agenda today my name is dick bankhead i was unvolunteered appointed to do this today and i'm kidding we stand up and say the pledge of allegiance uh 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 for coming and i promised myself i wouldn't say this but uh marine corps has 250 year birthdays so good info okay now how do how do we do this she's doing it you got that i got that okay morning everyone we got we have one uh well we're gonna call roll okay go ahead uh don dice is not here mark trope here richard nipper here bruce larson is not here kimberly is not here deborah harman here laurie thompson here nicholas anzone here richard bankhead here aaron adams here kurt smith here fred goldstein here barbara is not here eric man is here john windsor here and charlie is not here we do have a quorum good uh approval of the agenda do i have a motion i move to approve the agenda from the april no from the march meeting thank you second i second vote do we have to have to vote on that yes yes do we have a vote everybody in agreement nay's eyes nays well maybe you can get a marine through this like i said it's the blind leading the blind uh approval of minutes do i have a motion so moved i'm sorry he made a motion moved second second eyes all right hey nays we'll move to the project process and physical reports with virginia thank you good morning i'm gonna skip around on the little one page progress report that you have and just pick up some highlights so uh 20 more quick connects to sewer existing sewer lines were completed one more septic upgrade we have a stormwater project up in the north end of the county flounder that has reached substantial completion and another one uh the west arlington basin we have uh another monthly report from our third party oyster monitoring by the university of central florida at a site that was just installed three months ago in the banana river it has a density of 237 live oysters per square meter which is more than double the hundred live oysters per square meter that is our target um and the mean shell height on those of 60 millimeters that's reproductive size so that site is doing very very well which is extremely good news because um we we've had some false starts in the banana river over the years we removed one more derelict vessel um under work underway this month the first one there the c10 water management area um they saint this is being managed by the st john's river water management district the request for qualifications to design that project is open that is a huge like 40 million dollar project that's going to re-divert millions of gallons of water back to the st john's river and keep that excess fresh water out of the indian river lagoon so we're excited that that project is uh being advertised to to get the design going um construction has started on sykes creek t septic to sewer project um we had three projects m n and t that were awarded not too long ago when we finally broken ground on the first of those then um a stormwater project on pioneer road the shop drawings have been approved by public works so that should get going here uh to construction here soon um vegetation harvesting is underway at kelly park if anybody wants to swing by a park and see vegetation harvesting the ogalley muck dredging project uh we have been in negotiations with the um the sole bidder and we're we're hopeful that we will complete negotiations next week we've got another negotiation meeting what we hope is the last negotiation meeting um set up for wednesday of next week um grand canal dredging is proceeding on track that 445 000 cupid guards that's about three quarters of the volume of muck in that canal system has been removed now um the titusville causeway multitrophic restoration and living shoreline resiliency project all the wave attenuation devices have been moved off the shoreline and out into the water the last of them uh the water was you know we just made it through our really really low water season of the year and the water was too shallow for the barge to be able to get them to where they're supposed to be so they're staged in the water very close to where they're supposed to be and and off the shoreline in the meantime they've gone ahead and they've pulled the riprap off the shoreline so that is mostly complete and they have been hauling sand this week for the shoreline restoration work so they've hauled over 40 truckloads of of clean fill into the site this week um and then the other thing under work underway this month the highlight is that the budget change request that amended the county's budget to incorporate all of the changes that were made in the 2025 save our lagoon plan update all the new projects that were added uh that bcr was approved by the um by the county commission so on the other side um presentations i got to do an extremely speedy presentation at a budget workshop um melanie got to present the pilot pond watch program to the south lake hoa i got to do a presentation to the american water resources association at their technical meeting um e-gad art and music event um friday first fridays down in o'galley um that was that was very successful we had a whole team of folks um there working that event um melbourne beach nature day don dice who's on your committee but not here today and abby uh worked that event had a good good flow of people coming through um and then this tomorrow sorry last weekend was enchanted forest earth day that melanie did tomorrow um anthony and i will be working the electric car event at the muscle car museum just missing from here because we didn't know about it at the time but um so we're looking forward to that event they've got over 200 people signed up um rsvp'd for that event already and the last thing i wanted to point out was the tire island cleanup so um fred if you want to introduce sharon and hopefully logan has got videos ready to roll whatever sure you want to do so i see sharon's back there sharon is one of four founders of waterway warriors and uh they've been doing an incredible job just growing that organization from first starting with a bridge and now expanding out only associated with the lagoon and the waterways and um so there were these tires sitting out there and uh one of the islands and as you can see in the videos they put together an incredible group of people and obviously we had mosquito control involved we had um the the coco beach uh public works involved we had um waterway warriors and uh captains and gator dredging and uh put together to pull out what turned out to be over 500 tires are there and we pulled out 321 of them in four hours wow and the other 200 plus are stacked up and ready to go in just a few weeks we'll go back out i don't know if you wanted sharon to say anything or run the videos or thank you looks like logan's ready to go maybe logan do you have the other one too no we don't the explorer explore the irl no we don't have that one i don't have that on the thumbs right yeah yeah oh no i said it in an email for logan um all right well so so about more than half of the tire you want to come up sharing um about half of the tires were removed and they added up to over 11 000 pounds so they add up to about 11 000 pounds is what mosquito control removed in the first batch um we still have about we're thinking between two and three hundred out there that the volunteers are now stacked piled ready to go we've got the event scheduled for may so and that's again another voluntary event to be able to get them out and then the ultimate goal is to restore this part of the island to actually create some erosion protection that is the ultimate goal but doing it in a way that nature can embrace it there was absolutely no life no life where these tires were there was no there was no grass there were no no sea life there was there was nothing out there in these two pockets where the tires were so we really want to give the island an opportunity to heal itself and to create that erosion protection so that's our ultimate goal so may 17 we are the tentative date is may 17th we want to make sure everyone is on board and writing before we announce that in total um the 50 volunteers that came out there's not one of them that doesn't want to come back so we now have to limit the number of people which i never thought would happen to go on out there and remove this everyone wants to be a part of this it's been embraced we want to publicly thank mosquito control for their um for including us in the tire amnesty kind of grant and more than anything we really want to give a shout out to gator dredging because they donated their captain their boat their hands for the entire morning they are willing and wanting to come back and it's because of their boat that we we were not going to put these tires on private on private boats that wasn't going to happen and we couldn't have done that in the vast amount that we had so gator dredging we want to say a public thank you thank you oh jenny i got a question for you and this may be a dumb question but i don't know the answer so i'm going to ask the dumb question what is it about tires that is detrimental i thought they were just inert so yeah they can leach all kinds of things especially the steel belted radials as that metal breaks down those heavy metals are polluting but you know also just the hydrocarbons in the in the rubber good to know yeah we there are studies that show how damaging it is to salmon i haven't seen any studies to fish on the east coast but you know if they're bad for salmon they're probably bad for our fish too yeah just uh just point out i mean i've pulled a few out of sykes creek and they degrade i mean i literally have pulled some up with a grappling hook and they just fall apart they sit in there that long and that stuff's definitely coming out the second thing i just like to point out is i listened to the presentation for the budget i think for mosquito control and i think they last year did 60 tons and you think this is one day this is about almost six and with the rest will go over that quite a bunch of tires in one day right so mosquito control applied for and received a grant that funds the disposal costs of the tires so you can imagine that there's quite a disposal cost on 11 000 pounds of tires and so um that that it's just great that they found this grant program and managed to get these funds so so here's another dumb question how on earth did they all those tires get there does that some they have a sign there that says bring your used and worn tires here somebody thought that was a good idea yeah because that's a lot of time yeah can i answer that one virginia is that okay we we believe that according to local lore so this is from multiple different sources that back in the early 70s they were placed there for erosion control and if that that was the perp that was the goal and we want to honor that goal so we believe that they were according to local lore they were um placed there like a retaining wall to actually deliberately stop the erosion first few hurricanes according to local lore first few hurricanes came through and scattered everything so that's why we want to put it we want to be able to restore that area did that help well i have a few tires at my dock so now the question is i'm obviously going to get them out of the water because i didn't think they mattered but so what do i do with those there's probably five or six um so mosquito control is organizing multiple tire amnesty days um funded with this grant and so a few weeks ago they staged next door at the health