Ed Collins, a former Pasco County commissioner, remembers the stunt fondly. The St. Petersburg Times called it "the social event of the water-war season."
On a sunny afternoon in June 1996, two dozen public officials turned out to watch Collins and then-Hillsborough County commissioner Ed Turanchik stand in a canoe in the meadow that used to be Big Fish Lake, a lake named because, according to local lore, the biggest bass in Pasco County history had been hooked there.
There was no water in Big Fish Lake that day. There hadn't been for quite some time. Weeds sprouted from the cracked earth.
"The plan," Turanchik announced to the crowd, "is to cast for bass, and if that doesn't work, we'll dig for trout."
It was a shameless media event, staged to demonstrate the desperateness of damaged wetlands in Pasco County. And it worked.
"We knew what we were doing was a bit of a joke but we thought that it was necessary to draw attention to the situation," Collins says.
Water-starved Pinellas County for years has pumped water from water-rich Pasco County.
"For the longest time, Pinellas County … wouldn't admit that they were destroying the environment and drying up lakes by pumping their drinking water out of Pasco County," Collins says. "They blamed [the dried-up wetlands] on a lack of rainfall. We just wanted to show them what was going on, so we went out in the lake that was empty and we said, 'Explain this away.'"
Today, there is no fighting over whether the depredations caused by water pumping are real. Eventually, local representatives agreed that groundwater pumping was destroying the Southwest Florida wetlands. The officials, with routine posturing over which agency was most blameworthy, concurred the problem must be fixed.
The governments formed a local water utility, Tampa Bay Water, to distribute water to member counties and cities. Then they came up with a plan to find alternative sources of water, which included improvements to surface water collection methods, plus construction of a 15-billion-gallon reservoir and a seawater desalination plant.
As a result of the improvements in water collection, the Tampa Bay area has reduced its groundwater pumping dramatically and surface water levels are at an all-time high. Lakes have been restored and rivers roar.
But one aspect of the plan didn't work. The seawater desalination plant remains idle. Years late and millions of dollars over budget, the plant is still under construction.
"When you deal with a lot of mechanical things and filters, things can go wrong and, evidently, things did go wrong," says Charlie Miranda, chairman of Tampa City Council from 1998-2002. "Water will be a little more expensive, but when you deal in massive contracts and engineering, sometimes all of the pieces don't fall together."
The Apollo Beach desalination plant was billed as a drought-proof water source in an area prone to drought. If it worked, it would have provided one-sixth of the water that Tampa Bay Water ratepayers consume. Instead, the plant has become a shining example of just how wasteful local government can be. In short:
* The plant has failed crucial performance tests.
* The plant was scheduled for a 2003 completion. That date has been pushed back to October 2006.
* The plant was budgeted at $110 million. It will end up costing at least $163 million.
* The project delays and cost overruns could have been avoided.
Local officials are predicting that the Apollo Beach desalination plant will be completed in late 2006, three years after its scheduled debut. And, because of a controversial decision to abandon a public-private sector agreement, it is the ratepayers who are paying the price.
Desalination, or desal, is the process of removing salt from seawater. The Apollo Beach desalination plant uses a system of reverse osmosis, where seawater is forced through a filter that separates the saline water into fresh water and water containing the concentrated salts, or brine.Desalting has been around for centuries, at least on a small scale. The process dates back to the 4th century B.C., when Greek sailors used an evaporative process to desalinate seawater. As of Dec. 31, 2003 there were 10,350 desalination plants in the world. Most of the 422 desalination plants in the U.S. clean brackish groundwater for domestic use or produce highly purified water for industrial use.
Israel is currently building what will be the world's largest desalination plant, capable of producing 50 million gallons of potable water a day. The Apollo Beach desalination plant was designed to be North America's largest plant, producing 25 million gallons of fresh water every day.
John Parker, the water use regulation manager for the Southwest Florida Water Management District, says that desalination is necessary in southwest Florida because of high demand.
"We use a lot of water," Parker says. "We use a lot for outdoor irrigation – lawns and landscapes and golf courses. Limiting the demands for outdoor irrigation is the best opportunity to scale down water usage."
However, a 2003 public opinion survey conducted by Tampa Bay Water showed that while most respondents (87 percent) believe other residents can and should do more to conserve water, they also believe (91 percent) that they, individually, are doing all that they can to limit their water use.
Jerry Maxwell, the general manager for Tampa Bay Water, says that ratepayers are already conserving water as best they can.
