Taking care of Sarasota County’s sewage is an increasingly expensive task. Expect rates to go up.
By Johannes Werner
Original Air Date: November 22, 2024
Host: A Bradenton man just lost a leg to flesh-eating bacteria, after wading in the Sarasota Bay. With storm flooding and million-gallon sewage spills, high enterococci bacteria levels in coastal waters, and algae blooms, our sewage systems are under strain and in the spotlight. So when the Sarasota County Utilities director reports to the public, we better listen.
Johannes Werner: Expect your water rates to go up. The county utility this year has asked for a $6 rate increase for the average customer, raising the monthly bill to about $108. Annual spending by the county utility is expected to rise by one-fourth over the next five years, from roughly $150 million to more than $200 million. And you can be sure that will be reflected in your bill.
That’s in part due to capital investment needed for Sarasota County’s wastewater infrastructure. The county is facing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of updates to bring its wastewater treatment facilities, manholes, pipes, and lift stations up to snuff.
On Wednesday, Brooke Bailey presented the Sarasota County Utilities’ annual report to her bosses, the county commissioners. But she gave only glimpse about how much the county will have to spend on wastewater infrastructure.
The county is investing close to $20 million in an upgrade of the Venice Gardens wastewater treatment plant, in addition to the $210 million it is investing in the Bee Ridge plant. Maintaining aging sewage pipes is an increasingly expensive task.
Bailey’s report came just a couple hours after the commissioners agreed to shuffle $8.8 million in federal funding from an affordable housing project to the Venice Gardens sewage processing plant.
Venice Gardens is the second sewage plant undergoing an update in Sarasota County, and the American Rescue Plan Act funding will go towards doubling the capacity of the facility and converting it to advanced treatment technology. The total cost of that project is close to $20 million.
The county’s biggest facility at Bee Ridge is currently going through a $210 million update. Expected to be done next year, that plant will be able to process 18 million gallons per day – up from 12 – and it uses membrane bioreactor technology, which filters out pretty much everything we don’t want to be in the water. Bee Ridge is the biggest facility in Florida using the advanced technology, and it received an award for that.
But the third of the county’s three plants – the Central County wastewater treatment facility – still does not filter nitrates and phosphates. Bailey did not mention any plans for that facility in her report.
A recently published scientific study proves the connection between phosphate and nitrate discharges and the length of algae blooms.
Brooke Bailey
Meanwhile, the main reason for sewage spills during storms is leaking sewage pipes that overwhelm treatment plants with too much water. You may not be thinking about suburban Sarasota as a place with old infrastructure, but it’s actually getting there. So the county has to smoke-test pipes installed before 2001 for leaks, and it is checking others with closed-circuit TV. When leaks are found, they are being sealed with lining. Bailey says they are on top of about one-third of its system.
Brooke Bailey: During the past storms and things like that, especially Debby, we’ve talked quite a bit about inflow and infiltration. So again, during Debby, we saw our flows more than double to our treatment facilities. Our lift stations got it to there, but then our treatment facilities had to deal with that. But because of the CMOM program, we’ve actually been doing a lot of smoke testing. We’ve spelled that out here, smoke testing and the closed circuit TV. So what that is, the smoke testing is we are pretty much smoking the pipe and then we can see if there’s cracks within the pipe, for instance, gravity mains, so you can see smoke coming out from the grass and things like that, and you know that you need to go in.
JW: All that is costly. The county has spent close to $27 million on this in the past seven years, lining 126 miles of aging pipes with PVC tubes. That spending will go up to $17 million over the next four years.
The commissioners did not have any questions for the utilities director.
Reporting for WSLR, Johannes Werner.
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