Sticks of Fire: a Tampa blog

The last time Tampa Bay Water suggested dumping treated sewer water into the Hillsborough River, the answer from the public, the reviewing agencies, and the City of Tampa was a big, booming NO. Of course they don’t call it “dumping treated sewer water into the river,” they call it “downstream augmentation with reclaimed water.”

Despite the public opposition, the idea is being discussed again as part of a contract with the City of Tampa. Tampa Bay Water wants to withdraw more clean water from our rivers—upstream—to supply future growth and development, and then replace that clean water (“downstream augmentation”) with treated sewer water (“reclaimed water”).

Scientists have raised red flags over the proposal to supplement downstream flows with highly treated, nutrient-rich wastewater currently discharged into Hillsborough Bay from the City of Tampa’s Howard Curren Wastewater Treatment Plant.

While overall nutrient loadings to Tampa Bay would remain unchanged, downstream augmentation would increase nutrient loadings in the lower Hillsborough River, proliferating the growth of algae and stressing marine life in summer months when temperatures rise and the water is stagnant.

Treated wastewater is damaging to Tampa Bay, but not nearly as damaging as it would be to our rivers where the pollutants would be concentrated in a much smaller quantity of water.

Another problem with trading wastewater for freshwater in the Hillsborough River is that it seems to require lowering the standard for dissolved oxygen in the river, since treated wastewater has less oxygen than the water it would be replacing. This would be a problem for the river’s fish and aquatic plants, which need oxygen to, um, live. Not coincidentally, they need the oxygen to remain at the standard that is already set for the river, as this standard is based on their requirements.

There are much better ways we can use reclaimed water instead of polluting our rivers with it. Reclaimed water should be used for agriculture, landscape irrigation, and industrial uses; which would reduce the use of potable water for these purposes.

On Monday, Tampa Bay Water will discuss developing a contract (technically a “Memorandum of Understanding”) with the City of Tampa, that would include the use of Tampa’s reclaimed water for downstream augmentation. (See the agenda item.)

Downstream augmentation of both the Hillsborough River and the Alafia River remain on TBW’s Shortlist of water supply projects. This Shortlist is still in the planning stage, which is a good time for you to provide your comments. Tell them which projects you like, as well as dislike.

That comment form is a good place to start providing input, but I suggest you also tell TBW’s board what you think—especially about dumping treated wastewater into the Hillsborough and Alafia rivers. Contact Tampa City Council member, Charlie Miranda, and County Commissioners Mark Sharpe and Al Higginbotham. (See my letter.)

Tomorrow Matters! is working hard to get thousands of people to participate in the public phase of One Bay’s regional visioning project (“VoiceIt”), which will be kicked off at 5 locations simultaneously on June 2, then continued at smaller meetings and in an online survey throughout the next 6 weeks.

Because I’ve been working with the Tomorrow Matters! (TM!) committee hosting the event, I was allowed to attend a private preview of the four scenarios.  I was disappointed to see that the survey form (against all my fabulous, free advice!) was basically just a series of multiple-choice questions asking participants to simply vote for one of the 4 scenarios. I complained about this to everyone I could corner, and I’ve suggested some questions that would encourage participants not just to rubber-stamp one scenario or another, but to provide meaningful input that can be used to shape the final vision. Dena Leavengood (TM! leader) is also suggesting better questions.

As I briefly explained in a previous post, the scenarios have been developed by the One Bay Tech Team which includes a lot of very well-intentioned expert planners, but also includes an awful lot of developers, and NO community activists, environmentalists, bicycle advocates, nor just plain folks. The Tech Team includes no environmental protection agencies besides water-based agencies — did they account for all the upland habitat and other green space besides the wetlands in the scenarios?

Let’s keep that process in mind as we review these 4 scenarios:

• Scenario A: Business as usual — a depiction of what Tampa Bay will look like if development is allowed to continue the way it has been going.
• Scenario B: A compilation of where the Reality Check invitees put their Legos during that 90-minute exercise.
• Scenario C: Combines the Reality Check results with an emphasis on compacting growth around transit corridors and walkable communities.
• Scenario D: Combines the Reality Check results with an increased focus on protecting water resources and wildlife habitat.

Note that Scenarios B, C, & D incorporate the Reality Check results as their starting point. Is that why Scenario D looks so sprawly? Are we expected to believe that protecting our natural resources (D) leads inevitably to more sprawl than transit-oriented development (C)? Why should we have to choose between Scenario C’s goal of promoting transit and Scenario D’s goal of protecting natural resources? Good planning should be able to accomplish both of these goals—and then some.