department building and people could drop off it was up to six or ten tires per person um and they collected about 12 000 pounds of tires at that first event that's great so um yeah there's a lot of tires i'll just get them out of the water and then when i hear about that then i'll yeah yes yep you're allowed to take four a year to landfill as an individual in the county and that's it which fred's very experienced with yeah he's been doing his part all right chair that's my report wonderful move on to lori onto the tvs in here black no is is there anything on that one yes okay there we go great well good morning everyone happy friday um before i get started a little birdie had suggested that we kind of go over this first chart right here so that everybody's on sync and understands it okay so we're going to go over it so if you notice the green line that is the state economic and demographic research projections for sales tax be our little green line right here so right now it's kind of hard to see because it's all going together but as it starts separating you'll see it right in here okay the blue line which is the county's 2025 projection as you can see we're on sync right through here and then it goes up a little bit and then the purple line is the actual sales tax we have received so i just kind of wanted to go over that with you so that everybody can understand um because i know it is a little confusing when i first saw it i was like what is all these lines and we used to show right so each line is a different year and we used to show all the years and it was just compressing and compressing so the committee uh talked about it for a while and said let's try three years no more than three years at a time on the graph but we're certainly you know amenable to changing this however you want it it's it's for your information and i do apologize i have noticed that we my little totals for the up here is not popping up so i'm going to try to figure out why it's not popping up so i did notice that i'm like when i was reviewing this so i will hopefully by the next meeting get that corrected and that way we can see a total of everything okay so now we're going to move on to our financial statements we have received 4.1 million for january collections and the total from revenue conception is 447 million there's that total right there for us okay for the monthly financial statement the anticipated 504 million in revenue by the end of the fiscal year the actuals received so far are 409.9 million so far for our expenditures this fiscal year the total assigned for the project and programs is 84 million and right now we have actually spent 8.8 point million 8.8 million right now okay do we have any questions or anything yes down the road question on the grants we got uh you know in the last two whatever time period is um will you add that change this and i know you explained that a lot of it didn't come to us but um and you can explain the there's grant if you scroll back up so the right the top um table are all the revenues and there are several lines there for different kinds of grants so as we receive grants we do budget changes and once those are approved they get incorporated into this monthly table yes okay just curious a little different question you mentioned that some of that money you mentioned that some of that money went to you know other people with their our projects so that won't go into here or will it no it won't show up in the county's budget it will show up in the plan in table 6-9 where we show how much swirl funding there is for each project and what the total funding is for those projects um okay thank you and then next month will be the grant breakdowns because that's the quarterly so then that's where you're going to see that a little bit more breakdown next month when we do it okay yeah y'all told me about the quarter one last week yes yeah because i remember last month you had to ask about that and that was that's coming up next month for you okay all right well thank you one quick question yes this was the first month with the capital outlay that's 27 600 what was that for i would have to get back with you on that because yeah because this is done at the first of the month for me when i do these and yeah is that our vehicle because that's just a sign oh that yes that could be yes that is our new vehicle that we've yeah we're purchasing for so thank you we ordered it it hasn't arrived yet yeah okay thanks i'm sorry okay morning i'm chuck jacoby and i'm probably here for multiple reasons but the main one is because whenever virginia tells me to do i try to do so i've tried to organize this around sort of three quotes um the first thing i want to do is to try to illustrate for you that you know you're not just people out there taking a walk even though you are kind of leading the charge on restoring the lagoon but there are a lot of people joining into this effort uh the second one is to kind of go back and go over a little bit of a potted history about how we got where we are um i think my hope is that by having a little bit of understanding of what we think we understand about what's been going on in the lagoon that'll maybe help you as you think about what you want to do in the future and the last one is to answer this question that a well-known lagoon um expert asks all the time whenever i do an egghead speech like this and that's so what so what i'll start with is the fact that you have a shared challenge this is not the only place that that is dealing with the issues you're dealing with um and that includes lake apopka this is an example of a slide that used by the district to talk about lake apopka where they're talking about the benefits of reducing phosphorus loads the amount of phosphorus that gets into the lake and the shared part of this is that any place there are submerged aquatic vegetation sort of rooted large plants they need a lot of light and they're at the bottom so they're the last ones to get the light and so if you get too much nutrients the small single single celled plants in the water column take up those nutrients better as it were when they're in the water column and they shade out those plants on the bottom and when you then what happens is eventually the plants can't photosynthesize enough to maintain their their body mass then they die and you lose your habitat for fish like bass and stuff in the lagoon it's a little more complex because we have to consider nitrogen as well and in fact we probably want to think about the ratio of nitrogen and phosphorus so nitrogen and phosphorus are the two macronutrients the ones that are used in the largest quantities by plants and animals fat but the the overall story is the same the phytoplankton can get to them quicker they up in the water column they get the light they shade out the plants on the bottom the habitat goes away and you see effects flow up and i'll talk about some of that later now is this really is this true of the in the river lagoon i mean do we have an issue and yeah i mean we do these are these are quotes from newspapers right so fish are dying gases strange colors confusion about what the hell's going on and those are from the 1900 period all right so the lagoon has always had this kind of issue in a sense right the lagoon is a place that will always have blooms not all blooms are bad they're part of the productivity that drive what makes the place special it's when they get out of balance as it were right when the nutrient inputs exceed that that with the system can cope with the shock absorbers in the system as it were the way the nutrients are cycled get overloaded and that's when you get the phytoplankton taken over and this and the switch loss of the key habitat all right so the lagoon part of what makes it special is also what makes it sensitive so it's it's functioning is is a key part of what everybody loves about the lagoon but it's also makes it a little bit sensitive here's some characteristics that we should consider these are receiving water bodies as we call them right so they sum up all the inputs from from the land and they gather that into one place the lagoon you know belies its name it's it's not a river it doesn't have that kind of hydrologic forcing that you get in say you know another like the saint john's river or someplace like that the lagoon is segmented so if you look at the image on the right hand side that's a model that looked at what we call water age just think of it as how long a parcel of water stays in a place and you can see that it runs from sort of three months the blue areas as you go south right that's where the inlets are and then when you when you start looking at where the orange the yellow and orange are you know those are the places where water stays for a fairly long period of time and that oval sort of highlights you know the banana river lagoon right where water can stay for years so these receiving water bodies when and because of the the way they're they work when nutrients get in the system they stay there and so that's one of the reasons why we have to be careful with the loads right because we just don't have it going somewhere else the other thing is that it makes the management a little more challenging than some of these other places that have the same issues right so you can't do an upstream project to fix the downstream like they can and say the saint john's river or the everglades even right you do upstream stuff and it makes the everglades better you also because of the fact that the lagoon doesn't necessarily mix internally very fast you also can't do one project and have it spread its effect over the whole lagoon right it's kind of in chunks um so you can't do like lake apopka where they put a flow way on the north shore right and they filter the water as it comes in and that affects the whole lake that's not going to work for the whole lagoon a lot of people say well let's change that you know i mean let's change the physics of it and you know i mean you could try um but the the key to me is that some of those characteristics that make this sensitive are also what make it special so i think you want to be really cautious as you try to think about that so why do we have this issue almost everywhere it's basically just numbers of people in a given area so that the graph on the left is just the census population from the counties up this way and you can see around 1950 you know it just started climbing right um and as my wife would say that's because air conditioning makes florida livable and you wouldn't be here otherwise um but a lot of things you know space uh you know mosquito control a variety of things sort of boosted the population and on the right hand side is a graphic that tries to say and here's the kinds of activities that then start to cause problems and we'll go into that a little more in a later slide so in about the late 1990s folks from the st john's river water management district where i used to work um they noticed that the lagoon was having some issues right and in particular again it was the sav the seagrasses in the lagoon right these rooted plants and they noticed that there was a relationship between loads of nutrients and and um suspended sediment light and and then the response of seagrass and so they did they put out what was called a pollution a pollutant load reduction goal right so they said okay we're having an issue we think we need to reduce loads to this level when when the districts do that that sort of keys off this whole string of things that happened after that um the