A drop, or a year, at a time

New federal clean-water rules announced Monday are part of a gradual change that could spread over more than a decade.

- July 2008: Environmental groups sue the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for number-based limits on nitrogen and phosphorus in Florida waterways.

- August 2009: EPA and activists agree to settle suit, set separate deadlines for rules for freshwater and coastal areas.

- January 2010: EPA proposes freshwater standards.

- Monday: Freshwater standards finalized, except in South Florida.

- November 2011: Rules are due for estuaries, coastal water and freshwater South Florida rivers.

- February 2012: Freshwater standards set Monday take effect.

- August 2012: Final rules are due for coastal, estuary and South Florida waterways.

- February 2012-2017: Utilities, companies, towns and others holding five-year federal water permits will come due for permit renewals. The new standards will be written into the permits.

- 2017-2022: For utilities and others that don't meet the new standards, plans for equipment upgrades and other steps will be required in many permits. Some will expire as late as 2022.

Where's the problem?

High levels of nitrogen and phosphorus in Florida's waterways come from many sources, including:

- Agriculture: Farms with lots of animals, where hard rains can carry animal waste into waterways.

- Fertilizer: It washes off household yards and into storm drains, creeks and rivers.

- Sewage: Sewage treatment plants that release wastewater into rivers.

Federal officials rolled out new clean-water rules Monday that backers say will fight Florida's perennial algae problems - and that critics say could bankrupt some utilities and businesses.

Most of Northeast Florida isn't directly affected, but a second set of rules to clean coastlines and estuaries - including the St. Johns River from Black Creek to Mayport - is coming next year.

The new rules to limit nitrogen and phosphorus levels in freshwater rivers and lakes will take effect in February 2012, a delay that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said would address Gov.-elect Rick Scott's request last week for more time to examine the issue.

As they have since last year, two sides of a debate on the rules quoted hugely different costs for even the first step in water improvement, pricing Monday's announcement anywhere from $130 million to more than $6 billion.

Both camps disparaged the other's accounting.

"Their costs are ridiculously low," Paul Steinbrecher, a JEA administrator and president of a utility trade group, said of EPA's estimates.

The EPA's top administrator in the Southeast, Gwen Keyes Fleming, called utility industry estimates "exaggerated doomsday claims" and said EPA set a "common-sense" policy that protects one of the state's biggest economic assets, its waters.

"One of the goals of these standards is to protect the clean water that is essential for home values and a foundation of industries like tourism," she said. "After years of scientific study ... we have now what we need to get to work."

Whether any of the costs will fall on the Jacksonville area remains to be seen.

EPA outlined a system Monday for communities or businesses to apply for special alternative standards if they could show their alternative was based on research and sound science and would still protect the water.

That seemed like a tailor-made description of a cleanup plan that Jacksonville and other communities signed onto two years ago to lower nitrogen and phosphorus in the lower St. Johns. The plan already commits cities, utilities and companies to more than $600 million worth of clean-water projects, from sewage plant upgrades to retiring septic tanks and controlling fertilizer use.

But EPA still needs to read through the St. Johns plan again and decide whether that will do enough for the river. The Florida Department of Environmental Protection could ask EPA to do that, but a spokeswoman for the state agency, Dee Ann Miller, said no system has been set up yet for sorting which plans like that to send to EPA.

The key difference from current environmental rules is that EPA sets specific amounts of nitrogen and phosphors allowed in each gallon of river water, whereas state rules for most rivers say only that there cannot be so much of those that they upset the water's natural balance.

Florida officials had worked for years on developing their own standards but never completed them. Keyes Fleming said her office used the information the state had gathered to help decide the numeric standards, which vary based on local factors including the geology of specific river basins.

Mimi Drew, the state's secretary of environmental protection, said the EPA rules "responded to many DEP and stakeholder concerns" and that talks between state and federal employees were "intense and involved but, in the end, constructive."

Before the rule was completed, about 22,000 public comments were directed to EPA by both critics and supporters.

Many business groups that feared EPA rules would be crushingly expensive lobbied members of Congress to fight the new standards. But comments from Capitol Hill were restrained Monday, despite earlier efforts to kill EPA funding for the rules.

"Nothing is more important to me than keeping all of Florida's waterways clean and pure," U.S. Rep. Ander Crenshaw, R-Fla., said in a statement, adding that he wanted to thoroughly review the new rules.

U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., credited EPA with listening to an earlier request to carefully weigh the impact on businesses.

"My office will keep working to ensure this process is fair to everybody," a statement from his office said.

The new rules are a result of a lawsuit filed in 2008 by environmental activists who said Florida had squandered chances to control algae-feeding pollution while rivers became more polluted.

Those activists celebrated Monday but braced for more courtroom and political battles.

"There will be a jillion [court] cases," said David Guest, an attorney for the advocacy law firm Earthjustice, which represented the activists. He said those cases will all end up in a single federal court case about whether EPA acted arbitrarily and whether the costs just outweigh benefits.

But the costs are manageable and the need is real, argued St. Johns Riverkeeper Neil Armingeon, whose group was one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit.

"We believe the standards are necessary," Armingeon said.

Quoting EPA's cost estimates for the freshwater rule, he said: "It's about $50 a year per household, which we think most people are willing to pay for clean water."

steve.patterson@jacksonville.com, (904) 359-4263

link: http://jacksonville.com/news/metro/2010-11-16/story/new-water-rules...