One billion dollars.
That's how much Tampa Bay Water will spend by 2008 to nearly double the amount of water that the agency delivers to its member communities.The water wholesaler for most of Hillsborough, Pinellas and Pasco counties has determined that's what it will take to satisfy the growing area's thirst for water through 2015. Most of the money will buy a giant reservoir and the two largest desalination facilities in the Western Hemisphere.
It's a big solution that grew out of big problems. But is it just a short-term answer to a long-term problem with, as critics contend, serious environmental risks?
Tampa Bay Water was created in 1998 to end the region's water wars, which had government leaders sniping at one another over water rights. In the meantime, residents near county well fields watched their own wells run dry and their lakefront property suddenly disappear along with their lakes.
Hillsborough, Pinellas and Pasco, together with the cities of Tampa, St. Petersburg and New Port Richey, agreed to form Tampa Bay Water (TBW) as a single regional water wholesaler. TBW would produce water, for which the cities and counties would pay a single wholesale rate. They would retain the right to set their own retail prices and manage demand.
Elected officials from the member communities would make up TBW's board of directors, with approval authority over plans and budgets.
Soon after its creation, TBW signed an agreement with the Southwest Florida Water Management District to address the issue of well field overpumping. It agreed to reduce groundwater pumping from the current 158-million gallons per day (mgd) to 121-mgd by the end of this year and 90-mgd by 2008.
To replace the lost water and keep up with booming area growth, Tampa Bay Water needed to find more water.
Desalination: Boon or Boondoggle?Planners created 19 projects to supply 140-mgd of new water, including an ambitious plan to fill a new 15-billion-gallon reservoir with water from rivers. But one idea for new water came with a lot more sex appeal than the others.
Desalination has long intrigued communities on bays and oceans as a no-brainer source of water. But desalination comes with problems.
The first is cost. Tampa Bay Water lists the price tag of its first plant, which will produce 25-mgd, at more than $100-million. Because desalination requires a lot of electricity, its production cost makes it uneconomical compared to most other sources of water.
Not to worry. By putting its first facility on the eastern shore of Tampa Bay next to Tampa Electric Co.'s Big Bend power plant, TBW can cut production costs in half because of the smaller amounts of energy and materials required to process lower-salinity bay water.
That economy will not be available for the second desalination facility, slated for a site on the Gulf of Mexico near Tarpon Springs. What's more, construction costs will balloon to $315-million, primarily due to a pipeline that will discharge the plant's brine byproduct 12 miles offshore.
The environmental risk of its discharge is the other problem with desalination.
Although TBW officials insist the 20-million gallons per day of brine byproduct from its plant at Big Bend will cause no damage to the marine environment, a discharge pipeline was added to the second facility. According to project engineer Don Lindeman, the reason is the environmental issues surrounding the second site. "We have a lot of data on Tampa Bay," he said, "but not on that location."
Critics of the first plant are unmoved by the mounds of data TBW has assembled to prove the brine discharge will not damage the bay. A south Hillsborough activist group called Save Our Bays, Air and Canals (SOBAC) lost a legal battle last year to stop the construction of the plant.
The group's technical director, B.J. Lower, says the key environmental study used to win approval for the project was flawed. "It states that the Big Bend area of the bay flushes out in eight to 10 days," he said.
Carl Goodwin's research for the U.S. Geological Survey showed Tampa Bay takes an average 110 days to flush, says Lower. University of South Alabama professor Wayne Isphording, who has studied all of the other estuaries on the Gulf of Mexico, hasn't found any that flush in less than 100 days, according to Lower.
Lower says a longer flushing time is significant because it means the plant's brine discharge could build up and raise bay salinity to dangerous levels.
Michael Champ, an international expert on environmental contaminants who advises SOBAC, says he has seen estuaries where the higher salinity is too much for the larval stages of marine species and the standing stock was lost. "Jellyfish became the dominant species in these impaired water bodies," Champ said.
The environmental study's author, University of South Florida marine scientist Mark Luther, defends the eight- to 10-day assumption and maintains his findings reflect more up-to-date computer modeling than what was available for Goodwin's 20-year-old study.
TBW General Manager Jerry Maxwell points to several other environmental impact studies to support Luther's findings. But even the analysis TBW commissioned by the Danish Hydraulic Institute on projected salinity changes from the discharge states that the area around the new plant can take up to 60 days to flush.
What is certain is any dangerous buildup in salinity can't be measured until the plant begins operation early next year.
All parties agree there will be no shortage of monitoring stations and agencies. Federal, state and county agencies all will collect data. The stakes are high. If the facility doesn't perform as predicted, TBW could face fines and a shutdown of the plant.