district proposed that the depth at the offshore end of the seagrass canopy be a metric of how well the lagoon was doing and that's because that's you know that's the deep edge quote unquote and that's where the light's going to be the least that's where seagrass is going to struggle the most so if that's doing okay then the rest of it probably is too so that kind of kicked off restoration and there's sort of a couple of couple of main ways that this is going on for parts of the lagoon there's the total maximum daily load and basin management action plan tmdl bmap process right and almost everyone in this room has had something to do with that virginia knows a little bit about it um but the basic premise is that that you estimate what is a total maximum daily load that is safe from all the sources then you look at what the estimates of the current loads are and in this case we're talking nitrogen and phosphorus and you say well the tmd if the tmdl is less than the current load we need to reduce the loads to get down to a safe level and then the commitments to do that by all the stakeholders they get bundled up into these basin management action plans right which says this is how we're going to do that you've given us this amount to reduce brevard county gets x amount to reduce here's how we're going to achieve that goal there's another way which is a little less regulatory and that's where the stakeholders kind of get ahead of the process and they say well we we can see this coming and so we're going to set up our own plan we're going to have a reasonable assurance plan or a wrap and that's up in mosquito lagoon where they weren't declared impaired in the first round of things but they could see it coming and so they said well we'll try to get ahead of the game same basic premise though again people commit to doing things to reduce load you know make the estimate of how much protection you need and all both of those get reviewed by the department of environmental protection at the state level and the epa at the federal level so that's underway around the lagoon so how do how do people make this happen well you know what drives this as it were so that top the environmental resource permits in white that's to remind me that to talk about that red box in the diagram there so the tmdl the bmap and the wrap are all backward looking things right they're all saying hey we kind of messed up in the past and we want to fix it so it's restoring things the environmental resource permits or erps are forward looking things that say hey this is what we learned from looking backward this is what we want to do in the future to not have as much of a problem so that's an important part of the of the piece of the way this works so on the in the diagram again you see a variety of ways that nutrients get into the system a lot of people call them sources a lot of that i tend to think of more as pathways there are ways for the nutrients to get into the system the nutrients themselves the nitrogen and phosphorus atoms you know come from burning fossil fuels putting fertilizer out waste products from people and animals that's where the nitrogen and phosphorus actually lives the storm water picks it up and carries it to lagoon likewise when you divert canals you know like the c10 was talked about right when you divert water that'll bring nutrients with it from a from a basin that wasn't supposed to be connected to the lagoon so anyway so the the on the right hand side in the text there um the best management practices that's for a lot of the agricultural inputs right that's how they're regulated and that's done through fdacs department of um agriculture and community and consumer services the wastewater treatment reverse osmosis all of a lot of that stuff that's all done through dep environmental protection so they're the regulator likewise to reduce non-point sources right those are things where you know that's picking up fertilizer from neighborhoods not from a single house those non-point sources are also handled by deb for the lagoon the things in yellow in the diagram so the atmospheric deposition just stuff that rains out of the atmosphere either dry or when it actually is wet deposition the groundwater which we know some gets into the lagoon and the muck which you folks deal with a lot those were all kind of handled implicitly right they weren't explicitly given reductions they were built into the margin of safety so have people been doing things yes um so this is about a year old um it's a little more than a year old now but um they gather these numbers together um when when they get the wherewithal to do it um but there are 10 projects that are proposed in the reasonable assurance plan up in mosquito lagoon again that's a relatively small part of the system um nine of nine of which are completed or ongoing ongoing things are like street sweeping and educational things that also get credit for helping to reduce loads right um they got one one project left that's that's in still kind of in the planning stage from the other from the other basin management action plans that are relevant there's a over a thousand projects um 900 just up short of 950 have been completed or ongoing and another around 200 to go so that's the effort right people are putting in the effort what's the result well again we measure the result initially by the credits for reducing nitrogen phosphorus loads and these are the values from the recent statewide report for that so you have the um mosquito lagoon banana river lagoon northern indian river lagoon and central indian river lagoon the northern central boundary is about 192 um the percent remaining is purple the percent complete is the green so you know you can see that um other than the total phosphorus reductions for the mosquito lagoon that they promised in the reasonable assurance plan we're about a little under two-thirds at best maybe more like around a half way home towards the tmdl right the tmdl runs out to 2035 and so you know we're they've hit the milestones thus far and so you know the the hope is that they will continue to do so all right so who's doing this i mean we talked about the regulators being dep fdax well i mean you folks are right out in front um with yours with your monies and you know more about this than i do so i'll just move on to the next one the state has been contributing um so a lot of times that's in the cost share projects right so some of the grants that were mentioned um those kinds of things and then this is a a recent poll of the sort of values for the state right so completed projects are the brown blobs um underway are the green and the planned ones are in the sort of moaf color there so you know people are working on it you also have the estuary program the national estuary program um they get some funding from the u.s epa but they also get funding from the coalition of the counties um the two water management districts and the dep and the epa has a non-voting sort of seat on that they only have about a million a year to put into restoration directly hands-on sort of stuff but i'll talk about another thing that they do which which estuary program is really helpful because it thinks about the whole system right so it spans the counties and it spans the water management districts and it tries to think broadly about what goes out and that'll come up in a minute the district up this way that's the saint john's district down south it's south florida water management district um but here's some recent numbers on what what the district's been up to so 59 cost share grant funded projects not all of those target reductions in nutrients sometimes reduction in nutrients come along with reductions in freshwater inputs things like that um but an estimated um 140 000 pounds of nitrogen and 11 000 pounds of phosphorus a year but there also are these six regional district-led projects so the district can be helpful when you need something that again spans counties or you know it's going to help multiple cities um and the estimated reductions from those are a little bit bigger so 1.2 million pounds of nitrogen 250 000 pounds of phosphorus per year so you know people are contributing the other thing from the district is that they're certainly up in this region one of the main players in terms of tracking what's going on so the whole tmdl bmap process has uncertainty that surrounds those estimates you know we don't know exactly how much nitrogen and phosphorus they're going and we we estimate how much there is and so to cope with that uncertainty they base success on an independent measure something in the system typically right so seagrasses has been the measure for the the basin management action plans up this way and you know we'll probably continue to be but there may be some additional things put in there anyway but to do that you have to have the measures of what's going on out in the system so these these dots on this first map here they're continuous monitoring devices that are out in the system so they take temperature and do and um ph and other they measure other parameters at these places and that can be really helpful because that gives you a much more coherent time series right so they every hour they're sending data back to the to the home base but there also are these water quality stations where you have monthly sampling going on up and down the lagoon and you know that's a little bit chunkier time step um but there are a lot more places and so we combine the two and get some idea what's going on there plus the parameters that they measure are more more broad suite of parameters then there's the seagrass um transects they're done twice a year and lori's going to come up here in a little bit and talk about some of that um but they're also mapping every other year so um try to get this fine scale picture with the transects right so that's you know what's the percent cover get the broad scale footprint with the mapping all right now i'm going to switch to kind of a potted history as it were so 1992 um the lagoon start you know the restoration really started to kick in by 2009 we'd seen expanses of seagrass and the arrows point at a couple that's sort of several places where you can see it again this is from the mapping 2011 um lost a lot of that 2019 had lost about 58 percent of the footprint right so much like my poor hair um it's like receding right but not only that 89 percent of the cover so the few hairs that are left they're kind of lonely because they've lost all their brother right so so a lot of seagrass left the system so why what happened there i mean this this was like right in the midst of trying to wrap up the tmdl b map process right so you can imagine the chaos that yes the the gnashing of teeth and tearing of clothes that happened um when all this occurred occurred what happened were a bunch a series of phytoplankton blooms this is the brown tide from 2016 um which i think a lot of people remember it's because it was pretty dramatic but there were others the 2011 losses there was a bloom in 2011 that started this process as it were so these are satellite images where um the satellite takes the light that bounces back and then we can take those measurements because and then use our water quality data and estimate how much chlorophyll which is the thing that the phytoplankton have that takes the light out of the system as it were we can estimate how much chlorophyll there is so the hotter the colors the more chlorophyll there is and and the satellite images are probably not used to get an accurate measure of chlorophyll