Alison Higgins, Key West Sustainability Coordinator, joined Good Morning Keys on KeysTalk 96.9/102.5FM this morning to talk about the Key West Water Quality Improvement Plan.
What’s going on with the plan?
Higgins said, “While the focus has very much been the very recent ILA, which just specifically was a piece of our water quality monitoring, we also have this bigger improvement plan, which actually has actions as well. So you can’t just measure. It’d be nice to do something about it. So this all started a couple years back with our very first strategic plan effort. Aside from a couple of have to monitorings that we did, either through our storm water or through our ports and marinas that were for looking after our systems, we weren’t really doing anything on our own. So the strategic plan said, hey, this is important to over 4,000 residents voted, and they said water quality is important. At the exact same time, the sanctuaries Restoration Blueprint was shopping its way around, and everybody said, water quality is important. I said what I need is people who do this for a living to help advise. So the National Marine Sanctuary has a water quality protection program and that group meets quite often, and so I went to them and I said, hey, we’re looking to see what a city can do. The great news is they had just done a big prioritization effort themselves, like maybe the year before. So we went through that list. We also went through a couple of other plans.”
Out of that came 11 goals.
Higgins said, “We presented those to the commission, and they’re like, this is great. Do more. So we said, okay, well, the next step is you can’t do more without the funding for the bandwidth. So we sat down and we went back through those 11 goals and said, okay, what does your one look like? We had maybe 40 or 50 actions that we pared down to 20. So the people sitting at the table, there’s eight different entities. So it was FDEP, one person from the marine sanctuary, one person from University of Florida, the Monroe County marine resources, College of Florida Keys, Mote Marine, and all of those folks sat down and ranked together these things and so for our implementation for FY 25, our number one was our wastewater infrastructure. When our wastewater plant was built, it was the first central sewer in the Keys. Everybody else kind of had to be forced into it by the state 20 years later. But we were winning awards for the steps we had taken to reduce what used to be just outfalls, and to not highly treated water. So now we have advanced wastewater treatment, which is basically two steps away from potable and it gets super deep injection, not shallow, like the city of Marathon had to just step back from and now they have to go deep water injection. So that was our number one. Number two, we want to because of the city of Marathon discovery, we know that there is a shallow well on South Stock Island, not our jurisdiction, but the waters flow. So we want to support finding out more, so we know yes, issue or no, not issue.”
Number three was looking at storm water fees.
Higgins said, “The way we charge for the amount of burden that an individual property puts on our overall storm water system was an average number that came up from 20 years ago on what was the average coverage on a property of impervious area? So if the rain falls and it hits your roof, then it hits your driveway, and your entire front lawn is driveway, then it just flows out to the street. So the city is shouldering most of the runoff that comes from your property. If it hits your roof and went to a rain barrel, and the stuff that hits your front yard goes into the grass, you are not our biggest issue. So the best management practice is actually to have tiers that reflect the amount above the average or below the average, that your property has an impervious surface, so that only those that are greatly burdening the system help support the system. If you’re being part of the solution, you don’t pay as much money.”
Number four was better trash cans near the ocean.
Higgins said, “Some of these ones we have are big, open tops, blows across, the bag comes out. So we were looking at those, working with the county so that we potentially can do a bulk buy, which will reduce the overall price of individual cans. We have a lot of data, like I was saying, we’ve been collecting from our marinas and from our outfalls for a couple of decades. We would take this data and we would turn it into the state. The great news is, all that data, is good, 99.9% of that data is good. So you turn it over and they say, thanks, but we haven’t sat and really looked at it and analyzed it like, hey, does this show that, over time, we are now 30% better than when we started? Is there one place that that has not gotten better? This data, we found out that it’s eligible to be put in a public database so that other scientists can use that as baseline data for our region. So we want to make sure we get that data that is usable into that public database. Then we also looked at hey, on what we’re doing for right now going forward, can we make other measurements that we are taking eligible, getting the right standards so they can also, going forward, go into the database. So we’ve made a couple of tweaks with the help of our partners on the team from FDEP, and we’re doing that now. So we’re even collecting better data that can be used by more.
