Waterways Advisory Committee - Regular Meeting

More than ninety minutes

Thirty seconds.

To hit that. Okay.

We've got thirty That's

where we need to go. I'm sorry. Go ahead.

Ralph, can I have a motion to adjourn? So moved. Second? Aye. This meeting is adjourned.

Committee meeting. Call to order. Could we begin with our roll call, please?

Member Leblundowski? Here. Member Rohina?

Here.

Member Winter? Vice chair High?

Here.

Member Schneider? Here. Member Woodworth? Here. Chair Mascoupe?

Here. Okay. I'd like to stand, if we will, for the pledge of allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of The United States Of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Thank you.

We now move to the approval of the agenda. I have a request to combine two items into one area here. And so I'd like to see if and that'll be my only comment on this. I would like to take item ID item 25Dash4561, the correspondence from Richard Eckstein, and put that along with six c, which is twenty five dash forty five thirty seven. It will make things much smoother.

It will save a lot of time. And the reason for that is that when we're initially putting together the agenda, Mr. Eckstein was not on the agenda, and now he is. So this will make things a lot smoother, and I think that everybody will understand why I'm doing this.

Move to where?

I'd like to six c. Right. Right. I'd like to combine those two at that time, which would be under six c, if that's okay. Do I have any comment or any discussion on that? No. Okay. So

we need a motion and a second to approve the agenda as amended.

Okay. I have that comment. Surely. Couple of comments. I'm sorry. Okay, Ralph.

Is there any reason why we can't combine six a and seven c? Six a, which It sound like they're one as part of the other. It might save some time.

And seven c, because I don't know exactly what you will be presenting under whiteboard topics and strategic planning. I'm okay with that if it doesn't take away from the material on six a.

I'll say you've been trying to present for a while.

I've been trying to present that.

Pushing it back based on time.

I have been doing that.

Benefit of I'd I'd just say leave it as is. I mean, just he's been pushed back a few times on his own.

Right. I mean Okay.

I mean, I would prefer to keep it separate because there are basically two separate issues. But,

you know k. It just seemed like it was one was involved, the other but that's I

would understand why you'd say that, but I'd prefer to leave it as it is. K.

I'll second your did you make a motion to

I'm gonna make a motion to to Well,

I made the motion. I well, it wasn't a motion.

Yeah.

So I'll just withdraw it.

Okay. I appreciate that. On the other, I would like to make that motion to move ID twenty five forty five forty five sixty one to be included with ID 254537. Motion made. Do I have a second? Second. Do I have any any all all in favor? Aye. Aye. Okay. The motion passes. Thank you.

I have a couple of the comments in the agenda, if that's okay. Absolutely. Go right ahead. After six c, just for your timing, I have a what's the KK Superblend? Yes. I have a couple of extra comments. So for your timing, it might take a little longer.

Okay.

I understand. Seven b, the depth survey. We touched on that a little bit just about every meeting of the need to have information in regards to the survey so we can make good decisions, particularly as we go to dredging. I'd like to expand that from depth survey to water weight condition survey. Okay.

That's vague. What is that?

I personally think that we can expand all these things all we like and we'll be here for three hours. I mean, I would say if you want to put something else about water condition, put it on a separate agenda for another meeting.

You don't think

The depth survey thing is not really going to take me very long, quite honestly.

Right. But this is more than depth survey, but that's fine. I would that way, I'll expand it in the conversation then.

Yeah. I think that would be the time to do it as opposed to now.

Alright. That's

Okay. Any

other comments?

One more. Yeah. Okay. 13. I know you asked to move it. Yes. I was, when this email came in, asked from outside of Independent of some comments when the email first came in by a couple of council members. So now that it's on the agenda, I'll just hand to you some of my comments because I'm I guess I'm compelled to share that and have a copy for Jim for the record. I'll give it to him later just so you have that. And that's, that's all I have with that, I think. Okay.

I think that's fair. If there are no other comments on the approval of the agenda, I'd like to get an approval of the minutes. Do I have a motion to approve the minutes? I have

one more comment on it.

Excuse me, mister chair. Did you vote on the approval of the agenda?

They did. Yes. We did. They did. Yes.

They did.

Yes. That has been voted on for the record. Okay. Approval of the minutes.

Just procedural, I think. I I'm not sure how how you do that. Under the proposed agenda topics, the third one, the whiteboard and strategic planning

Right.

It has member Winter against that. Since it's the minutes of what occurred at that meeting, it's hard to have him, since there's a meeting that he didn't participate in, to have it exactly like that. So I don't know if that's okay or not.

Do we have any comment as to that concern? I have no problem with it, but I don't know for any other reason. No.

What exactly is the issue here?

No. It's got you on the proposed agenda topics as proposing the third one, the whiteboard and strategic planning item, but you didn't participate in a meeting. So I'm okay with it, but I'm just wondering whether procedure wise, since it's about what occurred at that meeting, since you didn't participate in it, how can you propose an agenda topic? So if that's no problem for anybody else, that's no problem for me. I just thought I'd throw

it out. I don't have a problem with it. If if anybody has a problem with it, if they would let

me know. Well, member Lewandowski was on is on there. So and he was involved.

I'm fine.

He's got a

lot of information.

If he's good? Yeah.

I'm good. Okay. We all set? Yep. Okay. Then I would like to move on to

I have one more comment. Oh, okay, Rick. I appreciate that Justin noted in the minutes that I raised the question of whether our recommendations on the fertilizer ordinance were ever passed on to counsel, and I am just asking the chair whether our recommendations were ever passed on to counsel.

I have not been notified that they were, but we going are to be talking about that in just a few minutes. So I don't have that. I did not hear that. Who would

have passed the mine? It have to be either you or Justin.

That's a good question.

I mean, would say from looking at the town hall meeting, the City Council are very well aware of the issue around super K fertilization and the fertilization topics both on what homeowners are putting on and whole issue with waterworks.

Well, my point is we voted in favor of it. The recommendation should have gone to counsel, it did not. When counsel had their workshop, they noted that my motion to recommend that they get a price for AWT was noted in their notes, but counsel subsequently unanimously approved it. It would seem that things we do here at Waterways Committee do make their way to counsel. So if we make a recommendation and we vote affirmatively, whatever the number is, that should go to council.

Absolutely. And it does.

Well, but I think the real issue there is when the AWT got brought forth to the Waterways Committee on an issue, it got voted five to two, which meant it got voted down. But it still subsequently went to City Council. Correct. And I think City Council is very well aware that there is a referendum coming and signatures are being collected for AWT. So I am not

quite sure really what your My point is our recommendation didn't get to council. They may have read the minutes of our meeting, but we we made a motion, we made a recommendation, and it should have gone to counsel in one form or another.

Are you talking, Rich, about

the AWT price? No. No. About funding for the Fertile Enforcement. Oh.

I'm not. I have to check the minutes.

You know, we're gonna be talking about this a little bit later and, you know, we'll be able to get to the bottom of that because it'll be brought up again and I'm going to be making a motion on that. So if you can just hold off on that until then, we'll we'll get to it today.

Nope. My objection that it didn't go to counsel when we voted on it.

I'd like that on the record. Okay. Thank you. Duly noted. Okay. I'd like to move along to old business, which has been old for a while now. Number six ID 254550, prevention and remediation. This is a paper. Can I have this put up on the screen? It should be available. Do they have it? They should have it. I have it right here. This should be there. Is that the memorandum? No. That's no. No, that is not it. This would be the Take

it for

you. The copy of This here?

No. No.

No. No. No. This here. It does.

Oh, I'll do it.

This here. I'd like to have that on the screen if I could.

Oh, yeah. That's right.

Is that your only one?

I may have some more in here. I have to look. Oh, okay. Great. Thank you. I I just really like to go over this for a moment. If we could be able to see that.

Wait a minute. Are we on to old business?

Yes.

Did we do approval of the minutes?

Did we do I don't think we did. No. Okay. My my mistake. Right. I'd like to make a motion that we approve the minutes.

I second.

Second. Do I have any discussion? All in favor? Aye. Opposed? Okay. The minutes are now approved and thank you for bringing me to that attention. Okay. Now we can move on.

Could we possibly have this on the screen at the back? Because we don't have copies. I mean, I can pull it up on my computer, but it would be useful for people on diets to actually see it That

would be helpful. Thank you.

We have to, we can share.

The entire the entire area of issues that we have been looking at and discussing back and forth here, not just since I've been chair, but for many, many years, probably a decade or more. As we look at this, we have two areas that are involved in this entire issue. One is prevention, the other is remediation. And I think one of the things that we do is we get involved in focusing on one item and not focusing on the big picture. And the reason I have the screen up is because I want to look at the big picture.

It doesn't look like a lot, but it's the whole picture of what we're dealing with. And I think you can't do one without the other. I think we've talked about this, but I think it's really important that we combine prevention and remediation together as they can be able to mesh and to combine in the best ways that they can. One of the things that we're going to find out a little bit later is when we take a look at the K and K fertilizer and Mr. Eckstein's proposal and his letter.

