New water use limits come under fire at Vero Beach hearing

A dozen cities from Vero Beach to New Smyrna Beach turned out at a public hearing on June 19th to denounce the St. John’s River Water Management District's proposal to impose tough new curbs on irrigation including restrictions for the first time on reuse water.

In the Vero Beach area, more than 90 percent of the water derived from recycled waste water goes to the barrier island -- where it has been widely used for the past decade in place of drinking water to keep neighborhood lawns as well as parks and golf courses green.

Under the proposed new regulations, all barrier island residents – including those utilizing reuse water for irrigation – would be allowed to water lawns only once a week during the winter season and twice a week during daylight savings months.

While the proposal would apply only to small water users such as homeowners, St. John's district coordinator Dwight Jenkins conceded at Thursday's hearing that the new reuse water curbs -- if adopted -- would subsequently be applied to golf courses and other large water users who are governed by so-called conditional use permits.

"Yes, we want to have these restrictions applied to conditional use permit holders," Jenkins told a questioner.

Reuse or reclaimed water is water that already has been used once in the public water supply. After treatment, it is recycled and while no longer suitable for drinking. for bathing, or even for discharge into the Indian River Lagoon, it is increasingly widely used for irrigation.

Most jurisdictions currently impose no limit on use of reclaimed water -- a big selling point in the 1990s in persuading communities and home owners to pay for the millions of dollars of added piping needed to bring the reuse water to their property.

So a parade of witnesses on Thursday objected to the water district's proposal a decade later to impose the same irrigation limits on reuse water as on drinking water.

They contended it not only would undercut efforts to further expand use of recycled water, but would leave many municipalities awash in effluent that cannot be disposed of in rivers or streams.

The city of Melbourne estimated that if the rules are adopted, it would have half a billion gallons of reuse water a year that it could no longer distribute.

"If these limitations are imposed on use of reclaimed water, what do we do with several million gallons of reclaimed water every day?" asked Rocky Randals, mayor of Cape Canaveral. "We can't get rid of it."

John R. Ten Eyck, manager of environmental and plant operations for the Vero Beach Water and Sewer Department, said he also was concerned about limiting the use of potable water for irrigation to one day a week in winter.

"The proposal means decreased flows in your drinking water system, which means water will stay in the pipes longer," Ten Eyck said.

That, he said, leads to "elevated water temperatures" in the pipes, resulting in a variety of water quality problems. "In Florida, that is not what you want," Ten Eyck said. The way utilities then have to deal with this, he said, is by flushing the entire system.

"Flushing is counter-productive. It wastes millions of gallons of water," Ten Eyck said.

But it was the proposal to limit use of reclaimed water that drew far and away the most attention at the hearing.

Ford Fegert, who noted that it cost the 51 homeowners who live in Riomar Bay on the Vero Beach barrier island $251,000 to hook up to the reuse water system a decade ago, said "we thought we were being good environmental stewards to do this.

"We would not have entered into this partnership with government to build this system were it not that there was to be some latitude in use of the water," said Fegert. "This proposal is going to have a chilling effect on future development of reuse water systems."