Florida island city looks to its neighbors for help with water and sewer

Cedar Key is one of the prettiest and most historic island communities on Florida’s Gulf coast. I always recommend people pay a visit. If you go, though, you may want to bring your own water, because they’re running out.

Cedar Key is having problems with its sewer plant, too. Turns out it’s close to conking out completely. So you may also want to carry your own Port-a-Potty.

The folks in Cedar Key are looking to the nearby communities of Bronson and Otter Creek for help — much to the dismay of some of those residents. They’re worried about these outsiders draining their water supply.

“If our wells run dry, we have no recourse,” said Robbie Blake,79. a longtime Bronson resident who was the first person to tell me about this situation. “This has got to be stopped.”

The pitch for the three communities to work together comes from an organization called the Waccasassa Water and Wastewater Cooperative, a wholesale water and sewer coop called “W3C” for short.

To make this work, W3C needs money from the state. One estimate I saw called for W3C to ask for $138 million from the taxpayers to build all of the pipelines and other facilities.

I’m telling you this story because Cedar Key’s water woes are similar to what lots of other Florida communities are grappling with right now.

The days when you could easily and cheaply pump millions of gallons of water a day out of Florida’s abundant underground aquifer are over. Our uncontrolled growth has put our water supply under a serious strain.

If you don’t believe me, just ask Florida Taxwatch, a hard-nosed, money-focused bunch that no one would ever confuse with Captain Planet and the Planeteers. Last year the organization warned that the state is headed for a major water shortage sometime soon — very soon.

“Florida may experience a water supply shortage by 2025,” Taxwatch reported last year, “with the situation worsening through 2040.”

So think of this Cedar Key situation as a warning about what’s going to happen all over Florida — or already has begun happening — unless we get our growth under control and start taking our water supply situation seriously.

The reign of terror

Cedar Key got its name from its magnificent cedar trees. Of course, lumberjacks cut down thousands of them and shipped them to factories to be turned into pencils. The pencil industry erased most of the island’s cedar forests.

One of the pencil factory workers was future Sierra Club founder John Muir. He had made a 1,000-mile walk to the Gulf and intended to travel on to Cuba. A mosquito bite sidelined him with malaria, forcing him to stick around Cedar Key.

During his long recovery, Muir first came up with the notion that nature — even mosquitoes! — was valuable for its own sake, not for its importance to humans. This was a revolutionary idea, one that a lot of Florida politicians still don’t believe.

My favorite Cedar Key story involves the time in 1890 when the mayor set himself up as an island dictator with a thug for his town marshal. A woman wrote to President Benjamin Harrison to warn him about what she called the mayor’s “reign of terror.”

About that time, the mayor attacked the federal customs inspector, prompting Harrison to dispatch the U.S. Navy to invade Cedar Key and arrest the mayor.

The mayor fled the squad of swabbies sent to capture him but ultimately died in a shootout with an Alabama police chief. Why Cedar Key doesn’t reenact the Navy invasion every year like Tampa’s Gasparilla Parade, I do not know. I think it would be a big hit.

But here’s the most important story about Cedar Key: The town is not where it used to be.

Originally, Cedar Key was built on an island named Atsena Otie. Then a major hurricane swept across the area and wiped out virtually everything. The survivors moved what was left of the town to a different island, Way Key. 

The island-hopping that happened with Cedar Key was an early version of a policy called “managed retreat.” We need to start turning toward that option a lot more often here in Florida.

Now there’s a different kind of disaster facing the 2,000 or so residents of the island.

Playing Good Samaritan

The first person I contacted after I heard from Blake was Cedar Key’s most prominent citizen, a playwright-slash-novelist-slash-clam farmer named Michael Presley Bobbit.

Bobbitt, who calls himself Cedar Key’s “Clambassador,” told me he supports the pipeline idea, explaining: “It will be Levy County folks drinking Levy County water at least.” For more substantive questions, he referred me to former Mayor Sue Colson, who serves on the water co-op board.

“She is kind of an irascible lady and super blunt, but she loves Cedar Key and works tirelessly for it,” he told me.

I wish there were more public officials in Florida like Colson, who tells you exactly what’s on her mind, sometimes with the help of a four-letter word or two. She didn’t duck any of my questions, even the ones that clearly annoyed her.

Cedar Key’s water plant, which sits on the mainland a couple of miles from the island, “is very decrepit,” she told me. Recent hurricanes battered the plant so badly that it wound up with 4 feet of flooding inside, she said.

The plant’s operation depends on such an old and complicated set of contraptions that, she said, “iIt looks like Willie Wonka’s Chocolate Factory.” 

Even worse is the sewer plant, she said. It sits right in the middle of Cedar Key, which means it’s even more vulnerable to flooding. One big spill would ruin the clam beds growing there, she said.

Bobbitt, the Clambassador, told me he’s far more concerned about Cedar Key’s decrepit sewer plant than its water supply.

“I think we probably have to start making provisions for moving the human waste to a less fragile ecosystem,” he told me. “A catastrophic failure of our aging wastewater system would be an environmental calamity for the estuary.”

