Director’s Note: Progress on our Reasonable Assurance Plan
Yesterday, we had our first meeting with the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (FDEP) staff in Tallahassee, related to our proposed approach for developing the Reasonable Assurance Plan (RAP) for Sarasota Bay. As you likely know, a RAP is a locally led version of a Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL). A TMDL is an effort typically led by FDEP or the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) (or their consultants) to develop an estimate of pollutant loads, their impact on water quality, and the load reductions necessary for a waterbody to come into compliance with the water quality standards set for its designated use. Many of our bay segments are “impaired” for the amount of algae in the water column, and so our choices were to either sit back and let someone else take the lead on this process, or to lead it ourselves.
We brought this topic up to our Citizens Advisory Committee (CAC), Technical Advisory COmmittee (TAC), Management Board and Policy Board, and the widespread consensus was that the locally-led version was the way to go – similar to the process undertaken by our adjacent National Estuary Program (NEP) up in Tampa Bay. The RAP process allows us to get to “cleaner water, quicker” because we’ve got so much data collected and compiled and analyzed and interpreted, and our consultants have developed an excellent pollutant loading model for our bay.
Yesterday, we had our first meeting with FDEP staff in Tallahassee, to find out if there were any concerns about our proposed methods. The meeting could not have gone better, and they were very much in agreement with our proposed approach, which is summarized here:
- We will be using our multi-parameter “report card” of ecosystem health to set targets, rather than water quality values alone
- We will be using a reference period of 2006 to 2012 as our goal, based on the following findings –
- Concentrations of nitrogen in the water were lower than in later years
- Concentrations of chlorophyll-a (a measure of the amount of algae in the water column) were lower than in later years, and were below regulatory criteria
- The amount of macroalgae in the bay (where we had data) was lower than in later years
- Seagrass coverage increased by 28% during that period
- Based on our pollutant loading model, the most important nitrogen loads increased by 12 tons (20%) from the reference period to the more recent period of 2013 to 2019
- Based on that same loading model, we should be able to reduce our nitrogen loads by that 12-ton target – which means we should be able to restore our bay’s ecological health
The RAP process is thus off to a good and fast start. Our next meeting will be to follow up with the SBEP’s Water Quality Consortium, which is a sort of link between the technical work done here and the folks that will actually have to implement the load reduction strategies. Our consultants (who have done similar work for Tampa Bay) will review and revise the loading model, come up with basin-specific targets, compile all the benefits of already implemented projects, and come up with a process to hold our stakeholders accountable for actually implementing the necessary projects to get us back into the healthier bay we were not that long ago.
Some last thoughts here…
This is an important process – it’s the way to transition from good intentions to actually implementing what we need to do to restore this bay. This will be helpful for the vast majority of days during the majority of years. And, very importantly, it will be helpful when we have red tide brought onto our shores, and if we are so unfortunate as to have a more direct impact from a tropical storm or hurricane. As we’ve been saying, humans don’t cause red tides, but we can cause them to be worse. That is well established now – more and more research is supporting that concept. It’s no accident that Tampa Bay’s worst red tide in 50 years (in the Middle Bay) occurred after the Piney Point releases loaded the equivalent of 80,000 bags of fertilizer to the bay. Nor is it likely a coincidence that the 2018 red tide in Sarasota Bay was preceded by the largest amount of stormwater runoff at the end of the “dry season” in more than 100 years, followed by the largest amount of wastewater overflows – during the wet season - of any year over the past two decades.
Similarly, we know from research done after Irma that healthier systems (like St. Joseph Sound) had less of an impact than more degraded systems. Even within an estuary, the more degraded the water quality (like Hillsborough Bay in Tampa Bay or the lower portions of Sarasota Bay) the bigger the impact to our resources after a major storm.
Despite our population growth and impacts from Piney Point, 2021 had the best water quality across our bay in the last 5 to 15 years (depending on location). If we do more of what we have to do, that can become our new normal. And if we continue to do what we need to do, our future will be bright, and – perhaps – we can serve as a role model of sorts for other coastal systems across this beautiful state.
That’s our goal – and it’s a realistic one.