By Claire Jubb, Assistant County Administrator, Charlotte County
Every journey has a beginning. Mine began at a conference a couple of years ago. The conference focused around the importance of water in the planning world. Maybe not immediately the most fascinating of topics but I came away from this conference with a perspective that really changed my approach to water and water quality. The presenter talked about water issues and said that there is not a single jurisdiction in this nation that does not have a water problem. It could be too much, not enough, inconsistent, in the wrong place, in the wrong form, contaminated, expensive, poor quality or not fully accessible along with a multitude of other issues. Because of the complexity of these issues, a holistic approach to “everything water” is critical to success.
Applying this to my jurisdiction, we have too much (through summer rains, tropical activity, high tides etc.), not enough (during our winter dry season), impaired quality of some of our surface waters from a variety of contaminants and a relatively high cost of potable water in some areas.
Charlotte County is on the southwest coast of Florida, has two rivers and many tributaries running into the second largest natural harbor in Florida (Charlotte Harbor). We have a multitude of canals giving boater access to the harbor giving us a total of over 800 miles of natural or man-made shoreline in the county. We are flat with elevations ranging from sea-level to approximately 60ft above sea level in our more inland area. Our main source of drinking water is the larger of our two rivers.
Much of our tourism industry is water based in some form with our fantastic beaches, fishing, boating and eco-tourism opportunities making the preservation and improvement of our water incredibly important. People move to our county for the access to the water and we have many water dependent businesses. Water quality has always been a focus of our Board but in 2019, they made it a priority and set us a goal as part of their strategic plan to improve water quality.
We had already been making great progress with water quality. We have a very aggressive septic to sewer program, stormwater programs and many environmental successes but there had never been a holistic approach to our water and water quality issues.
Our first step was to bring all the staff involved in anything water together into a task force. We didn’t just include the obvious – utilities, public works, floodplain management – we also included tourism, economic development and our communications department. It was at the first meeting of this task force we realized that as an organization we really did not have a good handle on what we were all working on along with what a huge task this was going to be. Beginning to build this holistic approach, we started to develop our One Charlotte One Water integrated water resource management program.
A key part of the development of this program was to engage the community, local agencies and our partners. Although local government could lead this initiative, we could not do it alone. To engage our community, we organized our first One Charlotte One Water Assembly. To this assembly, we invited any agency, partner, business association, academia and anyone else we thought could help us. Over 60 participants agreed to spend a full day with us visioning the county’s water quality journey.
This day took the participants, broke them into smaller groups of mixed technical backgrounds and ran through a series of exercises. We asked questions such as “what does water quality mean to you?”, “what do you think we are doing well?”, “what should we be doing?”, “who should we be partnering with?” and “who is missing from the assembly?”.
This energetic group gave us over 300 suggestions and most of them wanted to be involved as we moved forward. By far the most highly rated suggestion was around the need to hire a dedicated Water Quality Manager to lead this initiative.
Timing however was not on our side – our assembly convened at the end of February 2020 and we all know what happened next! However, the need to move forward on our water quality goal did not diminish. Despite considerable uncertainty in revenues, our Board made the decision that this was too important to wait. They gave us approval to hire a dedicated water manager.
This begins the next phase of our journey – our water quality manager came on board three months ago and has hit the ground running. We are developing a comprehensive water quality monitoring plan to supplement to work that is already being done by different agencies in our county to build the true story of water quality in the county. We are building the One Charlotte One Water long-range plan, developing relationships and trying to really get a handle on where we have been, where we want to be and how we are going to get there.
We know this is a long journey, we are going to run into many challenges and will take a proverbial village to be successful, but we are not in public service to take the easy road. Charlotte County is our piece of paradise and this program will help us keep it that way for many years to come.