You can't do these just piecemeal, and you can't do these altogether in a big, you know, in a big mess. You have to really, really take time to to plan, to think, and to handle these in the right orders. And so I've been doing a lot of thinking about this, and I think that's really important that we stop adding to the problem, and at the same time, begin to look at solving what's already there. And I think very, very briefly, we've had fifty or sixty years of basically trashing our canals. We created Marco Island and we left the maintenance to to nature, basically.

We have not maintained anything. So what what we have and after looking into a lot of this, we according to a lot of people I've talked to, we have some pretty bad monsters lurking in the bottom of our canals. When we go to looking and testing and dredging, if we ever get there, and finding what's in there, we're going to be really, really shocked. So I think it's really important, though, that you have to stop adding to it and you begin to start cleaning it up. So the reason I have the screen up is because to get an idea as to where we start and how we proceed.

So basically, I think one of the most important things, number one, fertilization control. The two proposals that I have later will show us that getting off of the nitrogen and the phosphorus completely on this island and going to something else that does not hurt our environment in any way is really important to start to look at that. Another thing that I really do feel is important is that it has been brought to my attention, even though that the amount of the phosphorus and the nitrogen in the wastewater coming from the AWT is not hugely significant, it still is putting phosphorus and nitrogen into our environment, which we don't need, shouldn't Correction. Be

It's not coming from the AWP because we don't have one.

I'm sorry, I'm sorry, from our wastewater treatment plant. Correct. I appreciate that. So those are a couple of things that then that's also going to come up in one of my other items that we're going be taking a look at at the end. There are things we're already doing.

We're already doing street sweeping. We're already doing enforcement and education of the discharges. We're working on these items. So it's not like we haven't started. But what I'd really like to do is to just get some comments from the committee as to how you feel about I mean and I know we could take the whole two hours and more and talk about this.

But if I think it's good to see the big picture. That's why we're doing this. And I think rather than just to be saying that the whole problem will be solved by the AWT proposal. That the whole thing, that's all the problem is. And I think a lot of people, when they go to sign a petition and they look at this out there, they're thinking, if we do that, we're good. It's all done. And it's not true. It's really not. And I think that we need to have the big picture here and people need to be aware of it. So that's what I just wanted to put out there really briefly, and I'd like to get some comment.

Yeah, I'd like to make a comment to that. I think this is a great or a good start, but I think we need a little bit of a prequel to this from the perspective of there's things that I don't understand and maybe other people in the room or on the council or on the committee understand as well. A couple of really good comments came out of the council workshop a couple of weeks ago. One was about what our offshore waters look like, right? So in other words, if I think we need to understand, number one, where does the water come from that's filling our canals?

Does it because I don't know the answer to that. I'm assuming that the bulk of it comes from The Gulf, but I don't know what direction from The Gulf it comes from. I know that it goes up, makes this big loop. So I don't know if any type of hydrology study has been done come back and take a look at that. So that's one issue.

Number two, how much of it, from a percentage perspective, comes from the Everglades, comes from the backside of the island? How much of it potentially coming from Blaco and the discharges that come from there? So I think, number one, we need to take a look at the source because somebody made the comment last week that we can do all the remediation that we want. You gotta remember, we have the jurisdiction up to 10 feet off of the seawall and then we stop, right, from a from a city and from a from a committee perspective. So if the if the problem is larger out there than it is here, we need to understand that first and foremost before we go back and we spend a nickel on anything, right, from that perspective.

Mhmm. The second thing is, I I keep hearing about the the evil of reuse water, and it very well may be. I I I don't know. I'd like to get some historical perspective on over the last, if we have it, Justin, over the last forty, fifty years, what's the history of reuse water on the island? What's the volume of it year on year?

What's the quality of the water that we're putting out there year on year, does it get tested, and if it gets tested, what's in it? And then to have an understanding of, when you take a look at the volume of water that's in our canals versus the volume of reuse water that's coming out, what's the percentage? And there are very smart people out there that can go back and tell you exactly what the volume of water that is inside of the area inside of Marco Island. And then you can take a look at the percentage of reuse water. And then you can also calculate that reuse water that goes out there, exactly how much of it does make it into the canal, how much of it ends up in the grass, how much of it ends up in the ground. I mean, that's why we have the grass and that's why we do the exfiltration swivel, all of that

kind of stuff. The

last thing is, and you just brought it up about the monster in the canals, and it very well may be, but we don't know. I know Rick and his team have done some stuff with it. But have we professionally had people go out? I know we test the water, but have we done core sampling around the island from a professional outfit that comes back and takes a look at it and says, this is what's in your canal up to and I don't know what the depth would be. I wouldn't begin to pretend to know how deep you need to go to make a difference. Is it six inches? Is it six feet? I I don't know. I would guess it's probably closer to six inches.

I just wanted to respond to that. Back in Hurricane Irma, when all the water went out, heard all kinds of reports. I wasn't here to see it because we had to evacuate. But heard all kinds of reports that there were motorcycles. There were bicycles. There were drums of that could have had old

Dead bodies. Pardon me? Dead bodies and drums in the canals. Yes.

Yes. I mean, I've heard from that time that these were spokes.

That they weren't live bodies.

Yeah.

No. I that let's hope not. Let's hope there weren't any but we're not we're not working on hope here. We're working on what is.

Right.

And I think that when we if and when we do get to that point, we're going to find out some things that we didn't know, and we are going to be really surprised and shocked. But So you are right. And we are going to be talking about this But a little bit later the

only point that I want to make is before to me, before we, in an educated manner, debate a lot of these issues, I think there is some information that we need so we can make better informed decisions.

I'll be asking

provost And, Justin, I don't know of any of the things that I brought up. I'm hopeful that some of that is in some of the some of the consultants that we've paid in the past from a perspective of the the water flow, where does it come from. I don't know if any of that information already exists. If it does, I'd love to get it so we don't spend money again to find it.

Can I make a comment on it? Please do. Yes, Justin. What he said was very well taken, but it's been anybody who's followed this area for the last seven years Mhmm. It gets restated and stated as if there's a 100% smoking gun and a 100% silver bullet solution, and there isn't any. At some point in time, all the stakeholders and the experts need to get in the same room. Here's where we are. Here's what we know and take action. Because the way I see us is we're gonna continue what's been done for seven years, piecemealing it, remaking people with new people, understanding. Right.

I mean, there's seven years in history. Some of us noticed the nuts and bolts, some of us don't. I'm hoping in that seven c item, that's what we're

talking we're gonna be doing.

A strategic plan and actually take can you imagine if we did AWT seven years ago? I don't Well, we might be we might even not have to be here for all we for the information we know.

Or we may have spent $30,000,000, it may not have made a bit of difference.

I I think

I don't I don't so to the so I Ralph, I'm agreeing with you 100%. All I'm asking for is is that as we have this debate, I think there's more information, scientific information that we need to have it. I agree. I don't think we're gonna come back and they're gonna do one thing and we're gonna come back and say if we fix this one thing. But I wanna make sure that we understand what it is that we're trying to fix. I agree that we have a problem with our canals completely. I would like to understand where the water is coming from to make sure that we look at that as part of it because I don't see that on this list.

I'll be

talking about that.

Okay, good. Thank

you. I'm going be bringing it up. It's very important. Chair. Any other comments?

Yes.

Jim asked Martin a question about do we have any data existing? Maybe specific to sampling of of the bottom or or other I don't know what what question you were asking.

Reuse water was another one. Oh, re volume of re Water. Yeah. Reuse water.

Alright. The the volume of reuse water, we know because that comes from the wastewater treatment plant. We know how much goes out to Marco Island, how much goes to Marco Shores, Hammock Bay. Not all of it goes to Marco Island. There's a golf course out in Hammock Bay that the city serves.

I know that Jeff Poteet, director of the water and sewer department, did some calculations some years ago after the ERD report came out to look at the volume of reclaimed water, how much was applied, what the concentration of the nutrients were in that, how much is taken up by vegetation, and then what compare that to the volume of water in the canals. So he he's done that calculation. It wasn't a a an engineer or consultant. He he went through that exercise. As far as the origin of where this water from around Marco Island comes from, it is tidal.

So as the tides rise and and go down, that's where, you know, the overwhelming majority of of the water comes from. Now does that come from runoff from, the Marco River, 10,000 islands, Everglades, side? Or does it come from the Gulf? Well, it you know, what's facing The Gulf comes from the Gulf. What's facing that side comes from that side.

Now what percentage of that? We don't know that. And that would be some very complex modeling of the region, not just Marco Island and the immediate areas. That would take a pretty substantial consulting engineering effort modeling to look at that. And that is not only just hydrology, but it's also hydraulics from the tidal flows and from the runoff coming from the land.

The canal bottom sediment that was mentioned, did the city no. The city hasn't done any any sampling or testing of the canal bottom settle sediment. I know that Rick, his involvement with Clean Waters Marco, they did some of that. I saw some of those emails that had some some some cores. And but I I know you hired a diver to get those, but I don't think that was a, an engineering firm that did that.

But that was a that was the only effort that I know of of of getting that. Now that would presumably presumably be part of this p three effort for the dredging. It would you'd they would have to do bathymetric surveys, which we're gonna talk about later, and they would have to do profiles of the canal bottom sediment. How deep is it? What is it made of?

