Florida Spring Basin Management Action Plans

On June 5, the Florida Springs Council sent a letter to FDEP Secretary Valenstein citing many concern with the State's draft clean-up plan for impaired springs. A portion of that letter follows...

"The "Florida Springs and Aquifer Protection Act" of 2016 sets a twenty-year target for restoration of twenty-four impaired Outstanding Florida Springs (OFS). Your department is responsible both for laying out the clean-up strategies, through thirteen Basin Management Action Plans (BMAPs), and for assuring that these strategies are in fact implemented by a wide range of stakeholders. Given the degraded state of most OFS, this responsibility is one of the most important challenges facing the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (FDEP). It also provides a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for leadership to initiate springs restoration on a regional scale.

The Florida Springs Council (FSC) is comprised of forty-five member organizations from all over the State working together to promote the restoration, preservation, and protection of Florida's springs. Many of FSC's member organizations have been active participants in the BMAP process and have provided extensive written and oral comments to FDEP over the past two years. Many have expressed their view that the draft BMAP for their local spring(s), if approved, will not in fact lead to a satisfactory or timely restoration of water quality as required by law.

FSC will continue to monitor springs BMAPs both before and after the approval deadline of June 30. If substantial changes are not made to many of these drafts, however, it is possible - perhaps even likely - that one or more of these BMAPs will be administratively challenged. Any decision to challenge will ultimately come down to an assessment of whether the BMAPs meet the requirements of the Springs Protection Act - that is, whether an individual BMAP lays out a path providing a credible prospect of meeting the TMDL goal within twenty years."