Residents share concerns about lower water quality standards at DEP meeting
By Julio Ochoa
Wednesday, January 31, 2007
Local residents worried about a possible reduction of water quality standards in the Caloosahatchee River and other water bodies spoke out Tuesday at a public meeting sponsored by the state Department of Environmental Protection.
The DEP is developing new classifications for state waters and have suggested two additional sub-categories that would hold urban canals, built for drainage, to lower standards than the fishable and swimmable standard of most rivers and streams.
The reason for additional categories is some bodies of water, such as man-made, concrete-lined ditches, may never be able to meet the water quality standards for recreational uses, said Jerry Brooks, a representative from the DEP's Tallahassee office.
"We have the same expectations in terms of biological quality for the Ichetucknee River, which is spring fed with little development, as we do for urban drainage ditches," Brooks said.
But local leaders worry that if the reclassification lowers the water quality standards there will never be an attempt to clean up impaired water bodies that could get better over time.
The new classifications would also give businesses and developers a new avenue to petition the government for lower water quality standards on specific bodies of water, said Wayne Daltry, director of Smart Growth for Lee County.
"Too many businesses operate under the savings of today and don't worry about the consequences of tomorrow," Daltry said. "If you create an exit, somebody's gonna go out the door."
Forty years ago the DEP created five water quality standards as part of the Clean Water Act:
-- Class I - Drinking water
-- Class II - Shellfish harvesting
-- Class III - Recreational uses, including swimming, boating and fishing
-- Class IV - Agricultural
-- Class V - Industrial
The two proposed sub-categories, which would be placed under Class III, would include a "splashable" class called fishing and limited human contact and an "unfishable/unswimmable" class called limited fishing and no human contact. As it is, the law is narrowly defined and it's easy for environmental groups to successfully sue the government because it is not meeting water quality standards, Daltry said. The system may not be perfect but it provides for a way to eventually improve all water bodies, he said.
"The worry is that this is used to staircase down, where as the Clean Water Act is a staircase up," he said. "We're creating a vehicle by which people can petition to decrease standards."