What are the nutrients in it? What are the characteristics? So none of that has been done. But, yes, all that would contribute to the data to give us a better picture of what is there, what we what are we dealing with. The only thing I would caution is that that modeling effort for determining the the origin of the water would be very expensive, time consuming, and I don't know if you're gonna get a lot of bang for the buck from that because, essentially, you're gonna have the bulk of it be being tidal water coming in from The Gulf and the very small percentage of it coming from land runoff.

Thank you, Justin. Before we go to Rick, I just wanna say later on in a few months, when a lot of the people come back, I would like to invite Charlotte Roman to this committee to give a report on exactly what's coming from the interior of Florida through Okeechobee, out the Caloosahatchee, to the Gulf, and to us. And I think, I have talked to a lot of people who do know a lot through, you know, SwiftMUD and through others. And also mister Eckstein, which we'll talk about later, the phosphate mines Upstate do have a lot to do with what's coming down and the leaching and a lot of other things, which I won't get into now. But there's a lot coming from Upstate through Okeechobee that is affecting our waters that we don't have any way to do anything about here on Marco, but they're working on it.

It's not done yet, and it is affecting us. And it has been affecting us for a long time. So I just wanted to bring that up that this will be an item that we'll that we'll be looking at.

Yeah. Certainly, the water management district has a lot of information regarding the overall big picture of the of the runoff through the through the Everglades and through their comprehensive Everglades restoration program.

Right.

But if you wanna zoom in on the immediate area, what's coming towards Marco Island, perhaps the big Cypress Basin arm of the water management district would have that. We don't know. We'd need to

I'd like to reach out to them. I I'm I I may work on that in the next month. I I appreciate the the overview on that. Rick and then then Martin.

Have a few comments. Pardon? I have a few comments. Go right ahead. First of all, the city monthly publishes reports that are on the website about the effluent that comes out in the reuse water.

I don't know that the water and sewer department has a chart over all the years that it has been coming out, but I can tell you the data is there. And I can tell you I have data going back for several years on that. So I mean, is a way to look at that. We also know how much reuse water is being used for irrigation. Today, it is 700,000,000 gallons a year approximately.

So that part of the data is already out there. There is also data that Gene Warderhoff, a former member of the committee, did every month and he charted the readings for nitrogen, phosphorus, and oxygen in the canals. And so if you go back to the minutes that are in the water committee reports, for the time that Gene was there, all that data is available. I will also tell you that that Clean Markel Waters did a test for nitrogen and phosphorus at one, four, and 10 miles out into the Gulf, collected the samples according to the protocol that Dane Lab gave us, and we took that water to the lab. There were either no or infinitesimal traces of nitrogen and phosphorus in Gulf waters at either the one, four, and 10 mile testing points.

Now, I cannot tell you that that is one test at one point in time.

Is a snapshot of time.

Snapshot. Right. But I can tell you that there is and any fisherman, anybody that goes out in a boat can tell you there is a difference in the water quality as you go out one, four, and 10 miles. It could be tested whether the city will approve the funding for that, but it could be tested one, ten, a 100 times and you would get a picture of whether there is nitrogen and phosphorus in The Gulf.

Was there any testing on the backside that we talked about, water coming from the Everglades side of it? No, we went

straight out from Marco Beach.

Okay. Rick, I will be bringing this up to vote on this, to make a motion toward the end of the meeting. I just wanted you to know that.

I just wanted to point out that, you know, we did a test to see if it was detectable and the lab we took it to could not find nitrogen and phosphorus in it. So, you know, there is data out there. I will also tell you that we did the sample of the muck, I will call it, in the canal, and I went back and looked at Harper's report and I did talk to Doctor. Harper and he will tell you or you will find when you test it, there is three or four things that are identifiable. There is dead algae in the canal, which we found.

There is debris, landscaping debris, grass, parts of trees, leaves. We found that in our sample. What we do not know is the chemical analysis of

what is

in the sediment. We do not know how much of that has nitrogen, phosphorus, or mercury, or any other chemical in that sediment but is and I will tell you that the test we did in the bay, it was three feet deep from my house. Across the street, I had the diver go down again and he was amazed. The muck in his canal was also three feet deep before the diver hit the hard sandy bottom. I believe when I had my dock wrapped in my canal, there were guys walking around at low tide, that the muck there was probably only six to eight inches deep.

So I think if you are going to do a survey of the island, you are going to find anywhere from six inches to three feet of of muck.

I am going to be making, along with this, we are going, I going to ask for a motion on that, also for the council to, so this is all coming.

Okay. Am just trying

to clarify the questions

that he asked. Absolutely. And there is a combination of facts put out in the facts that Gene Warderhoff logged, I know Dave Crane has logged, a lot of the stuff. When I was on the WACC before, I logged it. So there is We have a history. We have a history. Have got a lot of data. Yes, we do. And I will just say again, Justin did a great job at the water quality workshop of all the things that they have identified that the city is doing. I will go back to Harper again, the two things Dave Crane can say.

He said, Look first at the reuse water and the fertilizer and all the other things that the city is doing is part of. That is what he said. On the record, Martin.

Is that allowed? Could we do that?

Certainly, you can call for a public comment on any issue that's on the agenda. And Mr. Crane has asked to speak on this issue. So when the committee is done with its deliberation and discussion, you can certainly call him forward to discuss it.

Okay. Okay. We'll put that at that point.

Martin? So I guess, I feel like we're relitigating stuff that we've already discussed at Infinitum for five years. We know this is multifaceted. We know AWT could potentially be a part of it, although it's not required by state for us to move in that direction. To me, the point that was raised of six to three feet of sediment, completely agree that's I don't have empirical data to back that up.

But certainly, I know because I've been in Mike now and I got about two to three feet of muck. So where do we go from here? Do we continue to collect more data? Do we continue to pay more consultants? I think some good issues were raised at the town hall about the clarity or the nitrogen content offshore.

It's going to be a mix quite honestly in my opinion. I mean to me at a very high level the water out there is way cleaner than the water here. There's definitely a tidal influence on that. If I had to swagger number on it and this is just me from doing six years of service here, I would say it's about 85% of what's out there comes in here, but there's also a 15% to 20% factor of the stuff that's coming down from other parts of the country where they fertilize and they have mines and all that stuff. But at the end of the day, we have to move this topic forward.

And one of the things I think came out of the town hall was when the graphs were put up from a fertilizer and pollutant and whatever, 70.9 of that was being released from sediment and stuff that's already in our canals. I believe that to be the number that was put out there.

That's what I heard.

Obviously, the balance of that comes from potentially fertilizer across the island at around about, let's call it 30%.

Just interrupt for one second. The sediment release was caused by thirty, forty, fifty years of nitrogen and phosphorus being put into the canal. That is what contaminated the sediment release.

And the leaching of the septic.

So I take the point and I'm not disagreeing with that point, Rick. But here's the other piece of it. So we're focused on we're saying 70% of it comes from release of what's already there. Rough numbers and this is just me swagging at it. 30% comes from fertilization that is based from potentially something could be coming from the sewer department, although Jacobs would say that that's not the case when they isotope tested it.

The rest of it is coming obviously from landscapers or whatever. But this to me is like, if we have got that in the sediment, this is like when you have oil in the bilge of your boat. You can flush it as many times as you like, but you ain't getting rid of it until you get rid of that stuff and you suck it out and you have a clean bilge to start with. We can vote, you know, and it's going to referendum for AWT. And I'm sure that if that is not worded accurately about what it is, what the cost is to the individual homeowners and how long it will take us to see an improvement because that's really what should be put on the referendum, not what's on there currently.

There is no cost on there. And so if you put this out to the voting populace and say, do you want a clean water on Marco Island, there's not a single person that lives here that's going to say, oh, no, I don't want clean water. Everyone's going to vote yes. And that's So it's great. We're going to get a referendum that says we want AWT.

It's not mandated by state. It's an optional thing for us to do. And I agree it should go to the people to vote on it. But when it goes to the people, it should be based on what the cost is, when we expect to see the benefit of this and not position this thing as the one thing, vote for this, pay some money and then the island is all good. I think what should happen is that referendum, one, should include a financial piece secondly, it should include a timeline of when the experts tell us that we'll start to see benefit.

And maybe on that referendum, we should put another line in there to say, do you think as you know, a voter on the island, we should commit to $183,000,000 to dredge the island and get rid of all this stuff that's in the canal and see how people wanna vote on that. I don't think it needs to go to referendum. I think it needs to be a city council driven thing that the city council get the numbers and the facts and say this is what we want. And it can save all these people in clean waters and all these other things a whole load of time and energy because this is a city council issue. We don't control the budget. It's a big ticket item.

Martin, you're taking away my thunder because I'm going to be asking for that in a motion too toward the end.

Sorry. I said my piece. No.

No. Hey, you did it for me. Thank you. If we could move along because we have a lot to cover. If there's any more, I just want to give that

as an overview. There might be public comment.

Do have a public comment.

This appropriate to ask for public comment?