If we weren’t tied to the Reality Check “data” (a skewed sampling of opinions gathered under contrived conditions), could we come up with a future scenario that accomplishes more of what we want the future to look like?  What if we started with professional planners and without special interests?

But whether One Bay offers you a thought-provoking survey form or not, it’s up to you to think outside the four corners of their scenarios and—no matter what questions are asked—tell them what you want to say. Write your ideas on their form in the margins if you have to, or hand in a piece of paper with your thoughts. Pretend every multiple choice question has a write-in blank for “other.”

If none of the 4 scenarios matches your vision, don’t just choose the closest one. Describe your ideal future scenario. Combine parts of the 4 scenarios, or take one scenario and change it, or just explain what’s important to you. Tell them what you like and dislike about all the scenarios. Point out any important elements that are not addressed by the scenarios. You might also step back and comment on the process and suggest ways we might come up with a better vision.

Finally, don’t hesitate to question the underlying assumptions, including the growth projections. Note this point in an Orlando Sentinel commentary about Florida’s recent over development and the vacant suburban slums left in its wake:

“If we didn’t build another house in the suburbs, we still would have too many of them 17 years from now.”

Aside from our local glut of newly built, empty condos & houses, we also have over 50,000 unbuilt homes already approved just in south Hillsborough County.  50,000 homes.  Even if we didn’t rezone another farm field we could accommodate much of the growth projected for decades.

This is your turn to have a say in your region’s future. Don’t miss it. But don’t let them hand you a rubber stamp, and then claim that the public has spoken.

You might remember reading about One Bay’s Reality Check exercises, in which 300 hand-picked invitees, rushing against a 90-minute time limit, hurriedly heaped Legos on maps to depict their ideas for the 7-county region’s development over the next 50 years.  When selecting the participants, One Bay had set an artificial ratio of 1/3 citizens to 2/3 business and government, which doesn’t reflect the ratio of unaffiliated citizens to moneyed interests in our community.

The exercise was just over a year ago, and at that time I encouraged you to claim a stake in this planning process by joining their mailing list.

The results of this exercise are now being called “data,” and this “data” is being used to inform the next stage of this visioning process.  The One Bay Tech Team used this “data” to create 4 scenarios upon which you are now invited to comment.

We’ll get to those scenarios in a moment, but first, take a look at the makeup of the One Bay Tech Team which created the 4 scenarios:

27 Government
10 Development Industry
4 Economic Development
3 Private Consultants to Government
2 Academics
1 Event Facilitator

Notice there are NO unaffiliated citizens, but plenty of developers. Despite my requests to see the scenarios earlier, they’ve been kept a secret from citizens like you and I up until now.  Meanwhile development industry insiders have been helping to shape those scenarios before we get our say.

But wait, there’s more insider influence.  Recently, One Bay’s project manager was forced to resign due to serious conflicts of interest.  While guiding our region’s vision for growth, Amy Maguire was also working for a coalition of large landowners in south Hillsborough pushing for a mega-development on 5,500 acres of rural farmland; she was an advocate of our detested Green-Swath-Sprawlway; and an employee of John Thrasher’s powerful lobbying company that represents giant developers and other special interests across the state.

Now, One Bay is finally inviting everyone to participate in shaping the vision for our region.  The invitation proclaims

“One Bay is powered by the voice of the citizens who want to be heard and keep our region sustainable and an attractive place to live, work and play…”

Let’s make sure this comes true.  As warped as all this has been so far, I strongly encourage you to participate in One Bay’s visioning process.  One Bay is being embraced by our county commission, TBARTA, and other political and business leaders across the 7-county region. It will have great influence over the future of our region—right down to our neighborhoods and our daily quality of life—whether we participate or not.

Keep in mind that while the Tampa Bay Partnership and other One Bay partners are paying for the visioning process, we taxpayers will pay for the growth that is envisioned, and its infrastructure. Yes, new growth pays some impact fees, and the new residents pay new taxes, but that doesn’t begin to cover all the costs that we taxpayers must shell out. We pay even more when poorly planned growth lowers our quality of life, destroys our natural resources, and sucks our free time into the black hole of time wasted in traffic jams.

Citizens must demand—not just a seat at the table—enough seats to represent our numbers and our taxes. If there are 1,000 butchers, bakers & candlestick makers for every developer in this region, then we should have 1,000 seats at the table for every developer seat. After all, it’s our table.