per se um but they can at least give you a picture of the extent of where chlorophyll is hot and so that 2011 bloom was very unusual one it was much more intense than the blooms that had been recorded in the past two it was much more extensive than the blooms that had been recorded in the past and three it was much longer lasting than the blooms that had been recorded in the past so it got dubbed the super bloom well that was a little premature um so there was a bloom in 2012 that's the first time the brown tide showed up and that was up in mosquito lagoon and it kind of eked over into the northern indian river lagoon 2016 was the major brown tide and that surpassed the super bloom so you know i'm not sure we've come up with the word for that yet but people are working on it um so 2016 major bloom 2019 another bloom 2020 another bloom um since 21 22 we've been running pretty smooth for the moment so knock on wood um down at the bottom there are some notes about fish kills um fish kills in this case are not toxicity it's not kind of like red tide on the on the gulf coast of florida right where the toxin from the phytoplankton kills the fish this is when the bloom crashes that they call it so the phytoplankton die in on mass the bacteria chew on the phytoplankton use the oxygen in the water drop the oxygen levels and the fish can't get enough oxygen so that's where the fish skills come in so not only did we see a change in the quantity of phytoplankton we saw a change in the quality of the phytoplankton as well so the new players which are on the right hand side um were dominant compared to the old players that were dominant there was the ones on the left the new players have a bunch of characteristics that make them particularly bad actors as it were um they're smaller so how small well 220 microns what does that mean so look at your agenda find a full a period and there's you can put 200 to 500 of these things across that period shoulder to shoulder yeah in the old version in the old phytoplankton you'd get 50 to 100 or so right so i mean they're all small but the new ones are much smaller much smaller means they turn over much faster so they get the amount the number of them gets higher very quickly because they divide much more quickly um they also have some characteristics that make them a little harder to control they have the ability to out compete some of the older phytoplankton for nutrients um in a variety of ways that i'm happy to discuss if somebody really wants to know but they also have characteristics that keep the grazers the things that would eat the phytoplankton from eating them so they kind of get what we call a boost from the bottom up which is the nutrients and they get a boost from avoiding the top-down control which is the grazing so when all this changed that you know did anything else change besides the habitat as it were and the answer is yeah we're starting to piece together some things that that um link up to those changes because they were major changes so the 2013 and 2021 manatee unusual mortality events now have some links back to what went on on the top row of figures there on the left hand side is a stomach full of drift algae looks like what the manatees did was when the seagrasses went away they shifted to eating drift algae which is um material that rolls around on the bottom like think tumbleweeds as it were and it turns out that in some cases enough cases as to make an unusual mortality event that drift algae set off a bacterial reaction in the guts of these manatees and the bacteria then produced a toxin and that got into the system in the manatees and so the manatees that were found dead in that event weren't starving they just kind of suffered toxic shock syndrome excuse me um and so the then the other one the 2021 event that is tied back to just lack of food so on the bottom two figures there the top one is a manatee that they normally look like the bottom one is has what they call peanut head which is circled in the red so they lose they lose the blubber um they lose their condition um because they don't have enough food um we're working on nailing down what happened to the fish assemblages through all this period um so here i have some figures of numbers in the sayings that the fisheries independent monitoring guys haul that's the y-axis and the time is the is the x-axis and the arrows kind of point out the patterns so pinfish numbers dropped and sort of stayed low that's a little bit what you'd expect when you pull the habitat out from under them right but then other things like red drum they dropped and then they kind of bounced back a little bit um ladyfish there was a pulse of a ladyfish caught and that may have something to do with the efficiency of of the gear um and then the third one is an even more complex thing where they dropped and they kind of came back and then they dropped again um so you know there's a lot to unpack but the point is that there looks like there are effects that flow down to the fish populations and then if we go from there we can go to the dolphin populations which feed on the fish and so in 2013 um they notice around that time a lot of dolphins with their ribs showing like the figure on the left dolphins aren't supposed to have their ribs showing look like me a little more um and on the right is a graph that we use stable isotopes so in in all organisms there's a couple of isotopes of nitrogen a couple of isotopes of carbon and you can look at the ratio of those and the saying is you are what you eat right so the black dots on that graph are the prey items that's the carbon and nitrogen and the prey items and the colored triangles are the are adult dolphins and what you think about with these isotopes it's it's like mixing hot water and cold water to get warm water that's what happens in the dolphins right they eat this and they eat that and then they get an isotope ratio somewhere in between the two and the main point here is if you follow the arrow from 1993 to 2013 there was a shift in diet and when we looked at what they were eating they were they had shifted from eating a lot of lady fish it turns out to eating more sea bream and there's less energy content in the sea bream so they needed to eat about 15 percent more food in order to maintain the same metabolism and that might have just been too much for some of the dolphins which this is one of the only unusual mortality events that has a cause and it was listed as ecological causes and we think we've now been able to untangle that a little bit and when they surveyed this the free swimming dolphins this like about almost two thirds of them were um underweight malnourished so some you know for some dolphins it was just too much for others they were struggling all right so do we understand why not fully i mean it's it's really hard to reconstruct past events right but here's here's my hypothesis as it were so we had decades of loading right you saw that from like the 60s on right this system as i said there the nutrients get processed and the system can handle blooms and process those blooms but if those things that handle that the shock absorbers as it were if they one of them gets broken or overstressed things can tip really quickly and we think that's what we saw so we had in sort of leading up to 2011 a couple of meteorological sort of events right cold winters hot summers the cold winters led to fish kills so there were about 400 tons of fish collected up up around the cape right and that was only a small part of the total number of fish that were killed those nutrients from the rotting fish they go into the water there was also in the warmer weather the bacteria in the muck produced more nutrients fluxes more nutrients into the water and so again you had like multiple stressors coming together perfect storm sort of thing then as soon as as soon as the phytoplankton got rolling and started shading out the seagrasses and the drift algae there's you can see some drift algae there in that diagram in the middle on the bottom um as soon as those got shaded now there's less competition for nutrients means the phytoplankton get more nutrients and so you spiral and so that's what we think went on it was like a a tipping point for the lagoon stress to a point where it was about to tip and then a sort of perfect storm and it tipped over now it has righted itself a bit and you'll hear a little bit about that um and so it's probably doing what we call flickering it's kind of i'm not too good in the back again and you know so again the last few years have been pretty good all right so as bob would say so what key message perhaps stay the course right stick with it um so you know the district we talk about diet so reducing the external loads with treating stormwater putting water back into the basins where it belongs septic to sewer will help um exercise um right that's the getting that legacy loads like the muck right so i mean i can reduce my intake but i'm gonna have to do some exercise if i want to get back in shape physical therapy restore some of the things that help like the wetlands and filter feeders and then keep going with the checkups and preventative care so continue monitoring continue looking for new ways to reduce loads of nutrients and why do i say stay the course two reasons one is the indian river lagoon national estuary program took a look at could we find the amount of money that we think we need to do this and so they had someone go out there and look at sources of funding you know seeking 250 million a year for 20 years right so five billion dollars and the red box at the bottom says hey yeah you know if everybody kind of does their part there are sources of these funds out there will it be easy no i mean you're competing with lots of other places but it's doable and the second reason is because some of the stuff we did at the district shows that if you head towards the tmdl you may well see the response you're looking for so this is that same sort of image kind of image from july 2011 which shows the super bloom we ran this model um for like five years leading up and going past the super bloom first of all with the loads that were estimated to be going into lagoon before anybody started counting credits for projects and things and you know the model output is a little wonky as we expect it's a model but if you look you know the oranges and the yellows kind of match up right and they're about the same extent of orange and yellow and then we ran it saying okay let's start the five-year term with 25 percent um towards the target 50 75 and 100 and what happens then well if you look here it takes you almost all the way up to 75 percent of the tmdl before the yellows really start to go away right and about at 100 you know you're now you're looking pretty good but remember we're like about 50 to 60 percent of the way home so that's why you know you can do it and it looks like you should do it another couple things um probably you know as the folks who manage things think beyond kind of averages so events you know we have to probably build in elbow room in our management for events right you you don't want to back the lagoon right up to the edge and then have it tip over just because something odd happened that nobody could predict um understanding what nutrients do in the lagoon could be relatively valuable so it's not just how much goes in it's what does it do and so understanding that cycling um and then like with the chlorophyll you know knowing a little bit more about what are the phytoplankton that are producing the