It is perfectly appropriate. One of the

members have

asked to speak

on Mr. Crane, we'd like to hear from you,

sir. Thank you. Good morning, everybody. David Crane, Marco Island resident. Boy, we continue to rehash kind of the same thing over and over again. Where how did we get here? We had Irma hit our water it actually probably six months before even Irma hit our water number started to decline decline from what it was. And where is it gone from here? It's kind of my point. Reuse certainly is a hot topic to say the least.

As Martin pointed out, and I mean there's so much in the Harper report guys that you really have to go through that. You're talking about soil samples or or bottom sediment samples. He did part of that back then. And the phosphorus, as an example, that was was found. 90 I believe it was 95 to 97% of the phosphorus found is is not soluble. It's not gonna reentrain into the water. It's in there but it it's locked and it can't come out. There's very little phosphorus that's there that actually comes out into the water. So again, go back, read it. It's you know, the summaries are easy.

I mean, the summaries are like eight pages, you know. The whole report is 500 and some pages. But if you get into the the details and get into where they've done those soil samples, what they found, one was in Collier Bay that is by me in North, you know, up in the North area in Old Marco. It's there.

Back

okay. Let's go first with Lake Okeechobee. It's a wives' tale. And you would think, looking at a map, you would think everything that comes out north of us is logically gonna come south. Noah has charts and and they keep an eye on this. And, yes, the the Gulf Stream that is way far out into the Gulf does go south. Mhmm. But there's another eddy current that comes from Florida Bay and comes up along the coast. Right? And is driving the water. And so in reality, in most times, the water coming out of Lake Okeechobee actually turns and goes north. That's why Sanibel gets hit so bad. Okay. Coral. You have yeah.

So it's there. It's a misnomer. It's there. I gave it to Gene when he was on the board and I was no longer on the board. I gave him that website. I can I'll find it again and show it to you. Now the other thing with currents as well is currents are driven usually in water that's a 100 and feet or deeper. And and water that is shallower than that, the surface winds affect it. So if we're getting winds out of the north, we get red tide. The surface wind is actually driving the surface down here and we get red tide from that. Okay? When I'll try to be as brief as I can. Sorry.

When

Veterans Park was opened up and we had the Farmers Market started up there again. I think I was at the first one afterwards. I ran into Bob Roth, another former member, And we were sitting there talking. He was getting his granola, and we were talking. And he mentioned, you know, Veterans Park, this is all reuse water that's here.

And we had we I had looked at the design drawings because as a water waste committee, were kinda involved in in that as well. And the drainage field that was built underneath Fenneritz Park with the reconstruction is only two to three feet deep. It's very shallow. So it it was like, oh, man. I mean, this is like finding the canary in in the in the mine shaft. If you test the water and the outflow coming out of the Veterans Park, there's two discharges into that canal. What's that like? At that point, I asked mister Poteet to check that. They sampled right there. The numbers were incredibly low.

I was shocked how much I don't remember the number, but it was way below what the numbers coming out of the wastewater plant is on the reuse water. That it had already been dropped significantly. No further testing I think has really been done by that but our monthly testing that we do Jane Hitler Park is roughly 300, 400 yards downstream on an outgoing tide because that's when we test the water, from Veterans Park. It would make sense that if it's showing up anywhere, the reuse, because that's that's the biggest concentration in one specific area, the drain field is shallow, what's that look like? So here's here's the results

from two We

are out of time though.

Let me show this is important. You guys gotta

I know it's important. What's Can I what's the rule on this?

The chair, of course, has discretion to allow any speaker to go

How much more time do you need?

I'm gonna show this, which is the water quality results at Henler Park for 2024 and 2025.

Okay. If you could make that brief, we'd appreciate that. One minute.

Okay. We'll start with

okay. Thank you. So 2024, what you're seeing there is the months they were tested. In in the beginning of 2024, we were only doing quarterly again. We had, for financial reasons, I assume, what, we weren't doing monthly for that period of time. So the numbers are January, April, July, and then it started monthly again. The numbers to the right, the n, that's the nitrogen. If you look at the January 18 number, point two zero is means it's undetectable. The number for nitrogen is undetectable. So all the ones you see going down there, the majority of them in 2024 are undetectable.

The phosphorus numbers, there's only one that's over our limit, which and we've never been in noncompliance for phosphorus. So but I'm putting it up there because everyone wants to talk about phosphorus. There was only one month where that was over. You go down to 20 this year. We're you know, and again, we're now monthly. There's not one month that we've tested so far. June numbers just came out this past week. It went it went online. It's on your website. Here's the numbers, undetectable for nitrogen all six months. What are we doing? You wanna spend, depending on who you talk to, $5.10, $20,000,000 on cleaning up the reuse water? It's not needed. I'm done.

We thank you

for your comments. Mister Crane, thank you for continually coming and giving us that historical data that some of us just don't have a chance to Exactly. Get to, and it's extremely valuable. Thank you. Well put.

If we could move along because time is going to run out on us. Unless there's any further comment, I'd like to go to Number 6 B, Stormwater Utility District information, and turn it over for Member Woodworth to make his presentation. The floor is yours.

Go ahead, I will try to be brief. Everybody here has has had this information for quite a while and so I am certainly not going to go through this page by page but there are a few things that I would like to highlight. So first one is the legal and administrative framework. There has been a lot of speculation that you need to set up a separate utility board with a different bureaucracy, if you will, to administer the framework. I have included a copy of the Naples ordinance where Naples created the storm water utility in 1992.

The way theirs is set up, city council manages it, the city manager is a designated chief officer, and the public works director oversees the operations of the utility. So if you followed Naples' framework, we do not need a whole new bureaucracy to administer it. It could be done the same way with city council, city manager and our public works director. So I think that is one misconception is that we need a whole new bureaucracy to administer it. Can I flip through this quickly or should I stay on the summary that's in the memorandum?

I would go to the summary to be able well, mean I

That's entirely up to you.

It's your gender item, your floor. You have the floor.

Okay. So alright. Well, here's a copy of, I am just flipping through it, there was a copy of this ordinance in the package that I presented.

So let

us jump on to number two, the stormwater fund itself, the public works department in Naples, is organized in a slightly different way than, Marco is. The public works director actually oversees five separate departments, a streets fund, a water and sewer fund, solid waste fund, storm water fund, and an equipment services fund. So Naples has a more segmented public works department instead of dumping all the work on one person like we do here in Marco. An editorial comment by me is that Justin has a lot on his plate and we might want to look at not only the storm water utility, but for some reason it is not clicking here. One of the other highlights of having a stormwater utility is its ability to get grants, which Doctor.

Harper highlighted during his presentation and it is on the list of initiatives, is the ability to get grants. If you look at the budget detail here that is up on the screen right now for the stormwater division, you do not need to recreate a whole other bureaucracy. A lot of things that are in the current city budget could be transferred as an expense to the stormwater division with really no net effect on the budget if there were no new initiatives allocated to the stormwater division. So it all depends on how it is structured. They have dedicated funding from the storm water enterprise fund.

You can see here they have got budget for citywide storm water improvements, street sweeping. They have lake management and restoration which we do not have to worry about here. For some reason, it is not clicking through the program.

Rick, I think that is controlled by Martin back here, so just tell him what page you want him to go to.

Can you jump to the next item please? Here is a sample of the Naples utility rates. There is no point in getting into this, obviously the rates are different, but there is a separate charge for the storm water utility. Martin, next one please. Okay, this information in here was taken out of the Florida Stormwater Association utility report.

You can see the city of Naples has 8,000, I believe that is acres. How many accounts does it serve? Naples has 15,000. Marco's population, depending on where you look, is anywhere from 15,000 to 16,000. Naples, at the time of this utility report, had a 14.5 per month charge for the stormwater utility.

This is also from the stormwater utility report, the charges per 1,000 square feet of property. There is a number of different ways that the utility tax could be allocated. You can see in this chart that Naples did have a history of increasing their storm water utility rates starting out at $4 in 2005 and growing to $14.50 dollars in 2024. The annual revenue generated by Naples, obviously, you can see all the other cities on there. But for the city of Naples, it was roughly $5,500,000 And again, you can look at the comparative annual total revenue, started out at $4.7 again $5,500,000 today.

It is interesting, I think, that the number of full time equivalent employees for the city of Naples is 15 just for the stormwater portion of its public works department. And I do not know, Justin, exactly how many employees you have now.

Well, for the entire public works Department, is 13. We have eight field staff and five administrative. So

you are running a lot leaner than the city of of Naples.

Yeah. And that is just the stormwater.

That is

what I wanted to point out. That is just stormwater utility function. There is a lot of graphs and charts in the stormwater utility report. You can take a look at the staffing levels in different cities. The one thing I did want to point out that on this page, one of the uses of the stormwater utility funds is public education and social media and internet surprised me a little bit.

85% of whatever their budget number is and I do not know exactly what it is, is going towards social media. Next is brochures, bill inserts. I cannot tell you the last time I ever got an insert in my water bill. They have neighborhood meetings, press releases, etcetera. The money can be used for public education, which is something that Doctor. Harper recommended and I think is part of the recommendations that came from the city itself.

