Environmental Groups Secure Key Settlement in Protecting Bay Waters

SARASOTA – Suncoast Waterkeeper, Our Children’s Earth Foundation, and the Ecological Rights Foundation are celebrating a third legal victory in the ongoing "Sick of Sewage" campaign. The groups have secured a positive settlement with Sarasota County that will bring the county back into compliance with the federal Clean Water Act, after an ill-suited plan to consolidate its wide-ranging sewage system put over a billion gallons of sewage water into Phillippi Creek and Sarasota Bay.

After a series of horrific sewage spills in 2016, the environmental groups brought suit against the cities of St. Petersburg and Gulfport in an effort to stop serious and ongoing Clean Water Act violations. During the course of the successful two-year litigation against St. Pete and Gulfport, Suncoast Waterkeeper began investigating sewage spills in Sarasota County, which revealed what they called "a shocking pattern of longstanding, systematic infrastructure failures and disregard for public health and water quality in area waters."

During the consolidation, Sarasota County decommissioned two tertiary, or Advanced Wastewater Treatment (AWT), plants to better centralize their operations. However, the remaining plants that they increasingly relied upon employ only secondary treatment, leaving billions of gallons of highly nitrogenated wastewater as a byproduct. At the same time, demand for the reclaimed irrigation water from the county was disappearing, as developers, in managing nitrogen in their stormwater runoff, turned to less polluted options, such as well-water or highly treated reclaimed water from the City of Sarasota.

With nowhere else for the nitrogenated wastewater to go, beginning in 2013, the storage pond at the county’s largest treatment facility at the eastern end of Bee Ridge Road, began periodically overflowing into Phillippi Creek, which flows into Sarasota Bay. To date, spills from the Bee Ridge pond have totaled over a billion gallons since 2013 on at least 394 separate days, adding over 65 tons of nitrogen into Phillippi Creek and the Bay. Meanwhile, the extensive sewage collection system was deteriorating and poorly maintained in a peace-meal fashion, resulting in periodic spills of dangerous raw sewage throughout Sarasota County.

The groups said the county had failed to embrace data suggesting that their own sewage utility was a major contributor to increasing levels of nitrogen in Sarasota Bay and a related decline in seagrasses–important indicators of the overall health of the estuary. The environmental groups' investigation revealed what they called a total breakdown of communications among county staff and decision-makers, despite county staff in the Stormwater Utility department expressing some early concerns.

The groups described planning failures, operational failures, communication failures, and inexcusable failure by consecutive administrations and commissions to provide adequate oversight. They said that the tremendous volume of nitrogen pollution entering Sarasota Bay area waters from the county’s sewage and wastewater systems became Sarasota County’s "dirty secret." The groups said that the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) was aware of the problems for years, but did "next to nothing" in the face of increasing legal violations and environmental harm.

In early 2019, the environmental groups initiated a federal lawsuit under the Clean Water Act with an initial notice, including a summary of the critical problems their investigation exposed. Apparently, Sarasota County Commissioners were not aware of the crisis until receiving the initial notice letter from the groups.

"To their credit, the Sarasota County Commission showed a willingness to immediately work towards a solution and to avoid protracted litigation," the groups said in a release following the settlement. "They have been responsive to the public’s calls for environmental protection and demonstrated a commitment to fixing their broken sewage system and making big investments in environmental infrastructure moving forward."

County staff, Administration, and the county attorney’s office worked collaboratively with the environmental groups towards solutions in a legal settlement crafted to bring the county back into compliance with the federal Clean Water Act. The settlement secures federal Court enforceable commitments for the County to implement immediate and long-term commitments to:

¥ end the spills to Phillippi Creek from the Bee Ridge storage pond;

¥ rehabilitate the aging sewage collection system throughout the County;

¥ upgrade the Bee Ridge Plant to Advanced Wastewater Treatment; and

¥ adopt plans and processes to ensure adequate capacity, management, operations and maintenance of sewage infrastructure moving forward.

The county rapidly began building the additional infrastructure necessary to move water out of the Bee Ridge pond so as to avoid further illegal discharges of nutrient-rich reclaimed water into the environment. As a result, when the Bee Ridge Pond began overflowing this rainy season, the county's work to start moving water before the rainy season arrived helped reduce the volume of water discharged into the environment. While the county has more work ahead of it to solve its problems at Bee Ridge, the groups say it is now moving quickly to take steps in the right direction.

The DEP finally initiated their own administrative enforcement action, which ultimately resulted in a consent order that covered a portion of the violations alleged by the environmental groups. While the groups praised the department as "much improved over Governor Scott’s DEP, which consistently failed to enforce environmental laws," they noted that the DEP’s consent order was far less comprehensive than the settlement between the environmental groups and the County in several ways, for example:

¥ the settlement goes back 5 years, whereas the DEP consent order only goes back to 2018

¥ the settlement includes detailed, thorough corrective action and prospective requirements for the collection system, incorporating best engineering practices and industry standards

¥ the settlement includes greater/higher stipulated penalties for future spills and missed deadlines, penalties go to the Sarasota Bay Estuary Program rather than DEP

¥ the settlement retains federal court oversight and enforcement for six years

¥ the settlement includes requirements for increased public notification for future spills

The provisions for continuing jurisdiction and oversight by the federal court were particularly important to the environmental groups and their citizen members.

"While the county under its current leadership was responsive and thorough, embracing a renewed commitment to improving the health of our waterways and our community's environmental infrastructure, future county commissioners and administrations might not be," said the groups. "By memorializing the settlement agreement in a federal court order, this settlement preserves citizens' rights to hold Sarasota County accountable to their commitments to protect our waterways from sewage pollution. While it will take decades to bring the system up to industry standards and spills will continue in the meantime, the county is on the right track, under federal court order, to do what is necessary."