Tampa Bay Water's Gulf of Mexico plant, meanwhile, faces different hurdles. Though not located on an environmentally sensitive estuary, permitting may be more difficult because the site lacks the extensive history of study of Tampa Bay.
But even TBW's plan to skirt that problem by piping the brine discharge offshore comes with environmental risk. "I'm not so sure it's a good idea to put the discharge on the hard bottom out there," said Maxwell.
Indeed, SOBAC's Lower points to research done in Cyprus that shows because the higher salinity discharge sinks to the bottom, it should be dispersed over a wide area. Building such a dispersal system would further inflate the cost of the Gulf plant.
Technology to the Rescue?Maxwell says TBW is looking for new technologies to be able to deliver water more economically and without harming the environment.
The reverse osmosis (RO) process used in TBW's Big Bend facility has been around for decades. It works by blasting water through screens to separate out salt, producing fresh water and the brine byproduct. Other existing technologies also come with the problem of what to do with the salty discharge.
A next-generation desalination process currently being tested could solve that problem. By the end of 2002, a 3-year-old New Mexico company called AquaSonics International Inc., claims it will have a prototype operating to demonstrate its patented process. Company President Henry Lloyd boasts that the process will revolutionize desalination because it produces only fresh water and salt crystals that can be sold.
"The operating cost of our process is one-tenth of RO," said Lloyd.
The AquaSonics process, called Rapid Spray Evaporation (RSE), involves spraying saltwater through high-pressure nozzles into a heated chamber. The method causes water to evaporate and salt crystals to fall out. The evaporation is then moved into a condensation chamber and the salt gathered up for sale.
Despite the potential of RSE to eliminate the saline discharge into Tampa Bay and the potential to significantly lower operating costs, Maxwell says until the process has been proven, TBW isn't interested. "We couldn't get financing for it anyway," Maxwell said.
As for becoming a test site for the technology, which can be retrofitted on the new RO plant, Maxwell says TBW will do only very limited testing of new technology.
The Economics of WaterWhen member governments agreed to form Tampa Bay Water, they in essence agreed to solve water problems by creating a bigger cup to drink from. They also told TBW not to tell them how much to drink.
It was a signal that they would put more focus on supply than demand. The reason is more politics than economics.
Terry Anderson is executive director of the Center for Free Market Environmentalism, a Montana think tank. He's also an economist who has studied the economics of water, particularly in California.
Government officials want to keep water cheap and avoid raising the price for political reasons, according to Anderson. "With prices kept below the market clearing price, demand always exceeds supply," he said. "This plays into the hands of bureaucracies that want to build more infrastructure. Given that the price of water is constantly kept below the point where demand equals supply, there is always a water crisis to be dealt with by building new and larger projects."
Anderson could be describing the Tampa Bay area. Local politicians seem to feel the pain of agreeing to higher prices is far greater than the pain of $1-billion in water projects financed with long-term bonds.
But would simply raising the price of water be enough to bring supply and demand in line? Local governments have been tinkering with price for 10 years but still don't know how important it is to local consumption habits.
Norm Davis, Hillsborough's conservation coordinator, says the county began a progressive pricing structure in 1992. Heavier users pay a steeper rate. "Per capita water use this year is 105 gallons per day," he said. "That's down from about 120 gpd when the new pricing system started."
Davis says it's impossible to know how much of a factor price played in the 12.5 percent consumption decrease. Like other TBW members, the county has also used cash incentives to encourage low-flow toilets and rain switches on sprinkler systems and issued retrofit kits to limit water flow of showerheads, faucets and hoses.
Price matters to Colette Jaccard, who says her water bill tripled when she moved to Florida from Washington, D.C., five years ago. "I replaced the landscaping with Florida plants and I water them and my roses with recycled water," Jaccard said. "I keep a bucket in the shower and under the air conditioner outlet. I even recycle my dogs' drinking water."
While Jaccard has become an active water conservationist, even posting her water-saving tips on Hillsborough's water department Web site, she says she doesn't think price would make much difference to her neighbors. She may be right.
Jaccard says her water use is as low as 70 gallons per day, 25 gallons below the Hillsborough average, which is typical for the region.
The monthly savings Jaccard chalks up by conserving? It figures out to $2.67.
Despite progressive pricing, water remains cheap even for heavy users. The county charges $75, plus basic fees, for 24,000 gallons, more than seven times the monthly average use per capita. The same amount of water bottled from basically the same source and sold in a store brings in $24,000 on average.