"Typically, the way that you deal with a lack of water during a drought is you impose a restraint," Maxwell says. "No washing your cars or watering your lawn. We've been able to, through a whole series of conservation measures, like front-loading washing machines and special toilets, reduce per capita water use to less than 110 gallons [per day] and in some instances lower than 100 gallons, which is very low.
"So then during a drought you can't go after people and say, save more water, because they're already saving what they can save."
When plans for the Apollo Beach desal plant were announced in 1998, the project was presented as part of a unique business partnership between the private and public sectors.The public sector was Tampa Bay Water, which serves more than 2 million people. It is the largest wholesale water supplier in the southeastern United States. Tampa Bay Water is obligated to meet the water supply needs of member counties Pinellas, Pasco and Hillsborough; and cities Tampa, St. Petersburg and New Port Richey. No matter how long St. Petersburg residents shower, no matter how often Pasco County folks water their lawns, Tampa Bay Water has to make sure there is enough clean water.
In what is called a DBOOT agreement (Design, Build, Own, Operate, Transfer), Tampa Bay Water contracted a private company to build the desalination plant. That company, Poseidon Resources, and its partner, construction firm Stone & Webster, planned to own and operate the plant for 30 years, selling water to Tampa Bay Water, which would in turn sell the water to its member counties and cities. The governments were responsible for distributing the water to their ratepayers. At the end of 30 years, the company agreed to hand the plant over to Tampa Bay Water.
The DBOOT agreement supposedly eliminated any risk to the public. The private company was contractually obligated to deliver a specific amount of water to Tampa Bay Water, starting on a specific date at a specific price. All Tampa Bay Water had to do was buy the water and sell it to the counties and cities.
The project sputtered out of the gate. Stone & Webster filed for bankruptcy in 2000. To replace that company, Poseidon hired Covanta Energy – but Covanta, in turn, filed for bankruptcy in March 2002.
Later that month, Tampa Bay Water executives complained that Poseidon was unable to secure affordable financing to continue work on the plant. That set the stage for a questionable and acrimonious end to the public-private partnership.
In order to keep the plant on schedule and on budget, Tampa Bay Water bought the plant from Poseidon. Tampa Bay Water general manager Maxwell told the utility's board that they would save $1 million a year in financing costs by taking control of the project.
Chris Hart was a member of the Tampa Bay Water board at the time.
"They wanted us to buy Poseidon out, and it was like, 'Whoa!'" Hart says. "They said we had to do it quickly or else we would miss this window to save millions of dollars. The whole board, you could sense that it was like, 'What options do we have?'"
By purchasing the plant from Poseidon, Tampa Bay Water inherited all of the contracts, responsibility and risk associated with the construction of the plant. That meant that all of the costs of building and operating the plant would be borne by the area ratepayers.
Ronda Storms, a Hillsborough County commissioner and member of the Tampa Bay Water board, said she fought the purchase of the plant from Poseidon and still disagrees with the decision to abandon the private-public partnership.
"I think DBOOT is a good idea," Storms says. "I think the way it was presented to people was that buying the plant was the only alternative. They told us we were short on time. They came flying in like the old Pony Express and they had these documents and they said, 'Come on, come on, come on, you have got to sign these things and hurry.'"
Tampa Bay Water purchased the desalination plant from Poseidon for $11 million and retained Covanta Construction, a spinoff of Covanta Energy. Then Covanta Construction – can you guess? – went bankrupt in 2003.
Harry Teasley is a former chairman of the libertarian Reason Foundation who helped scuttle another risky-to-the-public venture, a convention center hotel proposed by former Mayor Sandy Freedman. He has been an opponent of the desalination plant since the day it was proposed, but he became vocal on the day that Tampa Bay Water bought the plant.
"The great thing about the agreement when it was first drawn up was that all the risk was borne by the private sector," said Teasley, a former executive at Coca-Cola who now lives in Tampa. He sees the problems with the desalination plant as stemming from a lack of proper leadership.
"Most savvy, experienced and successful executives understand that managing risk is at the core of decision-making," Teasley said. "When management recommended that Tampa Bay Water buy the unproven plant from the developer, as a way to control interest and financing costs, they were penny-wise and pound-foolish.
"In the end, management has neither been able to control costs nor risks."
At first, Tampa Bay Water officials predicted that, with the new desal plant, they could produce water at a cost of $1.71 per thousand gallons. At that price Tampa Bay's desal water would have been the cheapest desalted water in the world. To many, it seemed too good to be true.It was.
Tampa Bay Water's bureaucrats made a costly assumption when the agency purchased the plant from Poseidon Resources in 2002.
