Groups push for wave of change

Clean water advocates are going to court over a change in Florida's water quality standards, and the outcome could trickle down to Southwest Florida.

State rules allow for variances to water quality standards, but the change opens that door wider and lowers hurdles that had been set up to limit variances to only certain pollutants.

The state Department of Environmental Protection proposed the change, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency approved it.

"They're trying from every angle to keep the pollution flowing, protect the polluters and monkeying with the law in every possible way to keep from cleaning up the water, which is baffling to me," said Linda Young, director of the Clean Water Network of Florida.

Young said she expects the DEP to apply the weakened rule for variances to water quality standards all over Florida — unless opponents can stop them in court. She said her group hopes to file a lawsuit over the change.

The DEP already has used the change to get a variance to dissolved oxygen standards on the lower section of the St. Johns River in northeast Florida.

Dissolved oxygen can be a result of too many nutrients in a water body, feeding algae blooms. The algae die, sucking oxygen out of the water and leading to fish kills.

Besides dissolved oxygen, other pollutants the change opens up to variances from water quality standards are bacteria, chlorides, dissolved solids, color, and cloudiness.

The change does not specify how to judge whether a variance will protect the water body, saying only that the DEP can use any "generally accepted scientific method or procedure."

DEP spokeswoman Jill Johnson said the change does not weaken state standards, it only recognizes that some water bodies cannot attain the state standard because of natural conditions.

"The department is charged with protecting the resource," she said. "The department isn't going to do anything to allow more (pollution) loading than the resource can handle."

She said the St. Johns River is one example of where a state water quality standard, dissolved oxygen, could not be attained.

"At this point, there aren't any others we're looking at right now," she said.

The trigger that would get the DEP looking at Southwest Florida water bodies is something called the impaired waters list. Waters on the list must be cleaned up, according to the Clean Water Act.

In Southwest Florida, the list of impaired waters repeatedly cites nutrients and dissolved oxygen as problems. The list has been changing since 1998.

That's when the EPA, facing a court order, issued the first list. The DEP challenged that list as unscientific and produced its own pared-down list of impaired waters in 2002.

The rules the DEP used to decide what to put on the list are tied up in litigation. A hearing is set for July in Tallahassee.

In 2003, the EPA approved parts of the DEP's list but rejected DEP efforts to remove some waters from the list. A 2007 deadline is looming for clean-ups plans for waters on the list.

The EPA list includes tributaries to Estero Bay in Lee County, the Tamiami Canal, the north stretch of the Barron River canal, Naples Bay, the Gordon River, the Gordon River canal, the Henderson Creek canal, the Golden Gate canal, the Blackwater River, Lake Trafford, and the Cocohatchee River and canal.

The DEP, however, considers data on Naples Bay, the Golden Gate canal and the Gordon River to be inconclusive. City and state monitors are doing more testing this year.

A spot on the list of impaired waters doesn't necessarily mean the DEP will force polluters to clean it up, Young said. The EPA would have to approve any cleanup plan.

The DEP has tried before to get around the Clean Water Act by watering down requirements for putting waters on the impaired waters list, proposing an inadequate cleanup plan for the St. Johns River and then changing the rules to allow for a variance from dissolved oxygen standards.

"For the DEP, this is a game," Young said.

If Naples Bay doesn't get help from the DEP, the EPA still should require a cleanup plan, she said.

"We're going to sue them if they don't," Young said.

She said there is one caveat to that vow: Young said her group wouldn't go to court without the blessing of local concerned citizens.

A push already is on at City Hall to create a plan for improving water quality in the bay that would be a substitute for any DEP cleanup plan.

Naples Natural Resources Manager Mike Bauer has convened a group of environmental advocates, golf course managers, developers and bay-related businesses to come up with a Basin Management Action Plan, or BMAP. The group's second meeting is set for June 21 at City Hall.

"I don't want to get a variance," Bauer said. "I want to get the water clean. I really think people are interested in improving Naples Bay."

Young said the BMAP should have a goal of meeting water quality standards — not just creating pollution prevention programs that might or might not work.

"The devil is in the details," she said.