One of the unique things about tomorrow night's City Commission agenda...

...is the length of the consent agenda.  Item 8E sheds some light on our water permit situation with SFWMD and might go a long way in explaining why I heard a whole lot of nothing back on the status of our withdrawal permit from SFWMD.  At the time, a few months ago, other municipalities and the unincorporated county went back to normal watering times.  Lake Worth remains, although it is hard to tell, on the most strict watering standards.

A brief bucket of history:  We had to find another source of water other than the Surficial Aquifer that the city has relied upon for years due to evidence of saltwater intrusion.  After an aborted attempt at permitting for an ocean outfall for our Reverse Osmosis (RO) plant, we then went to Palm Beach County for water and then broke that contract and went back to building our own RO plant which is now getting rid of its waste through deep well injection.  That method is much more unknown than the effects of an ocean outfall, but politically impossible in this day and age.  However, there may be unforeseen circumstances springing from deep well injection that we won't know for many years into the future.

Well the RO plant is running and, according to the back-up memo, we made the assumption that SFWMD was going to give us a permit to draw 5.3 MGD in the dry season and 6.0 in the wet season on average from the Surficial aquifer.  (M is for millions, G is for gallons and D is for day) After many go-arounds with permitting and responding to SFWMD questions, they are only willing to give us 3.0 MGD in the dry season and 3.4 MGD in the wet season.  This application work was taken through the permitting process by none other than Mock-Roos.  The back-up memo says that the contract for that work was approved on February 25, 2010, but going to the city's website under 2010 City Commission meetings, there was no meeting on February 25th.  The memo doesn't indicate the dollar amount of that contract.

The contract to do further modelling is an attempt to satisfy SFWMD concerns that the city's requested rate of withdrawal will not create more salt-water intrusion that otherwise would occur naturally and is priced at $61,800.

What this means is that the city expected SFWMD to go along with the city's request that would NOT require EXPANSION of the just finished RO plant until 2017.  If SFWMD doesn't approve that rate of withdrawal, we will have to expand our JUST FINISHED RO plant to accommodate a greater withdrawal from the Floridan aquifer (source for the RO plant.)  Assumptions have been made that pushed off expansion into the future that allowed for lower rates - remember the RO plant was funded through water rate increases.  And, I remember many go-arounds by the Commission on how big to make the plant initially.  It is my understanding that it can double its capacity eventually, but at a cost.

Suddenly things are more clear - expect to be paying more for water in the future.