chlorophyll may be helpful as well some of those new players are going to like a different nitrogen to phosphorus ratio and will be more dominant depending on where that ratio sits that's why early on i said you want to consider nitrogen and phosphorus and the ratio of the two because it may tilt your phytoplankton a different direction lastly for this one is got to be patient all right the system took a lot of pressure went along and crashed just because you push back on the pressure it's not going to go back up that same path it's very unlikely you may well have to push a little harder before the system has enough wherewithal to pop back up to where it was in terms of health so don't be surprised at the end of the tmdl people ask for more um because it it's quite likely they will have to and then maybe you know as you go and people talk about trying to do new things um might want to you know think about some things that we may be able to do in the future so loads in groundwater we haven't looked in a lot of detail at those um there may be ways to put the lagoon on some more exercise harvesting drift algae not going to be the easiest thing to do but may you know may work um the rehabilitation of seagrasses is a you know is a big deal um and the district is looking at the seed banks because that's where as l'oreal tell you we think some of the recent recoveries come from and then keep up with your checkups and preventions you know so again try to learn about how nutrient cycle try to understand the vital points try to look at where the events happen what what does the system do and you know a model is a good way to capture all that and so i hope you get about 10 of the value that this guy's going to get out of that lunch thank you oh i'm sorry here forgot my job thank you is there any chance that they're going to start looking at salinity in addition to nutrients in the bmap process reduction of fresh water going into the lagoon not a lot i don't think um impairment for salinity is not something i've heard people do now the district does look for example when they do the quote-unquote re-diversions one of the things they do is say well maybe we don't want to re-divert all that water right we want to we want to make sure that the lagoon gets enough fresh water as well so but i haven't heard of anyone having an impairment for salinity so aaron had a question um thanks chuck um always good to see the summaries um got a whole list of questions but i'll just ask a couple um and this is coming from the perspective of the recreational fishing community a lot of reports i get um i talk about some of these at the nep meetings as well but when you showed the sub basins and the residence time of the water one of the continuing confused points of confusion for me is that section from the melbourne causeway down the sebastian inlet it should have a low residency time and high circulation but if you run from say geez all the way down wabasso all the way up to port st john's that section from long point to the melbourne causeway is consistently the worst water color in the entire lagoon so it's kind of a throw out that the the basin management is fantastic but there's something else going on in that region that's a pretty significant region it wasn't until last year for example that seagrass and laurie can talk to this came back around sebastian inlet which gets tidal for any every day so do you have any thoughts on that how that committee might think about this so again um you know it's it's in a sense going to be the combination of loads and call it residence time for lack of a better word um it's not one or the other and that relationship's not likely to be linear right so there's it's going to be some complex relationship between the two um which may be what's driving pockets of you know of places where things happen um and you know salinity can play into that uh you know all of those things so it's to me it's not a shock that you get these places where phytoplankton bloom more than others um seagrass recovery you know i mean that's because of the extent of the losses um that relatively strong coupling between light and seagrass may be a different relationship now and there may be other factors that are entering into it like disturbance um so you know with if the sediment moves too much the seagrasses may not be able to recover as easily um so again in terms like that sebastian you know i mean if you get you get a lot of a lot of tide right and so you know again these guys have to kind of overcome that um if the bottoms shift around so you know the relationships are multiple uh not necessarily simple okay so a follow-up to that um and you kind of referred to it um as far as the tmdl's if i understand correctly the tmdl's are based on uh surface water flows yeah primarily yes um and so i think this is discussed a little bit at the last meeting so our groundwater flows basically have a lot of legacy right so even if we stopped all the inputs from septics into the groundwater now it's going to take decades for that to sort out so are those when we look at tmdl's that's great but there's that kind of underlying legacy to kind of get into your diet thing you're great all week but then you eat three pizzas on saturday and that's that's your legacy um how do we kind of look at that kind of longer term because if you look at chesapeake bay tampa bay it's been chesapeake about 42 years before it actually recovered recovered so we have any thoughts on on that type of shorter term longer term so so again i i think you know the tmdl be met process um tried in my mind to capture the things that we knew were a major issue and address those um but it's an adaptive process right nobody said this is all you're ever going to have to do amen they said this is what we're going to do first right and then we're going to look and then we're going to see where we stand and then we'll talk about what we have to do next and like i pointed out at the end there you know groundwater um may be something that people want to work towards understanding right and and you have here right as as part of following up on projects um you know you're saying well did it make a difference to the groundwater but you're right i mean what kind of legacy there is in groundwater i'm not sure anybody knows for sure right i guess my overall point for both of those is the improvements are fantastic but we have to keep in mind that this is a long-term decades you know we're working hard now but we're talking decades of investment which is a lot harder to sustain sure and you know and remember what you're working hard now on is fixing what happened 30 40 years ago right um what you need to probably think about in the future is you know are we keeping pace with what's going on around us so are we let's make sure we're not digging another hole you know like they say you know if you find yourself in a hole stop digging so i'm sorry yeah laurie asked a question about salinity you mentioned the difference in phytoplankton in the lagoon are there other measures we should be gathering other measures about the different than what we're getting today no i think generally speaking you know we we have most of the metrics we need um the consistency uh i think one of the things for understanding the lagoon is the duration and so when you get an event like the 2011 super bloom right you don't have a way to look and compare it to another one right so you know you have one you go okay that's nice you know here's what we saw we had that one but does that hold if we have another one well that yeah that's an interesting point because when i looked at the last year the 2020 i thought to myself could the reduction in fish kills be just because there are fewer in the lagoon to begin with yeah it's possible and so it doesn't burst everybody's bubble and say oh my gosh look what it did and just one final thing just anecdotally that study on dolphins was fascinating with it with the change in their diet and i read that read the study and i've noticed this is anecdotal my backyard i'm catching or losing tons of lady fish and there are dolphin every day feeding in there so i'm wondering if maybe we're beginning in that little bitty spot is one anecdotal point seeing some of that come back uh i mean one would hope so um you know again i think the the fish story um is a little more complex than you might think it's the start um for both the independent monitoring and the dolphins because it may just have been they shifted their location so if the if the prey move into really shallow water the dolphin can't get in there and get at them like they used to when the prey was out in deeper water where the seagrass was and so again the same with the net you know that's perhaps why you saw a spike because they shifted their distributions so yeah that's something we're still kind of working on thanks together last question following up off of the the salinity questions are there tmdls bmp's for fresh water that are already being monitored about inputs not groundwater but runoff stormwater runoff inputs changes salinity because of that again i don't i don't know of anybody who's been declared impaired because of too much fresh water i'm just thinking of clams and the high pulse of fresh water the impact of clam reproduction sure again um you know big pulses of of fresh water certainly lead to short-term issues um whether they lead to longer-term issues is probably a little more questionable um but yeah again i don't i don't know of any impairments for that kind of issue thanks thank you appreciate it oh wait wait i'm sorry chuck on the map where you had the little circles for the continuous monitoring devices it looked like the one that was on the titus opere was not on your map did that one is it gone um still there uh it takes a little bit of a reduced set of measurements um so it doesn't it doesn't always make it into the set that we use to do some explanations okay thank you it's it's a little bit out of the main stem um and so a variety of reasons thank you again appreciate it all right our next speaker uh dr kate hubbard she's joining us virtually through teams so let's see if we can make the technology work i'm i'm sorry i couldn't hear you virginia our next speaker is joining us um through teams she's not here physically up yay there she is thank you can you hear us kate hey can do we hear you can you hear me we can hear you good um do you want to share your presentation i can stop sharing screen and you share your screen we can hear you oh you can hear me yes do you want to share your screen for your presentation yeah that would be great so while while they work on the technology you know we should have done something to introduce dr chuck jacoby as you could probably tell he was the lead scientist for the water management district during the super bloom and uh leading researchers trying to figure out you know what that event was um more recently he's gone to the florida flood hub but he is also continuing as a scientist for the indian river lagoon national estuary program our next speaker dr kate hubbard is with florida fish and wildlife commission and she is the lead for the harmful algalume subsection chair of the florida harmful algalume task force and director of the florida wildlife commission center for red tide research so i'm still not seeing a shared screen are you able to share your screen yeah i'll try to share my screen well thank you for the opportunity to speak today thank you so much to chuck for sort of setting the stage and i wanted to tell