I do not think that is a

percentage on that. That is just a what did they find to be most effective.

Okay, thank you.

You are welcome. I mean, I think the interesting thing to take away from that would be, is that we keep talking about public education. So there is somebody that's come back and done the workforce already. The best way to get to the public is through social media, internet, brochure and bill inserts. The rest of the stuff they got very little hit from.

I

would agree and I think that's one of the issues quite honestly that we have as an island is that the general population of this island do not fully understand the implementation or the cost of this whole

subject. Don't disagree with you.

You can tell, we've just had a town hall. How many people from the general public are sat here? We have thankfully three counselors, we have Chair's wife and we have David. So if this is such a burning issue to the residents, why is this room not filled with people? Now one could say, well, it's timing because people are at work and all the rest of that stuff.

But so public education clearly is a part of it, because when I watched the town hall, there were a number of people that stood up and chimed on about AWT and how it's critical and they're basically the same little tribe of people that come to these meetings. But there wasn't much representation from the 15,000 residents on the island. So clearly, what we're seeing here is that social media and Internet is a great way to get the message out, but it's got to be funded.

On on that note, do can we tell how many people are watching, you know, like, on live feeds, on social media? Yes.

You can.

But does IT have that? Like, can you

You can you can get hold of it for council meetings and any of these meetings.

You can see how many people are, like You can see how many

people are streamed or watching it live. Right now. Whether you can see how many people click to the recorded version, that I'm not sure of, but definitely the live

stream Well, that would be good to know.

Yeah. Okay. Let me run through all this. Obviously, this is part of what we're all discussing in public education. Yep.

Next slide, please. Okay. People sometimes ask about what the difference is between the wastewater permit for Marco Island and a city like Naples. Naples is regulated by the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System because it does discharge into public waterways whereas MARCO discharges basically as irrigation. But you can look on here.

Everybody talks about grizzled fig, if you are familiar with that term that was passed back in the 1970s. The maximum amount of nitrogen that Naples, for example, can discharge into the waterways is three parts per million and phosphorus one part per million. So yes, it does have different standards and it is different from Marco because they do have different discharge rules. I think we are back at the beginning. Naples did do a long term integrated water resource plan to identify both water supply needs and sustainable water sources.

I mean, we have basically been talking about water the canals, but for those of you that may have been familiar with the information that Clean Marco Waters did when we did the sucralose and caffeine testing, is there were extremely high levels of sucralose found in our tap water. We know from that that our water source is being contaminated further upstream by other sources.

It is

not germane to our particular discussion, but our city at some point needs an integrated water resource plan. I know obviously that Mr. Poteet is aware of our water supply and where it is coming from. But back in 2008 they had a twenty year plan. Okay.

I had done a rough cut first to compare some of the highlighted items in the Florida Stormwater Association and Naples data. Naples, in the data that was there, had 25,000 compared to 16,000. Marco. I am sure how they count full time residents, but Naples had 15 Marco and one report only had eleven five. I have seen sixteen five, so I am not sure that is an accurate number.

But again, I would like to point out under the left hand side of the screen, main operational areas that can be covered from a storm water utility is administration overhead reimbursement to the parent city handles operation and maintenance, technical capital improvements, monitoring, and public education. Apparently in Naples is a pretty big part of what they do. On the right, I put together a chart just using a number 11750 of customers, if you will, and what the different utility rates might be on a monthly and annual basis and how much money could be generated from a stormwater utility. I, just for an example, put together the debt service for the canal interconnect project in AWT and subtracted it from the annual total and under this illustration shows that there could be a surplus even after paying for the debt service on those two projects.

I have a question on that, Rick, if you don't mind. So you have modeled this out with a cost in here for AWT and a cost in here for the interconnects. What was that number because I don't think anyone knows what AWT is going cost us.

If we go to the next chart, made an assumption. Was

that your assumption, 3,000,000?

Go to the next. Okay, this chart. These were my assumptions for what I used, dollars 5,000,000 for the canal interconnect, dollars 15,000,000 for AWT, a combined total cost of improvements of $21,000,000 I assumed. At the time I did this, our twenty year tax exempt AAA rated bonds was 3.4%.

Yes, I can see the calculation, just needed to know what those Okay. Figures

This used 11,750 for taxpayers. I still do not know what the right number is. Could we go to the next slide? Should be one more after this. This slide just talks about the benefits of reclaimed water.

Sometimes I have been accused of not being in favor of reclaimed water. I certainly support it 100% from an environmental point of view. It is the right thing to do. I think my position has always been the cleaner the reclaimed water is, the better off we will be. And if you do a lot of research, you will begin to find that there is technology available to make reclaimed water so clean you can drink it.

And they are doing that in The Middle East. California is doing it, Arizona is doing it, and sometimes they are mixing it with other potable water sources. But our planet eventually is going to need to get to very clean reclaimed water. Next slide, one more, one more.

We are already into what I would be bringing up there.

Okay, well I think that there is probably one slide missing where I used a different assumption on the number of people that the tax would be allocated to. Instead of 11,000, I used 16,005 which is the number that is actually on the Naples or on our website for the total population. It is a significant amount of money that could be generated, obviously depending on what the fee or the tax was, but I would suggest that it is certainly worthy of discussion. A lot of people will say it is just a transference of one tax to another, but is a source of revenue and one of the big items that is important is that it does make you eligible for grants from the state of Florida that the city would not otherwise be able to have. I think you'll find the city of Naples, it didn't make it into this presentation, got a grant for $25,000,000 or so to extend their water pipe for discharge further out in The Gulf and bigger pumping to clean the streets so that during storms there wouldn't be as much flooding.

Anyway, the bottom line is I think it's worth further study.

Martin? So I think there's great data in here, Rick, and clearly you've done a lot of work and I appreciate you doing that. My take on this is, you can't say on the one hand, we're not going to expand the government here. Yet we want more people because Justin has got a very small team and we need to expand it. So those two things seem to be a little contradictory.

To me I look at this and this is we're building out some more resource albeit very dedicated to that, could be a good thing, could be a bad thing, I don't know. Why can we not do all of this just under the general fund? At the end of the day, whatever way we look at this, we're going to the residents and saying, we need more money. We're going to increase your taxes whether we put it on a water bill or whether we put it on millage or whatever we put up. But that's fundamentally the issue that some of these things will drive. That's what City Council

is going to be working on.

Exactly. So from what I saw a quarter millage point is what they're pushing for public work increases because there's all other projects in public works that we're trying to do. So the net net on this is, I think it's interesting. I think we're very small. You can tell from if they've got 15 people in Naples that are all just dedicated to this and we've got 13 for the whole public works department. We're kind of in a bad situation from amount of resource we got to address some of these issues.

I would agree. We're getting into opinions here. I think the rollback rate as the city manager said at the last council meeting, handicapped or handcuffed a lot of the departments in the city from a funding perspective. And I think public works is a prime example of that.

But you've also got to balance that out with every single councilor that went to election said we're not going to increase taxes on the island. So those people Maybe they made

a mistake.

Well, maybe they did make a mistake, but I'm just telling you that's what people voted for those people that signed declarations to say we're not going to change taxes and now the councilors are either going have to stand up and say we pledged this to the voting population and now we're not going to do it or not, but there's some conflicts there that need to be addressed. That's by this committee. Absolutely not by this committee. And that's challenge that we have right here. Everything that we're talking about, we can recommend as much as we like, we can push it up to City Council, we can drive a conversation, but we are not responsible for raising the funds or figuring out how we're going to move forward.

So one of the challenges with AWT is we go to referendum and depending on how it's worded, all the people go, yeah, we want clean water. 5,000,000, 20,000,000, we don't know the answer to that yet, but that is going to put a burden on our city council members to figure out how do we fund $20,000,000 with a budget that quite frankly is very, very, very challenging. Not my position to state, not a council member, but that is one of the things that we're driving to. And I think everyone kind of knows, certainly those that are involved in the decision process and the people here. They know what these things are.

They know ballpark ish what it's going to cost. The real challenge is how do we raise all the money to get these things done. And that's not our problem, that's a City Council problem. First, we need to

find out how much money we're talking about, and we don't know.

Really

don't. Find out now. To my point.

Well, that's one of the things that I want to put forth in a few minutes.

I don't really have much more to say.

Okay. I'll move to Mike.

Thank you.

Ralph? I think it's interesting, but I think it's let's move on. Okay.

This is great stuff. Mhmm. If we had the money, there'd be no question. Alright. Great. Timing is terrible. Personally, I prefer this issue, Stormwater Utility, on that referendum and let the people speak on it whether they wanna do it or not versus AWT, which is just a one snapshot.

And

you're never going to be able to tell whether it's working or not because of all the other variables that might offset it.

I

would like to see that on a referendum because it would also encapsulate it, bring it into a strategic plan.

My point earlier.

But we don't

Well, to my point earlier, Ralph, is you look at this and it's like we'll vote on AWT, the referendum will come in and I suspect if it goes all the way to that, they'll get enough votes, enough people will say, yeah, we want clean water because they won't be given the full picture in that description of what they're actually voting for. And then the city council that will then have to manipulate that or massage it to figure out how to get the money to do it, their necks will be on the line because people will go, oh, that's great, we've now got AWT, we're four years in, we're five years in, canals don't look any different. So I think what we're doing with this is we're actually putting our city councilors in a really bad position. But that's just my opinion.