Number eight wants to look at what’s called contaminants of emerging concern.
Higgins said, “This is anything. This is the PFAS in the waters. It’s the pharmaceuticals in the fish. This is such a new and emerging area, there is no one central knowledge. Some people are looking at it in different places, and we want to get the right people at the table and say, hey, is there something we can do? What can we do? And if we do it, how do we measure that? Can we show that we made a difference here? And what comes from absolutely somewhere else that we can’t do anything about except for trying to avoid, what is that mix? So when we get to the water policy monitoring, you don’t take data, just to take data, you have a question you’re trying to answer. We looked at all the other studies that are going around, and some of them are super long term, and they’re there to show that baseline, to show the changes over time, and see if we’ve done better or worse. That’s their question. There’s a lot of short term ones where they have a very specific question they’re trying to answer. That goes along the lines of the first EPA grant that CFA got, which was just looking at the harbor. So they went through the quality control, they’ve collected data for a year, and their master report will be coming out late spring. The second grant they got, which was looking specifically at the CEC’s, contaminants of concern that we were interested in at that time we asked them. They wrote a grant, and they are going to be looking at, for the next year, oxybenzone off of our beaches. That’s the sunscreen component that’s not great for corals. They’re going to be looking at sucralose in our mooring fields. That’s the way that you can tell whether, if there’s urine in the water, is it human, or is it not human? So sucralose shows you that somebody’s been drinking, their diet whatever, and that’s a really good example of inadequate pump outs. So we can say, hey, is that still a problem? Is it not a problem? And then the third one, hydrogen sulfide was the only thing that we haven’t been able to rule out as a potential issue at the landfill. So we want to make sure that we do our due diligence. Now, everybody knows hydrogen sulfide is that rotten egg smell that you get, but at very high levels, it’s bad. Usually the stink is usually so bad that you’re out of that area before you succumb to anything. But we want to make sure that we go down that rabbit hole and can say, nope, not an issue. So those are the three things that’s being looked at right now.”
The other question is when is it safe to go swimming?
Higgins said, “So we said, okay, the department of health monitors every other week. So there is a data point. But if you go to that beach, and the data point says that two weeks ago, it was bad, is it still bad? Is it good? So step one, we are proposing in the new RFP that the City Commission asked for, is to say, hey, we’re going to increase the monitoring. But we don’t want to just do presence/absence. We’d like to make it so we have less poor reports. So the next step is to get the right people in the room and say, hey, instead of just doing presence/absence for bacteria, just like we found a way to do sucralose that says this is human, you can do a different test that says, this bacteria is human, this bacteria is dog, this bacteria is bird, this is iguana. So we can find out, hey, when something tests poor, what is it for? And if we find out what it’s for, our action might be completely different. So then we actually have the information. So we ask that question, we got that data, and then what can we do with that? Then you monitor after the fact, after that action, to see if you did it, did we achieve? So there’s a bunch of other areas as far as, what are the questions we want to ask there? We still need to devise that plan, to get the data to ask the question in the first place. So that is the big picture in what the RFP that we put together is. Okay, we have these other areas of concern. Let’s look at the existing data. Is there something that we’re missing? Is this area good? Is there still something of concern? Is it not covered by anybody else? Okay, if it’s not, what is our design for water quality data so that we can measure what our issue is, and then be able to tell, after we’ve come up with an action, that we’ve made a difference and the thing is, you have to be very methodical about it, because you could go into a car dealer and be like, hey, look at my car, and they’re like, oh, what’s wrong with it? You’re like, I don’t know, look at my car. Well, he’ll look at your car, but it’s not well spent money, especially you may have one little issue, you might have no issues. So the biggest first thing is getting someone who has that skill set, whether it be a firm, that can come and say, hey, I looked at the data. These are your potential issues. I suggest this sampling to tease out what we could do, and then this is what we should do to mitigate that problem.”