you a little bit about some of the harmful algal bloom issues in the indian river lagoon a little bit more about some of the different species that are causing these blooms how we study them and a little bit about how they thrive i did include all of these titles up here particularly that i chair the florida have task force we came together again as a task force in 2019 and we've been meeting ever since and although we've been focusing on red tide uh craniobrevis issues since then we have started to discuss working on other issues across the state of florida including those in the irl so with a focus on blooms in the irl there are a few things that can make an algal bloom harmful one is simply the amount of biomass as we saw with some of those super blooms the other is that they can produce toxins and those toxins can be harmful to human health and then we have a few species that may be able to do both and so we're really interested in trying to track those that are particularly harmful to the environment or to human health but also i just want to mention that a lot of algae in fact the vast majority of algae are not harmful they're really important as check mentioned for primary productivity for acting as the base of the food web for producing the air that we breathe algae are really they're really awesome in terms of how they interact with their environment and in terms of nutrients algae can take up nutrients but they also release nutrients and they themselves can be a source of nutrients and so there's a lot of complex dynamics there as we think about the different algae within the irl so we have a huge partner network that works on algal blooms in the irl these are just some of the different partners that are involved in that effort and it's really these federal state regional county local partnerships that allow us to have such great coverage in the irl in terms of our work at the florida fish and wildlife conservation commission our work on harmful algal blooms is focused on monitoring and research and a lot of the monitoring that we do is in support of the florida department of agriculture and consumer services and they're the ones that manage shellfish harvest areas and as you can see from the lap the map on the left there are a lot of different shellfish harvesting areas with different approval statuses at the moment and we do a lot of the testing the analytical testing on the phytoplankton as well as on the toxins to be able to help inform those decisions by dax and a lot of the habs that we work on unfortunately can produce toxins that require international or national management strategies as well as state biotoxin contingency plans and so we have several of those for the habs that we work on in the indian river lagoon and again just i want to emphasize this awesome partnership that we have and there's just a lot going on and a lot of people involved i will show you a little bit of the data just to illustrate some of the hab issues that we faced over the past several years and i want to take us back to the 2000s when people started to get ill from eating puffer fish that were traced back to the indian river lagoon and puffer fish actually do have their own toxin tetrodotoxin and this toxin is typically found in the liver and gonads and so in order to eat puffer fish there's very careful cleaning particularly when people get sick from eating puffer fish it's because the the fish weren't accurately cleaned or adequately cleaned in this case it was traced back to a different syndrome and this syndrome was tied to a particular alga pyridinium bahamence so this is one of the the first tab issues that really popped up in the irl and unlike most species of fish the saxitoxins that are produced by this alga are actually concentrated in the fillets the parts that the people are eating and so this led to a permanent ban on harvest from puffer fish in the irl and so this was the first incident and it sparked a lot of monitoring especially for saxitoxin and the alga that produces it so these are some pictures of pyridinium bahamence these blooms can make water discolored slightly reddish or brown this is actually a bloom in old tampa bay these blooms form in areas that have long residence times so they're well acclimated to some of the sub basins of the indian river lagoon one of several different types of things that can exist out in the lagoon that can cause bioluminescence and so that's something where often during a bloom there is quite a bit of bioluminescence and if we look at observations this is just showing one station in the banana river over time and what we see is that going back in time we see cyclical summer blooms of this particular alga and in some years these blooms reach higher concentrations than others and generally we see blooms across the upper part of the indian river lagoon i wanted to mention these summertime blooms occur in old tampa bay and we've started to see issues in pine island sound as well and one of the things that we track with pyridinium is the presence of cells in the sediment because cells these are what the in the upper part of that image are what the cells look like when they're in the water but after bloom during a bloom as conditions become less favorable cells form these cysts or seeds and those cysts sit in the sediment just like seeds do on land and then they form the seeds for the next bloom the next year and through studying bees in the lab we found out that they require a certain amount of chilling or cold kind of like again like plants or bulbs and once they've reached that amount of cold then they can start to germinate and bloom the next year a few things were kind of interesting with respect to pyridinium blooms in recent years it is again very dependable in terms of being a summertime bloomer but we saw that at least in 2023 and 2024 had a few kinds of things happening during the blooms and one of those is that we saw a pretty intense bloom in the Titusville area and that was something kind of unusual it came with a lot of bioluminescence and then last year we really didn't have much of a bloom and this was interestingly true in old Tampa Bay as well and so even though conditions in the past in the summer have always favored this suggests that there may be conditions shifting even more it's hard to say but I think it's important to point out that we have these cyclical algae and since 2010 we've also experienced these super blooms or you know occasionally maybe an extra super bloom these super blooms can discolor the water this is showing one of the brown tide events and so as you can imagine very little light is penetrating down to the seagrass it also can reduce dissolved oxygen concentration and that can cause a lot of issues in the water itself for fish other organisms and what we found with this particular type of algae is that it is very adept at using different types of nitrogen it can pick up a lot of different forms of nitrogen often those forms are maybe recycled forms and so that's probably one way that this organism is able to sustain itself for so long and reach such high densities now this is the organism itself so this is if you say it looks like a lot of tiny little things that's kind of what we say too these are extremely difficult to identify even under the microscope and so we have to use a lot of different specialized approaches when we start dealing with these tiny algae and one of the things that our group has done and some of our other partners in the IRL have done is really try to embrace these different monitoring tools so that we can get a quicker easier handle on what's going on during an event and particularly if we don't have an event it allows us to use these tools in an early warning capacity one of the things that we've seen with these brown tides especially over the past few years is that they may be able to compete with and or add to our seasonal pyridinium blooms so Chuck mentioned that in-situ continuous data that's hosted by the St. John's River water management district and I just want to mention what an awesome resource these these instruments are having these sensors there allows us basically to do extremely intensive monitoring high frequency monitoring from our offices and that allows us to keep track on things like dissolved oxygen and if we go to that time frame leading up to the fish kills in 2016 what we see is that we first saw really really high levels of oxygen associated with that really dense bloom and then we saw oxygen crash basically to zero this allowed us to know basically what was happening what was going on what was causing the fish kill but what caused the bloom to crash it may have been simply that there was a cloudy set of cloudy days so that the bloom couldn't photosynthesize whether or not it reached nutrient capacity we still have interesting questions related to these events that we have not yet answered of course this was the fish kill this was one of those images from that event and just now over layering some of the monitoring that we've been able to do since that event we've been able to partner with the fisheries independent monitoring field lab with fwc over in melbourne to do intensive sampling at eight or nine sites throughout the northern lagoon each week and these are showing results again just from one site but now i've shown that cyclical red tide pyridinium bahamens over time and then we see that the brown tide adds on to that the cell concentrations on the brown tide are shown on the the right hand axis they're much higher the cells are much smaller in spite of that the biomass the amount of algae is much greater and we see that it's quite big and even extended for quite a while and i'm only showing the banana river data here but we did see this bloom impact other basins as well before it kind of petered out things have been pretty quiet in the banana river over the past few years with respect to brown tide which is amazing i wanted to mention another type of alga that popped up um this was an alga that popped up in 2020 and caused green water discoloration and this was something that ended up being a blue green algae or cyanobacteria so a completely different type of algae and this was something novel that we hadn't really seen before and you can see some of that bloom extending in the satellite imagery over there and it did turn the water pea green soup colored this bloom really picked up in the summer of 2020 and then it petered out by the time the winter came and this was something again that we had never seen before the normal way that we prepare samples made it look different than how it looked when it was alive and so that was also a consideration and again these tiny cells when you get a sample that looks like this there's just so much going on it can be really hard to identify them we were able to use some different methods some genetic methods to figure out which species this was then we were able to do sequencing of its genome and we were able to figure out that most likely it has genes that allow it to take up nitrogen from the atmosphere so in addition to potentially utilizing nitrogen from the water it has that ability to bring nitrogen into the cells and then when it releases its own exodus that includes nitrogen that maybe informs that other algae can take up and we were also able to use those different genetic approaches to adopt rapid identification tools so that we can quickly identify this particular type of course this particular type really peaked in 2020 and we haven't seen it since however we're standing by ready