It's interesting because two weeks ago, Eric Bresner said the same thing. He said, you know, we were told that when we went from septic to sewer, it was gonna fix everything. And he goes, we went from septic to sewer and we all paid tens of thousands of dollars to go back and do that individually. Now I'm not saying we shouldn't have done that. But he was saying at the time it was, that's going to fix everything. And he goes, it didn't fix it.

But here's the issue with that is the challenge there is we don't know that it didn't fix everything because what that may have done is it may have slowed down the issue from a 10 mile an hour issue to a one mile an hour issue. We don't know. So I just I'm just really concerned that there's this push for AWT. And I'm not if we had infinite amount of money, absolutely, I'm the first to put my hand up. If someone says to me, do you want clean water? I'm the first to put my hand up. But we have to tell the people that are going to pay for it what the cost is, what the benefit is.

That's

exactly what I want to bring

in a few minutes. Let's get to it.

Any other comments on this because we're going to run out of time, which is usually what happens. If I can move on, if it's

okay with there

anybody gonna call for public comment on this item?

Any any or I appreciate that, Justin. Any public comment on this?

There were no members of the public who submitted a request to speak on this item. Okay.

Appreciate that. If it's okay with the committee I I have a

rhetorical question that nobody wants to speak that's in the audience. Is it common sense or is is it accepted, by most that a a spending initiative going on a referendum, the voters would know what the price tag is? I mean, is that like, if this went on a ballot, if this went to a vote, would you want the price to be Yes. On there? I'm just asking this. There there's three there's three city council members.

Well, I my agenda.

Yeah. I I it doesn't matter what

doesn't matter what's Just curious. You know?

If The whole referendum thing is gonna be a city council member issue as to what the city council want.

Right. If I'm able to get to that, we're gonna be talking about that. Thank you.

We do have a public speaker, mister David.

Okay. Mister Crane?

I'll try

to be as brief as I can. Dave Crane again. We've gone through this. We had the Terrell Hall report. We had the ERD report. We had the Jacobs report. The Jacobs company engineering firm is either depending on the ranking one, two or three in the world for environmental engineering. Some people will say, oh, the fix was in. I've heard that from From me? A resident. Yeah. Whatever. It's bullshit. Alright. It's bullshit. No engineers. Sorry for my language. There's We're

on live TV, so please

Yeah. Sorry about that. That one.

Yeah.

We There's no engineering firm, especially one that's number one, two, or three in the world, is gonna risk their reputation for a five MGD plant. Are you kidding me? You know, you're dealing with, you know, the city of Chicago. You know, you've got wastewater plants that are 1,100,000,000 gallons, 750,000,000 gallons, 600,000,000 gallons. They're not gonna rep risk an engineering firm is not gonna risk you their reputation even with them. Their reputation is everything. You know, they don't do that. It's not done. They they'll they'll destroy themselves. They will fire anybody that does that.

It's ridiculous. Again, water movement is everything. I mean, it's you you're looking at I think in in your thing real quick, you had 5,000,000 for the interconnects. One interconnect, if I'm not mistaken, is like four. Now now it's five maybe. So and we need more than one. That's what's gonna help the majority. The ERD report asked for we should do a hydrodynamic study. Jacobs agreed. The city hired Jacobs to do hydrodynamic study, and it showed probably 60 to 70% of the island would benefit from that.

It would greatly increase or decrease the the time that our water is in the canal dying as it goes. It's been done. What's not gonna do is the dead end canals. Okay? And we've got a lot of those. And there's other things that could be done with that. What they're doing in The Keys is working down there. I mean, it's gone from months of turnover in a in a dead end canal to three days the water's turned over. The question here is that geologically, can we get the water to come down that well-to-do it? So there's a lot of things to be done. AWT is nice. And same thing. I mean, yeah, if we had unlimited funds, yeah, it's a nice thing to do. Yeah. We think it's gonna benefit.

But what did Jacob say in their discussion in our meeting three years ago? It could be twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years before you see any difference. It's already in the canals.

And that's in the report.

And I think that raises an interesting point is expert like someone from Jacobs stating this around AWT, should that comment be made visible to the population of this island that this is what the experts have said? Because if you're going to put a AWT only thing on the ballot, people should be aware of it because I guarantee you that goes through the city councilors heads will be on the block. We voted AWT, you voted AWT and the canals still look dirty

and they're still polluted. The population will say, you know, that the people running the, you know, people in charge of Marco Island don't know what they're doing. It is exactly what is going happen.

We all

have opinions here. Will just say two things. The study that was done was a hydrodynamic study. The study does nothing to reduce the nutrients that go into the canals. And the second thing is if you go out to Jacob's website, they have a whole division devoted to AWT. The world is going to AWT.

Again, the AWT conversation is not that the world is not going in that direction, it's the right direction. The concern that I have, the opinion that we all have them is that what is for Marco Island, what's the biggest bang for our buck. It's not going to be just AWT, it's going to be a multitude of things, what things fix it best. And Jacob's, yes, of course they've got an AWT site on their website. That's one of the things they do. We're not required to do AWT, some cities are. You mentioned a $25,000,000 grant that Naples got. At the surface, that sounds great. But the reason they got that grant is because they're discharging directly into The Gulf. And so We can argue this all. I'm not arguing. I'm just making a point.

Mr. Chair?

I'll make the point that there's permeable soil on Marco Island.

That's true.

And it's true. Yes.

There's no question

about it.

Mister chair, point of order. The the agenda item is regarding the storm water utility, and we've digressed into

a Yep.

AWT conversation. You have other items on the agenda. We're We getting close to thirty minutes left.

Right. We need to move along. I'm going to have to do some things a whole lot more quickly than I want to. If it is Okay with the committee, I'd like to move along at this point. I do have some motions I want to propose. I want to also get to the fertilizer. And so that would be I'd like to bring up now, if we can, the combination of 20 five-forty five-thirty seven and combined with 20 five-forty five sixty one as requested. Let's go. Yep. Okay.

To begin, I there are actually three three portions of this, and I going to be as brief as I can. What we are doing now is we are, you know, not fertilizing in the rainy season, and we're putting whatever we want, basically, on the grounds of Marco Island during the rest of the year, from October through May. And we can if we wanna stay with the status quo, we can make it slightly better. It's not gonna be a very good answer, but we can mandate, to the best of our ability, better nitrogen, zero phosphorus, and see probably not much improvement in the practices that we have. Because, as I've mentioned before, during the dry season, we're throwing all the fertilizer that we want on our grounds.

Grass isn't using it. When the rainy season comes, all that fertilizer that's been put out there, not watered in well, gets in our waterways. In the rainy season, when the grass wants it, when the plants want it, would use it, we don't put it. We can't. Because nitrogen and phosphorus are probably shouldn't be any phosphorus anyway.

Nitrogen, again, even if we go to what they call slow release urea coated nitrogen, it's better. But they still got what you got. And you can improve things a little. Not the answer that I would propose as being something that will help appreciably. Therefore, I have reached out to a couple of well, one I reached out to, K and K Super Blend, a mister Ken Boyce, who is the owner of the patent, which I'll go over really briefly.

And the other came from the city, and they asked me to reach out to a mister Richard Eckstein. I'll talk about his proposal in just a moment. To begin with, and I wanted to really bring this up, what super blend is, is a non nitrogen or phosphorus type of fertilizer. It is something called humic acid. And it says here, I'm going to read this briefly, the K and K Superblend was developed as an exciting, innovative, all natural, eco friendly, and biodegradable fertilizer, the composition of which is totally organic and can be used year round.

Now we have an ordinance that won't allow that at this time, but with no restrictions satisfying various climates and soil needs. It is produced in Florida. There is a patent. I'm not going I'll go through the whole thing, but it does contain natural potassium, which does not hurt the waterways. Important micronutrients, are not appreciably involved in our water quality, and humic acid and composted humus that increases water retention, eliminates thatch, and may aid in micronutrient uptake and supports root growth.

And basically, it also is supposed to and again, I have no agenda here. I have only met the gentleman once. I have no skin in this game. So I'm not pushing. I'm just bringing this up. It is also supposed to reduce the amount of irrigation time needed for turf saving water. What I'd like to do, and we have plenty of material that we can put up here. I have a copy of the patent, and I have also if I don't know if you'd like to put it it it was available for this this particular page. Yeah. Okay.

It's up. It's up. I appreciate it. I'm not I'm not going to go through all this, but what I would like to do in relation to this, if it is within protocol that I could possibly invite mister Boyce to come to our committee and propose what he would like. Now I reached out to him, so I know that there are rules that we may have to advertise or put this out to the public before he could be invited. And I'd like to know exactly what those rules are at this point. He's asked to come and be able to speak to our committee, and I've told him that I I need to check on those regulations. So I'm just gonna ask that of Justin at the moment and see what I can and can't do.

Say that again.

