NaplesNews.com

Environmental groups threaten action over fouled Florida waters

By By Eric Staats

April 29, 2008

http://www.naplesnews.com/news/2008/apr/29/environmental-groups-threaten-action-over-fouled-f/

Clean water advocates plan to ask a judge to speed up a deadline for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to adopt new standards to control pollution in Florida waters plagued by toxic algae such as red tide.

The Florida Wildlife Federation, the Sierra Club and the Conservancy of Southwest Florida sent a letter Tuesday to U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Stephen Johnson notifying the EPA of their intent to sue the agency in 60 days for failing to uphold the Clean Water Act.

The groups cite a 1998 pledge by the EPA to set numbers limiting nutrient pollution.

The EPA’s plan called for states to set the limits by 2003 or the EPA would set the limits. The EPA recently allowed the Florida Department of Environmental Protection to delay new standards for nutrient pollution until 2012.

“This is way overdue,” Conservancy President Andrew McElwaine said.

EPA spokeswoman Dawn Harris-Young, in Atlanta, referred questions to the EPA’s office in Washington, D.C., where officials couldn’t be reached for comment later Tuesday.

Nutrients, such as nitrogen and phosphorus found in fertilizers and wastewater, have fueled blooms of toxic blue-green algae that have overrun the Caloosahatchee River, the St. Johns River, the St. Lucie River and Lake Okeechobee.

In coastal waters, rafts of floating seaweed have fouled Southwest Florida beaches.

Red tides, blooms of microscopic algae, have become more frequent and more intense. Red tide causes breathing problems for humans and can kill fish and manatees.

Algae blooms also rob waters of oxygen, creating dead zones that smother marine life.

Despite the threats posed by nutrients, Florida hasn’t adopted a number that nitrogen and phosphorus levels cannot exceed.

Instead, Florida’s rule says nutrient concentrations cannot “be altered so as to cause an imbalance in the natural populations of aquatic flora and fauna.”

That leaves too large a loophole for polluters to swim through, critics say.

“EPA has basically let everyone off the hook,” said Monica Reimer, an attorney for Earthjustice, which is representing the three environmental groups.

The groups aren’t asking for any particular standard, only that the EPA set a deadline by which a standard is adopted, she said.

The DEP cites complications in determining how much of a nutrient is too much.

Some effects of nutrients are naturally occurring, and the effects result from long-term exposure, DEP spokeswoman Dee Ann Miller wrote in an e-mail.

Florida has developed a numeric standard of 10 parts per billion for phosphorus in the Everglades, but the process was time-consuming and expensive, Miller wrote in her e-mail.

“We are working on the development of a more cost-effective means of deriving numeric nutrient criteria but it is an emerging science,” she wrote.

Numeric standards for the rest of the state would make it easier to develop plans to cut pollution and provide a way to track progress, according to the groups’ letter.

That doesn’t mean the EPA can’t hold Florida to its existing narrative standard, said Linda Young, director of the Clean Water Network of Florida.

“A numeric criteria would be great _ if they set a good one,” she said.

The Clean Water Network has been among groups that have filed a series of lawsuits seeking to overturn the way DEP determines whether a water body is polluted and must be cleaned up.

A report late last year from the DEP found that Naples Bay isn’t polluted by nutrients, a designation that had set up the potential for a cleanup plan in 2008.

Instead, the DEP set a 2013 and 2018 deadline to lower levels of copper and bacteria, respectively, in Naples Bay.

The city of Naples adopted a law earlier this year restricting fertilizer use with the aim of keeping it from washing into coastal waters.