Meanwhile, in Bronson — which is both the county seat and the last resting place of rock’n’roll pioneer Bo Diddley — “the water is perfect, but their sewer plant is awful,” Colson said.

And in the tiny town of Otter Creek, “their water plant is in worse shape than ours and they don’t have a sewer plant, so everyone’s on septic tanks.” Old septic tanks, she pointed out, are prone to leaking their stinky pollutants into the water supply.

To Colson, hooking all three communities together into one water and sewer system makes perfect sense. This way, they all help each other.

Three years ago, the Suwannee River Water Management District commissioned a $180,000 study by a company called Wetland Solutions. It reported that piping water from Bronson to Cedar Key and Otter Creek and sewage from Cedar Key and Otter Creek to a revamped Bronson sewer plant would be the cheapest possible option.

But no one knows yet how such sharing will affect water customers in Bronson who are worried about Cedar Key and Otter Creek sucking their wells dry.

Drilling of a test well is supposed to start sometime this month. If it finds that Bronson’s wellfield cannot safely provide water for the other towns, nobody in a position of authority has picked a backup plan yet.

“The unwritten subtext in all of this,” a local freelance reporter wrote in May, “is that Bronson is essentially being asked to play the role of Good Samaritan by offering its clean underground water supply and some of its property to its sister cities.”

Nothing but swamp

Advocates for the co-op’s pipeline plan delivered a presentation about it to the Levy County Commission and to the Bronson Town Council this week. There was no vote, it was just an update on progress, but some of the politicians hadn’t heard anything about it before and seemed surprised.

Then Colson listened — I picture her with steam coming out of her ears — while several Bronson residents picked the idea apart.

One question Blake has been asking is why Cedar Key can’t get its water from the Gulf and use reverse osmosis to remove the salt. There are 140 such desalination plants scattered around Florida, she pointed out.

The biggest one was built in the early 2000s by Tampa Bay’s wholesale water supplier, Tampa Bay Water. It’s North America’s largest desalination plant. As of last month, that plant was providing more than 9 million gallons of water a day. In April the utility voted to spend $181 million to expand the plant to keep up with the area’s growth.

The problem with desal, Colson said, is that it costs more to build and operate than simply pumping water out of the ground.

On the other hand, desal carries less risk of draining Bronson’s wellfield to supply people in Cedar Key. Blake pointed out that the area is already prone to sinkholes. Sucking its aquifer dry would likely cause even more.

During this week’s government updates, the company that W3C hired last year, Dewberry Engineering, made a presentation that, Blake said, included some comments she found alarming. They concerned expanding the rebuilt system to include new homes and businesses.

“They’re hoping to open this place up to major development,” Blake said, sounding outraged.

New development would cause some serious environmental damage, because from Otter Creek to Bronson “it’s nothing but swamp,” she said. “It’s insane.”

How dry we are

Discussions like this one are going on all over the state right now. You wouldn’t believe that a state that’s surrounded on three sides by water could be singing, “How Dry I Am,” but here we are.

In fast-growing Cape Coral, for instance, people’s water wells keep drying up, year after year, as more residents sink wells for their own drinking water. The response has been to spend thousands of dollars to sink the older wells even deeper, chasing after a dwindling natural supply.

In Palm Beach County, there are condominiums where you can’t coax a glass of water out of the faucet at certain times of day. Officials there have blamed the shortage on “simultaneous landscaping irrigation across multiple condos.”  In other words, the plants are so thirsty they’re making the humans suffer.

Last year Dundee, a town of about 6,000 in Central Florida, ran out of water to accommodate new development. City officials imposed a one-year building moratorium on new residential construction. The moratorium stymied the progress of about 20 proposed developments which, if built, would add more than 5,000 housing units to the town, doubling its water usage.

Dundee is in Polk County, which has handed out so many water permits to accommodate new development that it’s now hit the limit for drawing fresh water out of the ground.

To cope with this, Polk is trying a $600 million experiment: drill into the brackish lower level of the Floridan Aquifer. But to make the water from that level of the aquifer drinkable will require lots more treatment. That means the water will be much more expensive – by some accounts, 12 times more than existing rates.

A business group, the Florida Council of 100, saw this water shortage problem coming more than 20 years ago. Rather than recommend better conservation of our natural resources, it came up with a slick new way to further exploit them.

The council proposed creating a statewide board that would control who got water and how much. Their goal: Suck up billions of gallons of water in North Florida’s magnificent springs and pipe it to the thirsty developers down in South Florida so they could keep building.

A couple of smart-alecky reporters (I was one of them) blew the whistle on this secret plan. Subsequent public hearings on the Council of 100 proposal turned, shall we say, “contentious.”

One drew about 1,000 very angry people. Some were wearing T-shirts declaring, “Our Water is Not for Sale,” and toting signs that proclaimed, “Not one damn drop!”

That noisy public hearing happened in Levy County. So it seems kind of ironic to hear people in Levy County now fussing and feuding about piping water all over the place.

Whatever they decide to do about this, though, one thing’s for sure — Cedar Key will once again be making history.

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