Is Marco Island Gaslighting Citizens on Water Quality Efforts?

On 9/18/23 the City of Marco Island issued a press release touting its receipt of the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (FDEP) FDEP’s approval of Marco Islands Alternate Water Quality Plan(4e) (Plan) 4e alternative water quality restoration plan. We believe the Plan does not include any meaningful measures to reduce nutrients in Marco's interior canals and bay waterways nor improve overall canal water quality. Rather, it is merely a recapitulation of the City’s existing Municipal Separate Storm Sewer System Phase II MS4 Stormwater Management Program (MS4) responsibilities to continue doing nothing noteworthy to improve the surrounding water quality and circumvent the Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) process. As submitted, it fails to be a solid attempt to improve surface waters.

It is written in a way that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to measure what is actually being spent for each initiative. It contains several manipulations of data and information and intertwines “water improvement” with "stormwater", "sewer", "repair and replacement" and normal "infrastructure" projects. Municipal projects to simply drain water off the streets are not improving our water quality. Nearly every project is already part of the City’s MS4 obligations or activities already in place.

It does not seek to improve the quality of its reuse irrigation by following the lead of the Florida Keys and other cities and counties that are looking to the future and embracing Advanced Water Treatment technology to improve water quality and protect our environment. Nor does it suggest reducing fertilizer application in the other months where it isn’t banned.

Further, the City did not invite any public participation in the Plan, solicit any input or even inform its own Waterways Advisory Committee until after they had already submitted the Plan to the FDEP. (The Waterways Committee has completely fallen apart, isn’t even called “Advisory” anymore, and hasn’t met since May,2023.) Instead, it hired Jacobs Engineering Group (Jacobs) for $26,170 to produce a Plan that does nothing new, doesn’t offer any benchmarks or goals and fails to address nutrient loading or removing the benthic algal mats that often clog our canals.

We challenge Marco to produce a plan that eliminates nutrients in a meaningful way while incorporating real facts and solid benchmarks that demonstrate adherence to a real Plan.

David Rasmussen

Robert Roth

Andrew Tyler

Rick Woodworth 

Clean Marco Waters, LLC