We have 6 weeks, starting with the June 2 kickoff event, to make an honest program out of One Bay, and help make its claims of citizen participation come true. In the next post, I’ll spell out some details on the four scenarios, and how you can make a difference, but for now, PLEASE give serious consideration to taking an ACTIVE role in this.

This Thursday, commissioners will consider several changes to our Land Development Code including two proposals affecting traffic: one good change, proposed by our county transportation planners, and one bad change, proposed by developers (well, by their lawyers). Developers are loudly opposing the planners’ proposal, while the planners oppose the developers’ proposal. Who will our commissioners listen to: the developers or the planners? Citizens need to weigh in or our commissioners may change the rules to suit developers, making traffic around here even worse.

“Transportation concurrency” requirements are supposed to ensure that new development does not overwhelm our roads with too much traffic. Ideally, ‘concurrency’ requires a developer to either prove the additional traffic from his project won’t overwhelm the roads, or improve the roads so that they can handle the additional traffic. The planners’ proposal would add a few teeth to concurrency, while the developers’ proposal would knock a few teeth out.

The developers’ proposal (08-0364) would allow a developer to get “vested” against concurrency, by making some road improvements several years before he builds anything, and without completely specifying what he will build later. Once a developer got vested, he could change his plans to increase the intensity of his land use, and increase his project’s traffic demands on the local roads, without having to improve the roads to handle the increased traffic. If, in the years between his vesting and his building, traffic increased on the roads so that his project would no longer meet concurrency, he would get to build anyway, even though his project’s traffic would overwhelm the roads.

This is, after all, the point of getting vested against traffic concurrency: so that at a later date, when it turns out that what you want to build would doom the community to nightmarish traffic jams, you can just go ahead and build anyway with your “get out of concurrency free” card. Vested rights means we taxpayers must pay to improve the roads — either that or we pay with our time and gas money wasted in gridlock.

Citizens opposing Little Harbor’s attempts to further degrade Ruskin’s quality of life should oppose the developer’s proposal (it’s the same applicant: Bricklemyer, Smolker & Bolves), because this firm has amply demonstrated the evils of allowing developers to enjoy vested rights. Little Harbor was approved for way too many condos back in the ’80s, and now that they are finally getting around to building them, they don’t have to trouble themselves with the fact that lots of other development has been built since the ’80s, so that their development will now overwhelm the local roads. They just wave their vested rights in our faces and proceed to ruin the neighborhood.

We need less of this vested rights nonsense, not more.

The planners’ proposal (08-0396) is a sensible change that would require developers to provide adequate entrances/exits for new developments, and limit development wherever the developer could not provide enough access points to handle his project’s traffic. When a large subdivision has only one or two access points, they often have to use a traffic light to control the traffic at that point, but this slows down the traffic on the local roads and negatively impacts the surrounding community. In addition to the quality of life issue, there is a safety issue: without enough access points large subdivisions cannot safely evacuate in case of fire, hurricane or other emergency, and one big subdivision pouring out of one little gate can clog up the surrounding road system in a large evacuation.

If you can’t provide enough roads and driveways to handle your project, then you should scale down the project. Period.

Citizens opposing the new subdivision (The Reserve at Westlake) that would add 2 new roads in rural East Hillsborough — one through the Balm Scrub (ELAPP) Preserve and the other over Bullfrog Creek and its wetlands — should support the planners’ proposal, because if it is approved it should limit the housing that could be built in this sensitive area, which is the “hole in the donut” surrounded by environmentally sensitive land. The developer is proposing 1089 homes — way too much housing for the two roads. The reasonable thresholds proposed by our transportation planners would not allow this many houses on just these two access roads, so if this rule is adopted the developer would have to build less housing (or find other access routes which isn’t likely here) and in this rural, ecologically sensitive area, less housing and less traffic would be a very good thing. (See my update & sample opposition letter on that.)

Here’s my letter to our commissioners asking them to approve the planners’ proposal (08-0396) and deny the developers’ proposal (08-0364). (There are other proposals besides these two [all in this big pdf], so if you provide input, you should note those numbers.) Here are some comments from U-CAN. As our commissioners consider these measures that can help or harm our community as we grow, they should do so with plenty of input from all of us.

The first public hearing is Thursday, May 15, and the final hearing is June 12. Both are at 6:00 p.m. at County Center. You can speak to your commissioners about these Land Development Code changes at either hearing, or write to them. They may have their minds made up before the final hearing (yes, really!) so I encourage you to speak up as soon as possible.