They assumed the plant would work.
The Apollo Beach desalination plant produced its first gallons of drinkable water in March 2003. But two months later, the plant failed a crucial performance test and was shut down after plant operators discovered that the cartridge filters that cleaned the water were clogging much too fast. Since the membranes were projected to last five to seven years, replacing them more often would drive up the cost of operations. The plant has been idle since February 2004, except for producing water one week each month to maintain the machinery.
The Apollo Beach desal plant is built next to the Tampa Electric Big Bend coal burning plant. The desalination plant gets its water from the electric plant, which uses billions of gallons a day to cool its generators.
Before the Big Bend plant imports water from the bay, it first filters the water to remove biological debris, such as crabs, fish and seaweed, and manmade debris, such as soda cans.
"The issue is that the designers of the desal plant – Poseidon – said that TECO's screening was adequate and it isn't," said Neil Calahan, head of consulting firm R.W. Beck. "TECO wasn't screening the water sufficiently for the process employed at the desal plant."
Calahan added that it is not TECO's responsibility to screen the water before it is sent to the Apollo Beach plant.
A Jan. 19, 2004 letter from Covanta Tampa Construction Sr. Vice President Scott Whitney to Maxwell complained that changes at the TECO plant were interfering with operations at the Apollo Beach facility. Whitney cited two problems. First, he said TECO had changed the way it cleaned its screens and that those changes were causing problems.
"Apparently, when the debris filters become clogged, they are automatically backwashed and the mussels/shells/debris are reintroduced into the circulating water immediately … upstream of our intake pumps that supply water to the Facility," Whitney wrote.
Second, Whitney said, "there exists at least one softball-sized hole in the TECO coarse mesh screens." That hole let even more debris through. All this extra debris, according to the letter, is what was causing the Apollo Beach filters to falter.
Tim Cornelison is the owner of Water Services Inc., a company that specializes in the DualSand filtration technology used at the Apollo beach plant. He went to Tampa to serve as a consultant after the plant failed its first performance test.
"There was a whole laundry list of items that went wrong with the filters," Cornelison says. "Some of it had to do with the equipment. For one, the sand size in the filters was too small. And some of it had to do with the way the equipment was set up and operated."
Commissioner Storms comments that Tampa Bay Water knew that Big Bend was dumping debris in front of the desalination intake pipe and neglected to alert Covanta Construction.
"I think Tampa Bay Water knew the way the intake changed and they just disregarded it," Storms says. "They just decided not to tell Covanta. Big Bend did everything that they were legally required to do in terms of notifying Tampa Bay Water. Tampa Bay Water didn't act on it."
Tampa Bay Water officials deny knowing that Big Bend had begun dumping debris in front of the Apollo Beach intake pipe. Those same officials also deny that they had any responsibility to inform Convanta of any changes in procedure at the Big Bend plant.
Dr. Donald Polmann, director of science and engineering for Tampa Bay Water, says that regardless of changes at Big Bend, the Apollo Beach filtration system did not work the way it needed to.
"[Big Bend] changing the way that they clean their screens should not have caused the filters to fail," Polmann says. "Pretreatment components should be able to deal with changes because lots of changes occur all the time."
Tampa Bay Water could not afford to continually replace the membranes, which cost approximately $5 million a piece. The company estimated that it would have added $75 million to the cost of the project over a 30-year period had steps not been taken to improve the filtration system.
In November Tampa Bay Water signed a $29 million contract with American Water/Pridesa, which has been hired to fix the plant's filtration system. American Water/Pridesa has guaranteed that the plant will work by late 2006. Tampa Bay Water is also spending $6 million to replace the membranes that were worn out during the plant's brief run.
In early February the plant began producing about eight million gallons of water a day so that new managers American Water/Pridessa could uncover other equipment problems before repairs begin. They will be producing desalted water at Apollo Beach through the spring, after which time the plant will be shut down again until repairs are completed.
Do the math. The proposed $110 million privately owned and operated plant just became a $145 million publicly owned plant. That's the cost, not the value. And don't forget the $11 million Tampa Bay Water paid Poseidon Resources when it bought the plant, or the $5 million it paid Covanta Energy to go away. Now it's a $161 million plant. That price doesn't include the $2 million to $2.5 million per year that it will cost to operate the plant or any of the money that Tampa Bay Water has paid to private consultants. The ratepayers paid for all of this.And that's not all. There's also the Swiftmud factor.