Alternative SourcesPricing is one way to encourage a more distributed solution to water supply problems, as an alternative to ever-larger and environmentally risky water projects.
Other distributed solutions include everything from the cisterns still used in parts of Florida and the Caribbean to gray water systems and even fuel cells, which also offer a distributed solution to energy needs.
The Florida House Learning Center in Sarasota is a model home built from currently available materials and methods deemed to be best suited to the local environment. Much of the home's water comes from two 2,500-gallon cisterns fed by water captured from the roof during rains. "One of the cisterns waters the landscaping and the other goes to the washing machine and toilets," said program Coordinator Betty Alpaugh.
The cisterns were installed by Anthony Fleming, who uses one for his home water supply. "I grew up in the Keys where my family had a cistern for water," Fleming recalled. "When Hurricane Donna came through and city water was out, the whole neighborhood came to our house for water."
Fleming has continued to harvest rainwater for the last 16 years at his current home on Palm Island, a barrier island near Englewood accessible only by boat.
"A 1,000-square foot roof can capture 700 gallons of water for every inch of rain," he said. "In this part of Florida, 9,000 gallons of storage is a three-month supply, enough to get through dry periods."
Fleming says his customers range from his island neighbors to wealthy Floridians who want the security of their own water supply. Fleming says even using captured water only for washing clothes, watering landscaping and flushing toilets can reduce the use of piped-in water by two-thirds.
Gray Water SystemsAs neighborhood groups clamor for hookups to the growing regional infrastructure for reclaimed water, sources of reclaimed water are already available to households from washing machines, baths, sinks and showers.
Gray water systems work by feeding water from these sources to a holding tank linked to an irrigation system. The Florida House, for example, recycles water from the washing machine to its banana trees.
Some governments offer economic incentives both for developers and homeowners to install cisterns and gray water systems. Austin, Texas, offers up to a $500 rebate for installing rainwater harvesting equipment, and last year Texas began waiving the state sales tax for the equipment.
Hays County, in the booming corridor between Austin and San Antonio, offers a $100 developer fee reduction, a value tax exemption and discounted financing.
"We're the fourth-fastest-growing county in Texas," said Bill Burnett, a Hays County commissioner. "Our aquifers are fragile and we keep putting more straws in them." As for acceptance, Burnett says more people use cisterns in his county than any other in Texas. "The commission just approved a new development that will use only rainwater harvesting for the water supply," he said.
In San Diego County, the city of Chula Vista offers a $500 sewer credit for homeowners to install gray water irrigation systems. Other governments legislate compliance.
"In the Virgin Islands, cisterns are required by the building code," said Henry Smith, director of the U.S. territory's Water Resources Research Institute. "Every square foot of house requires 10 gallons of cistern capacity. Two-story houses require 15 gallons per square foot."
Fleming says he is eyeing another source of fresh water soon to be mass marketed: fuel cells. "I'm planning to install one, hopefully next year," he said. While fuel cells are designed to generate electricity, some of them, like the fuel cells used in NASA's space shuttles, are set up to provide potable water as well, although the water created by a residential-size fuel cell would be only a few gallons a day.
Needed: A New PathTampa Bay Water and its member governments have jawboned and induced some of their water users into adopting the first wave of water-conserving tools and methods.
For example, Pinellas County's incentives led customers to install 93,000 low-flow toilets in the last five years. Together with pricing incentives, per capita water use in the region has fallen.
But inside water use in the region remains at pre-conservation levels, based on a 1999 American Water Works Association study, which estimates more widespread conservation would cut water demand by an additional third.
On the current path, TBW and its member communities will continue to struggle to maintain plentiful water even after this billion-dollar round of infrastructure is in place. It's possible some new technology like RSE desalination will radically change the future.
Michael Champ raises another possibility. He says desalination may extend the life of old, polluting power plants like the one at Big Bend. "It's an old plant, and in the future the permit to make drinking water may be more profitable than electricity," he said. "Every power plant in the region will want to add making drinking water from its cooling water as a new revenue source."
At current levels, that would add to Tampa Bay an additional brine discharge of well over 100-million gallons per day.
The short-term nature of Tampa Bay Water's plan will require a new round of costly projects with new environmental risks within a decade. But the plan does buy some time for the region to develop a long-term solution to water needs. Imaginative local leadership and increased individual responsibility for water resources and the environment can move the region to a more decentralized water supply system. That path will provide more water and further restore local treasures like Tampa Bay.
John Petrimoulx, an independent writer in Hillsborough County, can be contacted at jpetrimo@tampabay.rr.com.
This article appears in Aug 14-20, 2002.