole County for 2010 is less than half of Lake Mary’s.
To understand Lake Mary’s water usage, one has to understand that a CUP permit is like an allowance. SJRWMD defines it as any use of water which reduces the supply from where it was drawn or diverted . Because the city of Lake Mary is allowed almost two billion gallons of water a year does not mean the city uses two billion gallons of water a year.
Officials of the city of Lake Mary maintain that their water usage is declining. To encourage conservation, Lake Mary water hogs on the high end of the water scale are charged higher rates. Lake Mary city Commissioner Gary Brender, says, “We are aggressively pursuing conservation measures.”
In fact, Bruce Paster, who applied for the original CUP permit, states that the most water the city of Lake Mary ever used was in 2006, when, according to his numbers, usage topped out at one billion 423 million 500 thousand gallon per year or 3.9 million gallons per day or 269 gallons per person per day. In 2010, he maintains that water usage for the city of Lake Mary works out to only 201 gallons per person per day.
Paster’s numbers are still higher than the national and county average by 60-100 gallons per person per day. “A good portion of water use in the city of Lake Mary is not residential,” Paster says. “There are businesses all up and down Rinehart, there’s the Home Depot, the Sterling Center, and small office parks.”
Certainly, businesses lining highways are a familiar sight in any Florida city. There is no evidence to suggest that Lake Mary has an unusual number of businesses per capita. And it is worth noting that 2010 water management district projections do not conform to Paster’s figures and instead calculate much higher projections of water usage for the city of Lake Mary.
However, the numbers involved are only part of the picture. Why was the CUP permit allocating such an exorbitant amount of water ever issued in the first place?
Paster says the permit was submitted based on historical data of economic growth.
St. John’s River Water Management District employee, Mike Mc Govern, who reviewed the Lake Mary CUP compliance report, had this to say, “Lake Mary has developed substantially since 1996.”
But almost two billion gallons of water for 15,000 people?
Vicki DeSormier, listed on a county web site as an associate supervisor of public information for the Seminole Soil and Water Conservation District has a different take. She says that, “It’s because people in power own homes there.”
Steve Barnes, former Seminole Soil and Water Official and current Democratic candidate for House Rep, District 34 says that conservation costs money, and that officials don’t really want to conserve because they rely on the revenue from water. He says, “To build treatment plants costs millions of dollars. In order to finance that, they issue bonds, which have to be repaid. From water bills. Imagine if everyone starts conserving. Water bills go down. They can’t pay bonds. A lot of water officials only pay lip service to conservation, because it’s not in their financial best interest to do so.”
Ruth Hazard, assistant utilities manager for Seminole County Environmental Services Water and Sewer Department says, “There’s a lot of reasons to float these bonds. Still, as a customer, you see rain, and you say, ‘Yay, I don’t have to water my lawn.’ We see rain, and we say, ‘There goes a customer.’ We push conservation, but it does affect our revenues.”
Revenues aren’t going to be enough to buy more water when none is left. Bruce Paster, Director of Public Works for the City of Lake Mary, says, “ SJRWMD makes it so difficult trying to predict what the aquifer can do. There’s so many issues. It’s incredibly complicated.”
What is not an issue is that clean groundwater is clearly a dwindling resource. At this point, Florida is basically nothing but an eroded peninsula prone to sinkholes because of overdevelopment and wanton pumping of groundwater. Pumping more than 600 million gallons a day from the underground Florida Aquifer, risks drying up wetlands, springs and lakes.
Thus, the demand keeps growing, and one of the solutions is to draw from both ends of the water table: the aquifer and the river. To meet the increasing thirst for water, where, until recently, homeowner associations used to require residents to grow the thirsty St. Augustine grass on their one and two acre lots, Seminole County is proposing to pump an average of 5.5 million gallons of water a day from the St. Johns River for irrigation.
They are building a wastewater treatment plant to accomplish their aim. The size and scope of the still-under- construction Yankee Lake Wastewater Treatment plant promises potential increases of pumping up to 50-80 million gallons a day, and a plan to eventually provide potable (drinking) water to Seminole County. Drinking water requires more filtering and treatment than water used for irrigation. The remaining residue could very well find its way back into the St. John’s River.
Pumping water out of the St. John’s River disturbs its delicate ecological balance and can also cause an increase in algae blooms that strangle plant and animal life. It may harm manatees according to Dr. Katie Tripp president of the Save Our Manatees Club. It contaminates the fish with toxic chemicals like dioxin.
The plan for the Yankee Lake plant was fraught with controversy from the start. The city of Lake Mary actually pulled out of the deal. Three organizations disagreed so strongly that they passed resolutions opposing the Yankee Lake plant construction: The Seminole Soil and Water Conservation District, The Lake County Board of Commissioners, and The Friends of the Wekiva River. A local Save the Manatee Club also opposed the permit. The St. John’s Riverkeeper and the city of Jacksonville sued Seminole County, a suit which they lost in a contentious hearing in April of 2009.
Bill Belleville, a noted environmental author, who has written extensively about the St. John’s River, says, “Clearly taking water from the river is not a long-term fix to Florida’s water troubles. Once the economy comes back, Florida continues to bloat with growth. When the river starts to run dry, then what? Go to the ocean?”
NASA is actually working on an experiment called PROJECT OMEGA that involves clean-energy production at sea and the ability to treat wastewater. There is also a desalinization project called The Coquina Coast Project, which comprises a partnership among the cities of Palm Coast, Leesburg, Deland, St. John’s County and the SJRWMD.
However, converting salt water to drinking water is enormously expensive. Desalination plants use 21 times more electricity than conventional water systems and local water bills could rise 25-50%.
If conservation fails, if the river fails, the beautiful city of Lake Mary is going to have to pay for those prodigious CUP permits. They’re going to end up spending money like water.