Okay. Sorry. Mr. Ken Boyce would like to come and make a formal presentation of his patent, the K and K Super Blend fertilizer, which is not fertilizer as we know it.

Yes. We had similar types of requests from the Waterways Committee in past years. And it's we can't single out one single vendor to come in and talk about a product. Okay. If it's a request that we would like to hear from, we have to advertise it in the form of a request for information or proposals, open it up and then they would send in their submits. That's certainly something that we could do but just inviting one vendor to come in and talk about their product. We can't do that because we're a municipal government and we have to abide by fairness laws.

If I could weigh in on that. Sure. There's another item for a presentation.

Yes.

And it needs to be vetted, if that that's the right word. Okay. And that one is going through a process. So whatever that process is, that would sound like the same thing to request it.

Actually, if there is a way to put well, in that case, there isn't a whole lot more for me to do in relation to this particular possibility.

You can certainly do your research and have this vendor provide summary, whatever information you want to present to this committee, but that would be you presenting that.

Well, okay. I I have that right here. I got that from him if that's able to be displayed on the screen. That is actually available.

Part of the agenda packet. If not, we can put it up on the overhead.

Okay. It should be. I don't know if it is. It would be this here. No.

Last page.

There. There you go. Yep. You have got it. Basically, this here is the proposal. This tells everything, basically, that he would tell us were he to come here. And if everybody would like to take a brief look at that, I think that there's a lot that there's a lot of benefit to getting off of what we're doing and be looking at possibilities like this. That's what I'd

like to say.

Remember I have some comments on this.

Correct. Okay. Martin, did you wanna go first and then Ralph?

I mean, my my whole thing with this is I saw the, you know, the comment and it looks to me like the guy is I don't whether he wants to sell us a patent Yes. That's what he wants to do. $500,000. I don't think That that's

was the maximum that he threw out there. He said he he paid $25,000 He said it would not be any more than $500,000 He said it would probably be less.

Right. So to me, this is great, but I don't think I don't know how the city council feel about it. But to me, spending any kind of think more than $26,000 on this is makes any sense for us personally. But again, I mean I think maybe to the point that he can't come here, maybe what should happen is he should go and maybe present to city council. He should maybe go talk with the city manager on this particular topic. But this seems like a a little bit of a Hail Mary to me at this point.

Justin, can he go to can he make a an appeal to go to the city council?

Anybody can speak at a during public comment at

a city council meeting. For four minutes.

Yeah. Or what would be most effective is for somebody to reach out whether it's this particular person to reach out to a particular city councilor who would then take interest in it, discuss it during city council items so that it gets put on a future agenda for city council

Okay.

To That will be Okay. That will

be If that city councilor I'm

on I'm on Google right now. I can buy humic acid fertilizer for my lawn, already ready to go for 30 $22 to cover a ten thousand square foot lawn. Usually, $25 a bag.

I've got con I've got some comments that I referred out as

well. Okay. So

Okay. Then, in that case, in in that case, we don't need to go to this gentleman. We could get counsel to look into, you know, making regulations that perhaps Marco gets off of the nitrogen and the phosphorus fertilizers and goes to something like humic acid. But let's not do that yet because when I talk about mister Eckstein, it's gonna be something even beyond that. Okay. Okay? So Comments? Yeah. Ralph?

Let me go comment on it. Since this was presented to city council at the Waterways Quality Workshop as a game changer, great opportunity, new concept, I dug a little bit more into it. It's not a new concept. Humic acid, everybody knows what a compost pile is. You reach into it, it's the end result of decomposition of organic material. What you've got in your hand is humic acid. And you process it with an alkaline solution to pull it out and it's sold, as was mentioned. And there are many, I can go into many companies. They can all get patents by putting something in organic material that's a little exclusive. You put goat hair into it.

You can get a patent for it and package it, sell it, or sell a patent on it. So it it this is nothing. Humic acid has been used in compost, I don't know, since they found fire. I don't know. A couple of thing is that was mentioned that there's no nitrogen. The abstract itself on their website says it does contain nitrogen.

The

Humic Substance Society study, which is supposed to talk about the positive effects of this material, says the extent of pant growth promotion is inconsistent and relatively unpredictable when compared to organic fertilizer. The warning label itself, which is on our website, is do not apply near water, storm drain, or drainage ditches. So I don't know where else you would use it on Marco Island if you go by that. The patent that we purchased, I'm not sure what the next step would be. Are we to get in the city into the business of producing fertilizer and retail sales of fertilizer as a business or something.

I don't know what happens after you buy this patent. But the big thing is that people are familiar with PFAS, the forever chemicals, It came up a lot with the synthetic grass issue. Everybody is afraid of it. It's in our water everywhere. I'll just read one thing.

Sewage sludge is a nutrient rich byproduct of wastewater treatment often used in fertilizer. It contains these forever chemicals, which can be problematic as the treatment process concentrates it in sewage sludge. Millions of tons of these forever chemicals contaminated sewage sludge are used as fertilizer. Practice can contaminate soil, crops, and impact human and animal health through food chains. There's a lot of lawsuits going on with that.

Some of them include municipalities that have applied some of the stuff on that's still in flux. So the defense, of course, is that these municipalities are one step away. They're not required to ask what's in your fertilizer from the landscape companies. The minute you buy this as a patent, you're right in this lawsuit area. So I don't know why you would pay $500,000 to have a target on your back. I would I would make a motion that we kill this thing, but, you know, obviously, I'm open to any ideas.

With what you brought up, I would probably agree with your motion. I mean, this was just thinking outside the box as something alternative to nitrogen and phosphorus and to look into it. And this is a lot of information that is very valuable and I accept that information as to amend what we're talking about. Although, I would not totally say we wouldn't, and again, there are products on the market like Milorganite, which we all know about, which is activated sludge that comes from the sewers of Wisconsin, I think. And it's not, I mean, they say things on the bag that you can use that for your produce that you grow, but you're getting heavy metals in that produce that you're eating.

So, you're absolutely right. It would depend upon where it comes from and who makes it and how it's made. So yes, just to go with that as an automatic great idea, no. But then again

I don't think the city wants to get involved in a place where they have to ask the question, should we be testing landscape materials that are coming in here? Absolutely. Should we modify our ordinance to specify that we do that? I this kind of needs to go away to the enforcement, which I think is the biggest part of Well,

okay. Enforcement, again, we're still with the nitrogen and hopefully the no phosphorus bags fertilizer, which I think if we could be able to get away from that, we would probably be doing a better job for the environment of Marco Island. But that's I understand what you're saying, and there are some red flags. Absolutely. If I could briefly go on from there. Any other Rick, I think you had a comment. Just wanted to

ask just how did did Seahawk get to make a presentation to city council if if you can't ask anybody to make a presentation?

There's a a Florida statute that governs public private partnerships and unsolicited proposals. So it's in Florida law where they can do that as an unsolicited proposal from a public private partnership. It's different than having vendors come in and speak about their projects at a public meeting.

So if this guy came in and said I want a public private partnership with Marco Island to make himself

He can certainly go through the process that's in the Florida statutes to do that.

Just wanted clarification. Thank you.

It's specified in there they need to actually have two public hearings. What you saw was one checkbox.

Yeah.

Okay. Thank you. The other item here that I wanna briefly include, this came from the this came down from Joan Taylor's office, and it was also mentioned at the city council workshop. And this was the I did some investigating. I reached out to him.

It's a mister Richard Eckstein, and it's a company called Free Fertilizer. That doesn't mean it's free, but anyway, he sent a letter, and if we could be able to refer to that. Dear city manager McNeese and members of the Marco Island City Council, you are sitting on one of the biggest untapped natural assets in all of Southwest Florida, the nutrient rich bottom sediment of your own canal system. And instead of spending $200,000,000 of taxpayer money to dredge it, I propose a public private solution that restores water quality, solves the algae crisis, reduces noise complaints, and costs your city nothing. My offer, I will dredge Marco Island's canals at zero cost to the city.

In exchange, I ask for a two year soil enrichment and landscaping contract for public and park properties in in Cape Coral and Marco Island. So Cape Cape Coral should not be involving us. Here is how the plan works in three clear phases. So it's outlined here, phase one, dredging and material reclamation. You can read this, but briefly, I will remove the muck and nutrient saturated sediment from the bottom of the canals using advanced low impact equipment.

The material will be repurposed as valuable fill worth up to two fifty dollars per compacted cubic yard and sold to the infrastructure projects like the Florida Bullet Train Corridor, Southwest Florida International Airport improvements. I'll go on to phase two, freshwater Gulf flushing and aeration. I will rent a barge and install two twenty thousand gallon seawater tanks. Every three to four months, my team will collect deep Gulf seawater and 80 feet down from 80 feet down, rich in oxygen and natural minerals and flush it through Marcos Canal network. The clean oxygenated seawater replenishes marine life, flushes out lingering synthetic fertilizer, helps neutralize algae stimulating nitrates.

