DEP outlines progress on water-quality plans, grant funding and public data tools

At a meeting of the Senate Committee on Environment and Natural Resources, Adam Blalock, deputy secretary for ecosystems restoration at the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, outlined how the department sets water-quality standards, tracks impaired waters and advances restoration projects.

Blalock told the committee that the department first designates uses for each water body (for example, Class I as a drinking-water source and Class III for recreation) and then establishes numeric water-quality criteria. "Once that determination is made, if the water body is exceeding the nitrogen and phosphorus, I'll just use those as the primary example since that's kind of the main issue," Blalock said. If criteria are not met, DEP lists the water body as impaired and establishes total maximum daily loads, or TMDLs, then develops basin management action plans, commonly called BMAPs, to assign reduction targets and implementation responsibilities.

The nut graf: BMAPs and TMDLs are the legal and technical framework the state uses to allocate pollutant reductions among dischargers and to track progress. Committee members pressed DEP on whether the plans are producing measurable water-quality improvements and how the department is accelerating work where needed.

Blalock said Florida currently has 33 BMAPs that are adopted by secretarial order and are updated on a five-year schedule. He described a change required by recent state legislation, saying the department is incorporating five-year milestones into BMAPs so entities with load allocations must show interim reductions rather than waiting until the end of a 20-year planning horizon. "With the 5 year milestones that we are we put into the BMAP process in, 2023, we now have that ability to say, you know, these 5 year milestones, you need to show, you know, a 30% reduction here, 50%, 75, 100," Blalock said.

Committee members asked for evidence that the approach yields improvements. Vice Chair Angolia asked about a historical spike on a nitrate graph and said, "I'm seeing a large spike in nitrate concentration in the year 1988 in the Waukola B map. Can you explain what that is?" Blalock offered to research the specific year and suggested spikes can reflect historical land uses, climatic variation or specific events.

Blalock reviewed funding and delivery of restoration projects. He said the state has directed roughly $2.9 billion to water-quality projects since 2019 and that DEP has funded nearly 1,100 projects. He reported those projects, when completed, are estimated to reduce about 4.6 million pounds of nitrogen and 893,000 pounds of total phosphorus per year. The department's largest program, the Water Quality Improvement Grant, has been appropriated about $1.1 billion and is now eligible to fund projects outside formally adopted BMAP boundaries so long as the project benefits an impaired water body and fits statutory project types.

Senators discussed how to use available grant money. Senator Jason Broder urged members and municipal officials to apply for the Water Quality Improvement Grant before pursuing member projects through the legislature, noting the department had far more project applications than the recent annual appropriation of about $200 million.

Blalock also described DEP work to consolidate continuous monitoring and other environmental data from multiple entities into centralized, public-facing dashboards. He said DEP is developing a Water Quality Improvement Grant dashboard, required by statute, to show project locations, status, projected nutrient reductions and awarded funding; the department expects to make the tool available before the July 1, 2025 statutory deadline. He described a separate pilot map for the Indian River Lagoon that will display real-time temperature, dissolved oxygen and turbidity readings and include seagrass coverage layers so investigators and the public can more quickly locate monitoring data during events such as fish kills.

On the policy side, Blalock described statutory changes carried in recent bills and explained how DEP enforces BMAP obligations through permits and, where necessary, statutory penalties. He also noted reasonable assurance plans as a locally developed, voluntary restoration tool that can be submitted to EPA for approval; Tampa and Miami-Dade were cited as jurisdictions working with DEP on those plans.

On closing, Blalock answered a final question about whether the solution to persistent nitrate and nutrient problems is more funding, stronger accountability or both. He said the projects funded to date are effective but that meeting load reductions statewide will take time — "probably gonna be easily 5 to 10 years out before all of these projects that we've currently funded ... get completed and then you see that ecological response" — and he stressed both continued funding and action by stakeholders are necessary.

The committee had no further business and the meeting was adjourned after a motion to adjourn by the vice chair.