Swiftmud, aka the Southwest Florida Water Management District, gave $85 million to Tampa Bay Water to pay down the cost of water – seemingly a prime example of how two government agencies can work together toward a common goal. Swiftmud endeavors to maintain local water supplies, so ensuring the success of the desalination plant is in its best interest. The $85 million is meant to encourage Tampa Bay Water to develop alternative sources of water.
But, here's the rub to Floridians: The water management district gets its funding from state property taxes, so those people living in southwest Florida who pay property taxes and water bills are paying for water twice.
In 1998, the year the desal plant was approved, the average household spent $7.64 on water each month. Today, the same household spends almost $10 more.
Tampa Bay Water science chief Polmann estimates that after the Apollo Beach desal facility is online, Tampa Bay Water ratepayers will end up paying $2.54 for every thousand gallons of water that they use. That's $20.64 a month for the average household.
Water rates for Tampa Bay Water ratepayers have risen every year since construction began on the plant. Last year, water rates climbed five percent from 2003. In 2003, water rates rose 15.25 percent. In 2002 they rose 14.5 percent.
Yet there's at least one expert who says Tampa water users are getting a bargain.
"When they first announced the [desal] price in Florida I thought it was almost shockingly low," says Frank Leitz, a chemical engineer with the Water Treatment, Engineering and Research Group in Denver. "Well, $2.54 [per thousand gallons] is not really an unattractive price for a water source where you're not really infringing on anybody else's supply."
Leitz says that there are several seawater desalination plants worldwide that are producing water through a reverse osmosis filtration system. Cyprus has a plant that was also built under a DBOOT agreement and sells its water at a price of $3.10 per thousand gallons. Trinidad's plant was finished in 2000 and sells its water for $2.80 per thousand gallons. Israel's plant is still under construction, and it is projecting water will cost $2 per thousand gallons.
"How one compares the cost of water at different plants is sometimes tricky," Leitz says, "The cost may or may not include certain items. For example, in Saudi Arabia, the plant cost always included the cost of a facility in which the workers at the plant would live. Now, in the United States we would never consider that part of the cost of a plant."
But how do Tampa Bay Water ratepayers feel about the increases? According to a 2003 survey conducted by Tampa Bay Water, they're fine with it. In fact, less than half (45 percent) of those surveyed were even aware that the cost of water had gone up, and only 22 percent of those surveyed listed rate increases as a concern. The survey questioned 1,200 people, 24 percent of whom made $75, 000 a year or more; 41 percent made between $35,000-$75,000; and 35 percent made less than $35,000. One-third of those surveyed never pay their own water bill.
Despite ratepayers' seeming nonchalance, some people (31 percent) said that there was a limit to what they would pay for a more environmentally friendly water supply, indicating that Tampa Bay Water should not investigate new sources of water if it will cost the average household $7 or more a month.
Commissioner Storms says that there are lots of people in her district and in neighboring counties who are struggling to pay their bills and can't afford more rate increases. The cost of water, according to Storms, has been driven up by a tremendous amount of waste on the part of Tampa Bay Water. She says that the company has thrown money at unnecessary consultants and public relations firms, among others.
"You ask people if they are prepared to pay a little bit more for their water and they say 'yes,' but if they knew the huge amount of waste, they'd say no," Storms says. "And if you talk to the poor and the work-a-day people, they absolutely don't want to pay more."
Storms suggests that the water utility submit its books to an independent audit.
Tampa Bay Water board member Anne Hildebrand says the public was told from the beginning that diversifying water sources would not be cheap. She said that the demand for a secure water supply has been louder than the demand for lower water rates.
"I think the public understands that there is a price for preserving the environment," Hildebrand says. "First of all, historically since we've been doing all these new water sources, we have not had a hue and cry of opposition, at least not to date. Obviously if you ask people do you want to pay more, they're going to say, 'Good grief, no.' But, overall, the public has been supportive, as has the media."
Barring an independent audit, it could be years before anyone knows the final cost of the Apollo Beach desalination plant. That cost could further be impacted by lawsuits. Tampa Bay Water has sued the membrane manufacturer, two engineering companies and the companies holding a performance bond on the project. The membrane manufacturer has sued Tampa Bay Water.
Storms believes that the desalination plant will end up costing ratepayers even more than what Tampa Bay Water has suggested.
"That $29 million that Tampa Bay Water just paid [to American Water/ Pridesa to fix the plant's filtration system] is not going to stay $29 million, I guarantee you," Storms says. "I know that that's true. After all that's happened, I don't know why we should believe Tampa Bay Water when they tell us how much it's going to cost."
This article appears in Feb 23 – Mar 1, 2005.