County administrator Pat Bean has decided we don’t need any more nature preserves.

Oh, did you want to vote on that? Me too. After all, we always have held a vote to decide whether or not to continue our county’s Environmental Lands Acquisition and Protection Program (ELAPP), and the voters have always passed ELAPP by an overwhelming majority.

ELAPP is set to expire in 2011 unless we vote to extend the program again. Citizens have begun raising money to poll county residents to see if they want to put the issue on the ballot this year, or possibly wait until the 2010 election. The Trust for Public Lands has offered to conduct the poll, Tampa Audubon and The Tampa Bay Conservancy have offered to help pay for it, and more offers of help are rolling in.

But even though we have not asked the county to fund the poll, the county administrator is against it. Pat Bean has decided — with no poll and no vote — that we don’t need to continue this wildly popular, successful program.

She says the land-buying program has largely fulfilled its purpose by preserving the most valuable natural areas in the county.

Nonsense! We are nowhere near done protecting this county’s environmentally valuable lands.

I myself have recently nominated large tracts of pristine wildlife habitat, with ecologically sensitive riverine wetlands and tributaries whose protection is critical for healthy rivers and clean water resources. There is plenty of still-pristine land worth protecting, and we also need to protect some less-than-pristine land, in order to make connections between the pristine areas for water flow and wildlife corridors.

Continuing this program’s current budget doesn’t require a tax increase, and the economic climate is opening up a window of opportunity to acquire undeveloped land at bargain prices. Without a local conservation program we would lose the state funding which has so far matched ELAPP to the tune of $75 million.

Publicly, politicians are generally supportive of our hugely popular environmental land-buying program, which is win-win for the environment as well as the landowners who sell their property to the county for fair market value.

So what’s got into Bean? Are her bosses, the county commissioners, eyeing our ELAPP money for their own pet projects? Are they using her, again, to take an unpopular stand for them, so they don’t have to take the heat?

Commissioner Rose Ferlita has assured me that she remains a staunch supporter of ELAPP, and said the county administrator was not speaking for her. Commissioner Mark Sharpe said he’d ask today to agenda this item for public discussion on April 16. So who was Pat Bean speaking for?

Hillsborough county’s Strategic Plan, set on March 7, supports ELAPP with this objective on p.10:

Hillsborough County will pursue the acquisition of environmentally sensitive and significant resources by leveraging ELAPP funding with 40% noncounty funding on an average gross annual basis.

It is not Pat Bean’s place to push an agenda that is contrary to the county’s management strategy, set publicly by our elected officials. Her job is to carry out policy, not set policy. As I’ve said here before,

We don’t elect Pat Bean, and she has no authority to act independently of our elected officials.

I’m asking our county commissioners to support ELAPP, now and into the future, (and I’m thanking Ferlita and Sharpe for their support). Here’s some material that might help you compose your own letter of support: my letter, some bulleted points prepared by the Tampa Bay Conservancy which refute Bean’s position, and some facts & figures on the economic value of ELAPP put together by Wildlife Fellowship, Inc.

I’m also asking our commissioners to rein Bean in. I hope you will, too. The voters should decide whether to continue our land preservation program, not Queen Bean.

I’ll bet certain special interests were meanly happy to see this headline & subhead in the St. Pete Times, casting aspersions on the Environmental Protection Commission:

Auditor slams watchdog’s recordkeeping

The Environmental Protection Commission is doing a poor job of keeping track of its work.

Like a gossip tabloid making something innocuous sound sensational, the Times makes a bland audit sound as though it revealed shoddy bookkeeping which might be hiding something. They even misquote the auditors:

“It is unclear if they are protecting wetlands because of the incomplete data,” said Chad Lallemand, who helped prepare the report for auditor Jim Barnes.

Both Jim Barnes and Chad Lallemand tell me Lallemand never said this. The auditors have no doubt that EPC does protect wetlands. What is somewhat unclear is the extent to which they protect wetlands, because while much of the protection is documented, some simply cannot be.

As EPC Director Dr. Garrity told me, “It’s like asking the police how much crime they have prevented.”

EPC can and does count the acres of wetlands that have been impacted (legally or illegally), then replaced or mitigated through EPC regulation. But it’s impossible to know exactly how many acres of wetland impacts have been avoided due to EPC.

