Iorio holds onto Tampa water

Tampa Mayor Pam Iorio on Monday put the brakes on plans for Tampa's reclaimed water backed by Senators Paula Dockery, Ronda Storms and J.D. Alexander. Iorio said she won't contribute the city's water to the $188-million project that would allow a private company to sell millions of gallons of Tampa's wastewater to customers in Polk and Hillsborough counties. Iorio said she wants to keep the water in the city to reduce drinking water use in Tampa. Storms and Alexander cared about the project enough that they tried to block the re-appointment of Southwest Florida Water Management District executive director Dave Moore because he wasn't making it a high enough priority.

Read more about it here and here.

Comments

This was a shady deal from the get-go. These developer-owned “so-called” Legislators would sell their mothers to build something.

Good move, Mayor… we’ll make a leader out of you yet.

maybe if the city of tampa really cared about their water supply they would stop letting so much of it become waste-water to begin with. I think once it goes down the drain it probably should belong to whoever payed for the pipes.

failure to act shows an absense of leadership. Madam Mayor, why did you not address this issue until somebody offered a viable solution to this problem?

12:44- That's the Democrat way of doing things. Sit around and wait for somebody else to solve a problem and then come up with reasons why its bad or can't be done. I'm sure you will see lots of this from the next president.

There is no water shortage, only water politics.

[Chris W]

Typical Storms thinking, btw. She hates Tampa with a passion, because we refuse to run ourselves in accord with her tiny mind. So any chance she gets, she tries to knock Tampa down or steal something from it.

[Buzzard]

St. Pete has so much demand for its poop water from residents who pay for it that demand exceeds supply. I'm shocked that Tampa is dumping theirs in the Bay. Where are your leaders?

Buzzard, demand will always exceed supply. It takes 4-5 households of potable water to create 1 households watering needs.

well then, clearly the answer is to not use any of it. The only logical response is to dump it, satisfying none of the demand and ruining some fisheries and ecosystems in the process. Thanks for the economics lesson Adam Smith....

[Chris W]

The smartest thing we could do with the treated wastewater that nobody wants would be to pipe it up into the Green Swamp and let it cycle back down through the aquifer as purified drinking water. To get rid of the trace pharmaceuticals, you could pass it over a synthetic enzyme bed to lyse them and through a couple of large hydrilla ponds to leach them out.

There is no water shortage, only water politics.

[Donald Lance]

There is more to argue about other than wastewater. I heard that Tampa is losing some 3 billion gallons of water a year due to leaking problems within the infrastructure. Wastewater is wastewater, and if some sucker wants to pay for it they should invest the profits into the water lines so they're not losing 3 billion gallons a year.

what? reinvest in infrastructure? I'm not familiar with the idea.

Hey 1:36: how does this have anything to do with hating Tampa? The deal pays money to Tampa for the waste water. Tampa is in dire financial straits and needs money. Tampa currently dumps the water --betwn 40-86 MILLION gallons per day-- into the bay against the Clean Water Act and with penalties looming. Advocating a way to help the environment and make money for Tampa is an example of Tampa-hating. Huh?

Oh, because at some point down the road, there might be a way to pipe the water for New Tampa users? You're getting hosed to believe the city's numbers at this point. The city says they can build a plant for appr. $10 million. Ok. But that's just the plant. That's not including right of way/emminent domain costs to run the pipes, construction costs to build the pipes, consultant fees to plan the route, staff fees for public meetings on sight selection, and the roughly 8% Troxler factors for all government contracts' hidden costs due to incompetence and corruption.

Even if the city started tomorrow, the project is ten years out. And then, there is no guarantee that anyone will hook up. BTW, hook ups for yesterday's reclaimed customers for yesterday's bonded money is roughly 3-5000. What's it gonna be in ten years with today's costs and today's bond market and the city's bond rating? Hm-m-m?

So if I understand you, it is better to dump the water for more than a decade, at a financial loss to the city, at the risk of staying in violation of the Clean Water Act total maximum daily load requirements, and at environmental impact to wildlife and aquatic vegetation . . . all because Storms supports the plan and as a Tampa-hater, must be secretly plotting against the city . . . therefore, we should all be opposed to the plan. You're cutting off your nose to spite your face . . . but it is your face, so hack away, my friend.

Educate me with facts to be against the plan . . . I'm sure there are down sides, but I haven't heard them from anyone on this site . . . or from the Times, for that matter.

[Chris W]

8:31 - Like I said above, it would be better to pipe the treated water back up into the aquifer that feeds the Hillsborough River so we get it back as clean drinking water (plus we get more flow over the dam and a healthier lower river).

As for being against something because Storms supports it, that's a more complicated thing. The fact is that Storms has that East Hillsborough County resentment of Tampa (part inferiority complex, part religious objection to Tampa's tolerant ways, part justified reaction to Tampa's old arrogance) and it drives a lot of what she supports. As a consequence, in much of she wants to do there's an element of sticking it to Tampa and taking us down a peg or two. So you can understand why those of us who live here look at the things la Storms wants to do with automatic suspicion.

And she's not alone. East Hillsborough has its share of people (not everyone, but enough to cause much damaging mischief) who would love to dismantle Tampa because we believe things that are anathema to them - that gays and lesbians have rights, that it's important to teach actual evolutionary science in science class instead of carving out a safe harbor for the claptrap that calls itself "intelligent design", that we by and large don't care if people get lap dances as long as they're not all over the city. In short, we believe in a secular government that leaves the churches alone to flourish (or decline) on their own.

True, Tampa could rake in bucks by selling its wastewater. But that would mean giving up control over a resource that we'll need later on if the water wars begin again. The colloquial term for that is "eating our seed corn"; the Biblical way to say it is "selling our birthright for a mess of potage".

There is no water shortage, only water politics.

[Buzzard]

9:32: Baloney.

8:31: Besides the Clean Water Act, check out the 1899 Refuse Act, which I believe is still on the books. Get the right documentation and you could turn in Tampa and collect a portion of the fine!