in case it ever does happen again and we're trained up and we know but it just adds to this complexity of these algal blooms and it also points to how quickly how dynamic things can change and shift this one ended as temperature started to decrease so thankfully it was not a long-term bloomer and again it hasn't come back i wanted to mention another type of algae that we monitor for in the indian river lagoon pseudonychia pseudonychia is a genus of diatoms that includes a lot of different species that basically look very similar to each other we have to use genetic methods to tease them apart so we just count cells for the most part and we also screen for toxicity and we do this as part of our biotoxin shellfish contingency plan with fdocs and this allows us again to keep a close watch on our shellfish harvest areas as well as on these populations that in terms of this toxin pseudonychia produces tomoic acid only some species are known to produce this toxin and it can cause issues in marine mammals there has been an ongoing event on the west coast where sea lions have been impacted and although low levels of domoic acid have been observed in the irl and in some of the marine mammals on the east coast again the levels that we see in the irl are very very low one thing i know there's been discussion of salinity and pseudonychia is a marine diatom and it does tend to do better in more marine conditions and so often when we see it thriving conditions tend to be saltier so again just adds to this overall matrix of different algal blooms that can be in the indian river lagoon particular one isn't particularly bad when it's not toxic and so i think one of the things to look at is that after we've had this series of super blooms and anomalous blooms with really discolored water we've had a past few years that have been really good and so that has been awesome we have all of these tools ready to go but at the same time we'd much rather not have to use them um and so i just wanted to mention in terms of where we go from here i think that with respect to these different phytoplankton and their dynamics the episodic and event scale nature as well as the interannual variability that we see are really important and again these algae are coupled to their environment but they also can change their environment and so the restoration and management strategies have to account for that variability different types of algae that we see they have different threats in terms of how they interact with the ecosystem they also have different interactions with respect to nutrients and i think there are still some gaps that we have in terms of understanding linkages between nutrients and phytoplankton i think that there are other gaps in terms of understanding some of the benthic algae in the lagoon and in other estuaries across florida and that's something that we're actively working on trying to improve so um again there's a lot to think about in terms of where we go from here a lot of different types of algae and although i spoke about a lot of individual types of algae that we focus on it's also important to recognize that none of these algae exist on their own they're always existing in a community and so we have other tools other approaches that allow us to study either the individuals or the community in a whole and i just want to really highlight how routine monitoring with a toolbox makes a difference it allows us to have the appropriate resolution and space and time to get a handle on what's going on in terms of event response but then also to start looking at drivers and impacts and thinking about innovative strategies for resource management and i really want to highlight how having the institute one monitoring sensors that the district maintains as well as the phytoplankton routine phytoplankton monitoring that's been going on for a long time through the district nep and others satellite imagery has been a really awesome advance and allows us to have that in really high frequency handle on what's going on it's not everything and there can be cloudy days that obscure what's happening in the lagoon but i think it's something that especially with some of the new satellite advances coming out will allow us to get a better handle on who's blooming where and then finally i just wanted to share an example um so going back to 2016 my mom actually has a condo on the banana river and going back to that 2016 event and some of the other blooms um we had my mom collecting samples for us and i was quickly processing those samples doing dna sequencing in the lab but it was still something that was not instantaneous was not routine and this past year we started to see an increase in what seemed to be aurember lagunensis or brown tide like cells in the mosquito lagoon and we haven't indeed started to track a little bloom there and we were able to run these samples very quickly using a fluorescent antibody and a special automated cytometer and we were able to even take pictures of them and this all in the span of just a few hours and so i think our ability to respond to these events and to have a better handle on what's going on is is improving in leaps and bounds um and again i think that that goes hand in hand with a lot of the efforts put into restoration and with that i'll just say um again it takes a huge network i'm really grateful to be a part of that network and it's always something where i hope that we don't have to work on any harmful algal bloom issues but continuing to work on on just algal blooms um and algae in the irel um i'll pause and stop sharing my screen questions for kate orally so um the the bloom that's starting in the mosquito lagoon right now i i see it because i water test up there every week and i've been watching the water turn greener and greener is it going to get worse or what do you think is going to happen with with that bloom that's a great question and i do not know the answer to that um just looking back historically sometimes these things can kind of take up to pick up and then taper off um sometimes they can last for a long time and we're still at the beginning so it's it's hard to say other questions let me ask one quick one i i really enjoyed the presentation thank you very much uh the um the warnings you give in terms of being able to monitor now that's about as far as you can go i think it's up to us to do something here in response to that uh when you say we have tools ready to go about monitoring and warnings and alerts and that sort of thing uh i'm not seeing that there's if you start to see a bloom coming there's not like a bloom squad that you can have go out and stop the bloom i don't want anybody to get the wrong impression that this is something that you know is can be instantly cured by knowing it's coming is that a fair assessment i think that we'll hear a little bit more about that with one of the later speakers i think that given the nature of some of these different types of algae and how they where they are in the water column whether or not they may have a stage that resides in the sediment there are likely different strategies that might be helpful for each and i think that at least where the research is right now trying to understand how a treatment may be focused enough to alleviate the stress that the algal bloom causes but doesn't cause other issues i think that's a really delicate balance and just given how quickly things can turn over it is very possible that another algae will come to thrive after you deal with this algae and so i think that it is something that trying to understand their biology their life history how they interact with the nutrients it's another strategy for thinking about how you might be able to control them through improved management so if you can kind of take away some of the things that they need to grow and thrive before they turn into a big bloom uh one quick question on that i know they would be testing these lg sonic devices might if those prove workable might we be able to deploy those knowing an area is starting to bloom as a right potentially so that i think to kate's point the more we know about what makes them bloom what conditions allow them to bloom and what conditions the bloom collapses the better we can target um technologies to address sure the issue thanks go ahead uh kate you mentioned uh pyrodynia i just comment on that yeah briefly sorry i just wanted to mention that with some of the sonic devices i i think that there still needs to be some work on how they interact with marine mammals in particular um manatees yeah and so i i haven't seen that research yet and i just wanted to mention that just to add on yeah sorry i come off somebody no you're right on target i when i interviewed them about a year ago when they first had the announcement and i talked to their lead scientist i had the same exact question and he's claimed they've been used in areas with marine mammals and not seen any results but their range of that fits right in the range of the dolphins so it's uh it's certainly a great question i don't know if it does anything yet we should find out if it does obviously you got a problem um kate you mentioned uh pyrodinium and that it's likely caused some of the toxins in the puffer fish if if i remember correctly pyrodinium is also a factor in paralytic shellfish poisoning and shellfish so to what extent might this what what extent might this impact potentially um the clam aquaculture we have going on and in the lagoon given that that is a summer bloom we do have closures in those lease areas each year we try to work really carefully with dax to manage those closures um and try to open as soon as we're able to and so a lot of the testing that we do is to try to support uh reopening any other we thank you we've enjoyed it and we appreciate the effort you've gone to know it's a little difficult when you're remote but we thank you likewise thank you that's great let's see next we have she's getting up already terry's just going to pull up the presentation but laurie morris is here from the water management district and actually she's uh just drying out from spending a week uh swimming swimming in the lagoon along transects um examining the seagrass and the state of affairs out there so thank you laurie thank you good morning everybody and thank you for the invitation to speak so um i chose to be last because i'm hoping i can wrap up a lot of the last two projects so at first i want to um go over our see how we monitor seagrasses in the lagoon give you a little status and trend of that and then kind of give you an ecosystem view of what's going on with our main primary producers and then a little bit of update on some current projects that are helping for future restoration so let's get into it so we kind of monitor our seagrasses on a two-tier approach meaning a large scale and a finer scale so we do our lagoon-wide aerial mapping that you're all familiar with we fly and we can see a picture and from the air we can map the seagrass bed so we map that extent of the bed and that is done in cooperation with funding from dep and the south florida water management because we do a lagoon-wide view of that and so from that you get this footprint but what it doesn't give us is it doesn't give us what's going on inside that seagrass footprint you're not getting the quality of the seagrass you're not getting the type of species we do have seven species of seagrass so back in 1994 bob vernstein and i set up our fixed seagrass in water transect program to try to help give us that information of the