Additionally, I don't want to take up all the time here, but if you can read this, the Phase III regenerative soil and the noise reduction, I'll let you kind of see what you think about that. The final thoughts, it's a three bird in one stone solution, zero cost dredging and canal restoration, elimination of chemical runoff and fertilizer related pollution, and natural sound absorption, and improved community peace. This would be I would like to get this gentleman and I do have the approval from the hierarchy here. They have asked me to bring this up so that it can be the gentleman can be invited to speak to the the city council. Also, he would like to come and speak to our waterways advisory committee at the next meeting in August.

So with that in mind, seeing what this is about, this could be a bigger game changer. Yes, it could be too good to be true. It could be absolutely out there wherever. But it at least is getting us thinking outside the box and coming up with some ideas as opposed to just doing what we've always done and keep getting what we've always gotten. So I just wanted to throw this out and see if we can get any kind of traction to see if this gentleman can be invited to come

speak to our committee

and also the council.

Elliot, these you know, this particular one, I I'm concerned about what we push up the ladder and Okay. And the you know, are we filtering properly and should we be filtering? Like, this gentleman might be the silver bullet, you know, but I don't know. I don't know. I just feel like our committee is maybe it's best to go through he should be presenting through the procurement or through the city staff channels.

And, you know, for us to get behind this or even recommend, it's it's there's a lot of research, a lot of, you know, operational issues. And for us to push it up or put our stamp on it and and push it up, it just clutters. Certainly city council's list of things to get through Sure. Because there's just so many questions. I mean Oh.

I'm you know, it I I agree with a city staff will just direct them to city staff saying, you have an an amazing concept. It might win a science fair award, but, you know, present it to the professionals that that do this every day for the city. And if they say, wow. Why don't we think of that? Then maybe they can they would bring it up.

Well

For us to to to to be vocal for this, I think we should we're people send us this information is great. We should pass it on to the staff that does storm water, actual, like, operations and let them digest it.

Okay?

But we are not in a you can't investigate all these operational issues.

I can build off of that a little bit, you have my notes, my comments. Maybe that's the path we should take because there are things that he just doesn't know. He's coming out. I mean, if somebody were to talk with him and say, listen. If you can address this area, this area, this area, make it more collatable, whatever it is, then he has a chance. If you let him come in and talk, we blow it out of the water as being absurd. Right. So maybe if somebody says, okay. We got this. Let's talk to him, you know, and then talk about it and make that another step as you're suggesting.

Okay. As we're at quarter after ten and we are going to have to not do some things we wanna do here, is there any Justin, I'm gonna ask you, what were what would be the best way to proceed from here?

I I see two possibilities for this. One would be, as mentioned before, and we've done it in the past, is issue a request for information where we send an invitation out to the public for submittals and, limit it to, something like this where he can then submit a a his submittal, and others can do the same thing. It's a public invitation. And then you'd have responses, and then those responses can be reviewed by this committee. The other option, as he mentions in on the first page of the email under his first paragraph saying that he is proposing a public private solution.

That would be a public private partnership, which would fall under the Florida statutes mentioned earlier.

He could

go that route. So I see those two routes available for discussing this, either issue an RFI. The the the responses to the RFI can be reviewed by this committee, or go through that public private partnership.

Direct them to

the public private partnership,

and and let's not vote on anything here because No. It might hurt his you know, start Absolutely.

How do I do that from this position?

Well, you could just if that's the route that's chosen, there's a Florida statute that, outlines that route. So he would have to, look at that Florida statute and submit a public private partnership proposal unsolicited meeting the criteria in that. Probably in there. Or if this committee would like to take a vote for, requesting an RFI to be published, then you can go that route. Those are the two routes that I see.

Does this committee, we are about ten minutes away from closing. Does this committee have a response?

I just have one comment. I talked to three engineers. I I mean no disrespect to this gentleman or to the city to asking us to look at it, but it's got snake oil written all over it as far as I'm concerned.

Okay. And They asked me to do this.

They they emailed you? Yeah.

So just email them back to or tell Joan, say, hey, send this gentleman, the public private partner, asking could she help us handle these requests?

Exactly. Okay.

And I think she would quickly, you know, handle that.

Okay. Wouldn't from a committee perspective, I wouldn't touch this with a 10 foot pole.

Rick, I agree with you.

Okay. Do we wanna take a vote? Is it should we be be up for a vote?

I I think it's up to this gentleman.

Well, you would need a motion.

A motion?

I think it's up to this gentleman to pursue this. It's not up to us to Not for

us. Okay.

Pursue it. Alright. And do it. And you know what? I hope he's a 100% right, I hope it works. But let him do the work.

Got it. Okay. Let's quickly move on. Something I really wanna cover quickly, and we're we're probably not going to get

to No public comment for that. Any any public comment?

Sorry. There there are no registered speakers on this item.

Okay. Really quickly, I'd like to get to a reaction to the city council water quality workshop discussion items 25 dash 4,549. There are four items here that I would like to see go to the council, and I think they should be a slam dunk. I don't know. In relation in reaction to what they discussed at the workshop, number one, I would like to see our recommendation that the city council start to investigate Isle Of Capri and Goodland converting from septic to sewer conversion.

That's number one. Number two, I'd like to see water testing for Outer Marco Gulf waters. Number three, I'd like to see us recommend to the city council to price the AWT with I I I realize that we've already talked about this, and we did vote it down. But because of the council workshop, I would like to change that and have us recommend that the city council get a private engineer, as they discussed, to get a price.

Mister chair, the council did give direction on that and I believe the water and sewer department is actively

They are now doing that?

Yes, they are in communications.

Okay. So that does not need to be done. They are going to do that I'd I would really like to see that happen before a referendum and a petition

were to

That's go that's what the direction was, and I believe that's what the water and sewer department said.

Okay. And and the last item, so we'll we'll we will officially eliminate my request for number three, and number four, now be number three, testing of the canal sediment. I think that is definitely something that we need to know what is in there, and we need to know it from at this time. I know we've done that in the past, but I'd I'd really like to see what is in there in in the current moment. What and what and where? What and where. Correct. Thank you for that. So these are three items that I think should be a slam dunk that I would make a motion on. I'd like to get discussion first.

Discussion from Excuse

me. Elliot? Yes. Hi. Tim Henry, Marko, analyst Oh,

I'm sorry.

On your number one item about, the city and Isle Of Capri, I attended a meeting last week, with, our city manager, representatives from Isle Of Capri, as well as, our county commissioner and several people with the county. That is rolling. It is rolling. They are getting pricing together. Oh. So that the the wheel to we can talk about it at council, I'm sure. Okay. But just know that that entire process has started. Okay. And, you know, you talk about timing.

I forwarded them a video from 2019 where Jeff Poteet did a fabulous twenty minute presentation on everything that needed to be done, and we're at square one now. So so But everything the process is going forward. So that's something and if you wanna send it to counsel to discuss it, absolutely. But please know

Was that for just Isle Capri or Goodland as well? Both?

Just Isle Of Capri. And I'm waiting for more information about Goodland because that might not be in Marco Island's jurisdiction.

It is, but Isles Of Capri is a good place to start.

Yeah.

I do hear though that Goodland is much worse.

Yes. But we're talking think it's 87 doors in, Goodland, but we have 500 and some doors on Isla Capri. So it's a substantial different number. It's really

you've heard of

the restaurants on Goodland. But I just wanted to let you know that that is fully in process.

Okay.

The council will be talking about money and stuff like that, which we all did agree at this meeting that there would be no outlay by Marco Island or Marco Island taxpayers. But just wanna let you guys know. Balls are rolling.

Thank you, Deb.

Thank you. Okay.

So we just have two here that, would be still on on the docket, water testing for the outer Marco Gulf waters, which I think we it would be really good to know what's out there.

I did hear that I did hear that comment at the water quality workshop. Right. I believe it was from councilman Champagne that said that referenced that. So I don't know if if they're doing that, but he I don't either. I don't council made that come.

I'd like to see it done, if it's not being done. And I don't have that information as to if That's

why counsel is aware of that, because it was up with the water quality workshop.

And, of course, the testing and location of what's in the canals and the sediment.

Justin, the gulf testing, could that simply be added to the people that do our testing already that they run offshore and do that? Or would that be a separate thing or?

Possibly. The lab right now, they rent a boat to be able to get to the locations that we have right now. Whether they can do that to go further offshore, I don't know. We would have to find that out.

Actual

Lot just to button up that, your last testing of the of the sediment. If you ask, you know, somebody to go drill holes in their yard just to find out what may be there with no reason for it, you know, how many people go do that, you know?

This would be in the canals,

I believe.

Yeah. In the canals. Okay. So I'm I'm just saying

Yeah. Five minutes.

So Right. Yeah.

It's it's buried. There's below the surface, there's no no oxygen. It's buried. Also, if you're gonna drill those core samples soil samples of the canal, you need to do them out in the surrounding areas like the bays, the rivers because all that sediment is gonna be pushed into the canals during the next storm. So you get better know what's out there because that's eventually just gonna keep coming in. Well put. So Okay.

I guess, at this point, there is no real motion to be made. I just wanted to bring that up and

Recommend we

go to We'll have to b. Yeah. We'll have to I don't see time to do anything else in in quality. Seven b or c, I apologize for that. The clock