When a developer brings their plans to EPC for an initial review, who can say how many acres of wetland impacts they have already avoided, knowing that EPC would make them revise their plans had they shown certain impacts? How can EPC count all the acres of wetlands that would have been impacted if developers didn’t have to go through EPC reviews? Maybe some developers would have avoided some wetlands voluntarily, while some would have paved over every inch of wetlands that EPC protects, if they could get away with it.

EPC protects wetlands not only by enforcing regulations, but also by working together with builders, farmers and others in the early planning stages of projects, to help draw up plans that avoid wetland impacts in ways they may not have considered without the expertise of EPC’s engineers and hydrologists. If EPC suggests relocating an access road on an early pencil-draft plan, are they to take credit for saving a wetland that would have been impacted IF that road had finally been built over the wetland where it was first penciled in? Would the auditors then fault them for claiming too much success?

One of the conclusions in the county’s audit of the EPC is the suggestion to develop some performance measures to better account for the wetland impacts that are avoided due to EPC processes. As noted in the auditors’ report, and in Dr. Garrity’s attached response, EPC has recognized this need, and has already begun improving their performance measures.

So the Times turns this into an accusation of incomplete record keeping, and boosts it with a misquote suggesting that EPC may not be protecting wetlands at all.

Last summer, special interests almost succeeded in getting our county commission to eliminate EPC wetland protections. Citizens had to work feverishly to snatch the agency from the flames. Innuendo from the Times serves only to fan those flames which are still licking at our EPC.

I attended the TBARTA Open House on Monday, and today I’m bringing it to you, just in case you didn’t slog through rush-hour traffic to voice your concerns about transportation around here. (Sticks commenter Scott Gunsaullus spent 2 hours on public transportation to get to the meeting!) But you get to skip that transportation hassle, and you don’t have to wade into the usual gaggle of developers, politicians and activists milling about this kind of thing. You can participate in the Open House virtually, right here on Sticks of Fire.

First, check out the maps that were posted around the room, with “general connections” identified. Then fill out the same questionnaire that was handed out, just as if you were there.

Uh-oh. What’s that green swath on the map of South Hillsborough Options? Is that the Green Swath of Death rearing its ugly head again? So soon after it was scraped off our county planning maps by massive citizen opposition? (See my article, “roads to sprawlville” for background on this beltway/bypass.)

I asked a couple of the TBARTA folks about this, but they were kind of vague. “It’s just a possible corridor,” they told me. “We’re asking for input on all the possibilities. Everything is on the table at this point.”

Hmmm. It looks kinda like a rail corridor, but then it hooks up with a new road corridor. Could this be a resurrection of the Brandon Bypass?

I mentioned that Green Swath on my questionnaire. I told ’em that new roads in rural areas attract expensive suburban sprawl, waste farmland under new development, and pour more commuter traffic on all our roads; and, I told ’em, we need to be concentrating our growth and infrastructure along urban transit corridors in order to make mass transit feasible. And I told ’em I don’t like roads carving up my nature preserves.

Certain people — the people who make money this way — are still pushing for new roads to open up cheap farmland for more sprawling subdivisions full of commuters. If you have an opinion on transportation, you might want to voice it soon, because

TBARTA is charged with developing a Regional Transportation Master Plan by July 1, 2009.

TBARTA is also charged with engaging the public in developing this plan, so let them know what you think about rail, buses, roads, alternative transportation — anything that matters to you in your regional transportation plan.

See for yourself on a 4-hour ecotour, any Wednesday from Feb. 6 through March 26, 11:00 a.m. – 3:00 p.m. Cost is $20 for members of Tampa Bay Watch, or $25 for non-members. E-mail Catherine, or call 727-867-8166 for reservations.

The environmental program starts with a classroom orientation of the estuary and then spends the rest of the day on the bay. This hands-on field trip experience includes an introduction to Tampa Bay Watch, discovering estuarine sea critters from our on-site touch-tanks and kayaking over oyster bars and through mangrove forests.

The course encompasses subjects/activities including: an overview of Tampa Bay Estuary habitats, its flora and fauna, bay impacts and restoration projects. Tampa Bay Watch’s Marine and Education Center, located on the Tampa Bay shoreline directly across from Ft. De Soto, provides an easy access toTampa Bay. We hope that both on-site and in the field, participants learn about our beautiful yet fragile surroundings in a fun and engaging way.

Tampa Bay Watch is a nonprofit stewardship program dedicated to protecting and restoring the marine and wetland environments of the Tampa Bay estuary.