EPA Honcho Tours County Environmental Projects

Knowing Sarasota County is a national leader in storm water issues, the nation’s “water lady” paid a visit Thursday to learn more about the area’s successes.

Nancy Stoner is the Environmental Protection Agency’s “water lady,” enforcing both the Clean Water Act and the Safe Water Act.

As Acting Assistant Administrator, she’s responsible for federal standards from the moment a drop of drinking water enters the utility system to the moment it comes out of the sewage treatment plant.

Her responsibility concerns storm water, too, as runoff from uplands affects water quality in bays, estuaries and eventually oceans.

On Thursday the senior Washington environmental official took a whirlwind tour of some of Sarasota’s achievements, focusing on the .

Teresa Conner, the county’s environmental services director, led off with a historical note. In the 1990s the county suffered the 100-year flood three times — in 1992, 1995 and 1997. It forced the county to re-examine its storm water system. One outcome was creation of “the celery fields,” which is a man-made retention area that mimics natural processes.

It does such a good job, birds literally flocked to return to the area, which was once called “Sarasota’s Everglades” before it was drained to create fields to grow produce.

The makeover was completed last year, and water managers think it will not only hold back water to prevent flooding, but also slow the transmission of storm water to allow plants to clean it naturally.

Otherwise storm water flows down paved surfaces along the curbs and gutters directly into the bay —which took the party to the second stop of the visit at

Honore Avenue

What once was planned as a four-lane, high-speed arterial turned into a two-lane, pedestrian and bicycle-friendly route using the most modern techniques to control storm water.

Instead of curbs and gutters, the water is shunted into “bio-swales,” that forms a kind of mini-retention pond on the roadside. Again, the idea is for the water to rest among plants for purification.

A second advantage was cost. Roads require some form of storm water mitigation, and if the traditional retention ponds were used for Honore, there would be a cost to purchase them. Consulting Engineer Molly Williams told Stoner the county saved about $3.5 million by replacing ponds with bio-swales.

Red Rock Park

Next stop: a home-like building set among a playground in Red Rock Park, near the Field Club and close to the bay. The building was a vacuum lift station for the county’s $100 million-plus project to replace 14,000 septic tanks along Philippi Creek watershed.

Technical Director Greg Rouse said the project is almost halfway finished by the end of this year. He said the area served by this vacuum lift station served about 600 homes in the up-scale neighborhood, “or about 98 percent of the lots.” Putting the homes on a central sewer system eliminated huge pollution loads from failing septic tanks.

While there, Stoner was briefed on how in the past two decades purchased more than 130 small “package plants” set up by developers to treat the sewage from their projects. The county is now building a unified and interconnected system to meet advanced wastewater treatment standards.

Jeff Greenwell with the Florida Department of Environmental Protection said, “I get calls from all around the country asking how this can be done.”

Standing in the park, Stoner said, “I came here to look at success stories. We need to see things working in the real world.”

Roberts Bay

Last stop on the tour was also the last stop for water in the Philippi Creek watershed – Roberts Bay.

A pontoon boat was waiting to take Stoner, senior county and state officials and the press for a look at the waters between Siesta Key and the mainland.

“What I see as an important part of my job is finding good, local solutions and spreading them around,” Stoner said on the boat. “The EPA is the largest funder for many projects. But funding is going to be very tight at the federal level.”

At the conclusion of the tour, she was asked what her “takeaway” is.

Stoner said, “What I’ve seen is it can be done in such a way that addresses all the needs of the community. I saw best practices not only in technology but in the community approach as well.”