percent cover and what's actually happening in that bed like chuck was mentioning the hairs on his head so um from that program again that is another lagoon-wide program but at a much finer scale because we're in the water so in there we have monitoring our seven species we're collecting seagrass cover and occurrence we do canopy height all non-destructive sampling because we didn't want to be the impact of the sampling and the impact of these seagrass beds we do it twice a year every summer and winter we also are collecting the drift macroalgae and um a calerpa another type of macroalgae we keep track of those separately and we'll you'll see how and why in a little bit so here are 100 dots of all the places where we have been monitoring and again this is also a multi-agency um cooperation we do not you often hear it referred to as the water management's transects they're not they're everybody's transects there's many agencies helping we cannot do this alone we do monitor i mean we do manage the data for it nobody else wanted to take on that task so here's the data from it so i'm hopefully this graph is familiar a lot of people present it we share it with everybody so that you can get that status and trend of the seagrass as a whole so looking at the green bars that is coming from our mapping data so that would be on the left hand scale using hectares and then the black and the gray lines come from the transect data and you can see that the mapping data isn't done every year every two to three years but the transects are so the transects allow us to have that information every year to fill in those blanks if there are and as the mapping data the total transect length because we always go from shore to the deep edge of the bed complement each other they um you can see they follow the same track and so we have that to show us how things are going in between so we're not missing stuff on our off mapping years and then the bottom line the gray line is what's the quality of the bed the percent cover what how much grass we have within that footprint and you clearly see the bloom events that have occurred starting in 2011 and the crash in the seagrass we've had some up and down as we call our flickering events and how the beds have occurred throughout the time and luckily we're starting to see that little upswing so the transects can take us till last year we are mapping in 2025 the contracts in place and with these clear skies we're having right now and the water's still clear we're hoping they're flying very soon but to give you an idea chuck kind of showed you some of these maps so this was our some of our peak maps the footprint that you saw in 2009 and you can see how the seagrass coverage pretty much takes over that shoal area that's shallow these plants require light so the light usually in the lagoon about less than two meters right so one and a half one meter or so is about where we have seagrass and luckily the lagoon has these vast shallow areas and so that's where the seagrass covers so there's 2009 and chuck kind of showed you what you're going to see for 2023 so you see that massive loss of seagrass in there and luckily we have mosquito lagoon which has shown some of that most the higher recovery and then when you look further south we see a little more recovery in the bottom so that's something to think about when we see of areas recovering it's not recovering when we see these increasing numbers it's not recovering the same everywhere so if we kind of break that into what we call sub lagoons into you know sections of the lagoon into big chunks the last two mapping years you can see some of our highest gains in recovery of seagrass have been in the north and mosquito lagoon a little bit in north irl and then down towards the southern parts of the lagoon and so you know you have to still think that central region is still really having a lot of stressors and taking that same kind of look now looking in the transects and looking at the quality the percent cover of the seagrass in those beds at the same time you can kind of see same kind of sub lagoons broken out with all my dots and the data coming from there looking towards the last couple of years we see how we're seeing increases and so in here we have the 2024 so you have beyond the mapping so you can see we have a little bit more recovery more recovery in mosquito we're starting to see banana light up we're starting to see north irl come back and then the southern irl as well that central is what kind of we talked about a little bit from chuck and um kate was mentioning that from coco down to um just north of sebastian grant area that's where that north central irl is where we're having our slowest return but when you look at this graph and you look at the areas where we are seeing seagrass we never completely a hundred percent lost seagrass in those areas right so there was something to come back from it's a little easier to come back when you have some shoots still out there than compared to that central area where we've had zero for a number of years now so that's where this little lacking and behind lagging behind is probably happening because it's harder to come back from nothing so now i want to kind of take you um into that whole ecosystem look and so we know the system has kind of worked together with seagrasses and drift algae and phytoplankton there are three main primary producers out there and we know they've all played and competed for nutrients during different times and we've seen that from the past two presentations so i just want to bring up this kind of classic graphic from from um you know a number of years ago and it goes back many people have used it as kind of a model for the system so if we're looking at trying to have a macrophyte based system of seagrasses you kind of have to have lower nutrients and highlight to have those seagrasses dominated but unfortunately as we have increasing nutrients over time and causing that decrease in light for the plants we see that there can be a flip in the system from seagrasses to a more phytoplankton system so all three of them were present and they're just competing with each other and so when i kind of look at our data and how that works we kind of see that that's a little bit of what happened out there so in the 90s and early 2000s we had a seagrass dominated system so here what i've done is i've taken my seagrass data from my transects and the drift algae data that i collect in the transect converted all to carbon and those are on the left hand scale on the right hand scale i have the phytoplankton biovolume that is collected by dr ed flips at the university of florida and so that is in cubic meters on the right hand side and so you can see the seagrass is our dominant we were a seagrass dominated system with the drift algae and the phytoplankton being the lower players but right there in 2011 we saw that flip in the system and we started losing the seagrasses and the phytoplankton became more dominant and then we have that flickering of the competition between seagrasses and phytoplankton and who was winning and you can see in 13 14 15 seagrasses and drift tried to come in and then fighter we had that 16 brown tide that we've been talking about and then later on you know they keep trying they keep competing and then the big one which kind of say the super duper bloom because it out these last two were so much bigger than the original one that we thought was horrific but then we get to the bottom here these last couple years and as everyone said we're getting oops we're getting less blooms but and we're seeing some of the seagrass come back but what i want you to look at now is kind of think about it if i could stack our three primary producers and hypothetically kind of stack them and add them all up it looks like the system holds a certain amount of carbon there who's getting it and what's going on and you know keeping it a seagrass or phytoplankton and that all seems to work except for these last couple of years they just don't seem to add up we're having lower blooms the seagrass is coming back but it's just not to the extent that we had seen before so if you're familiar what's going on out in the lagoon a lot of the bottom right now is covered with a different macroalgae it's calerpa prolifera and prolifera is meaning in his name it is prolific and it's very opportunistic so we're pretty sure calerpa is what is filling that niche right now so what we've been able to do in our 2023 map so here's i've kind of cropped our 2023 here to bavard county so at the time when we were finishing our maps fwc had some extra funding and they wanted to do a project and we said we would love to see if we can map our calerpa beds because they act like seagrass you can see them from the air they're dense coverage if you've been out on boats you know how dense that coverage is out there so as a pilot project we did this and we actually the mapping the same people that do our seagrass maps were given the time and money to do our calerpa maps and we actually have more calerpa than we had seagrass present in 2023 so if i put those two together on the same map you can kind of see you know where our seagrass is and where that calerpa is i'm going to bring up that 2009 again and now you see that calerpa has very happily taken over that footprint and just taken advantage of it it loves the open space and it loves being able to go in there so you know calerpa the main thing you need to know about calerpa is it's not an invasive species calerpa has been around forever out there and any of you brevard county people that remember conrad white when i first started here conrad was studying calerpa and there was a lot of calerpa out there in the early 90s then and i think even the 80s when he was really getting into it so it's kind of been this boom and bust kind of species that comes and goes and takes advantage of open space so going back to here taking looking at my graph one more time i'm pretty sure i can fill that circle with calerpa it's showing how much we have out there and to be able to make my graph balance out so to be continued because i don't have a carbon number for calerpa i'm trying to get harbor branch some of the people down there to help me get that carbon number so that i can add a new line so to be continued on that one so let's talk about more calerpa okay i already mentioned it's non-invasive it's very opportunistic it has good and bad qualities it has some similar ecosystem services like seagrasses it's very good at taking up nutrients and i believe it had a lot to do with why the water's so clear these last couple of years it loves nitrogen it's a good green macroalgae and it's also because it's attached on the bottom it looks like it's rooted but it's not it's not a it's not a plant it's an algae but it's actually on the bottom providing that stabilization of the sediments and not allowing not allowing you see i'm italian right um not allowing that resuspension of the sediments so it offers a lot of those services now bad is it out competing is it causing the seagrasses in some areas to not be able to recover and so this is one of the projects that we're working with now we're working in collaboration with ucf and brevard zoo with funding from moat marine lab and one of the students there is she's doing some mesocosm work over in the um in the hub sea world out in melbourne beach and so she's testing these thresholds of how much calerpa can be present and be able to plant paladule is the main species we're working with into the mesocosms and now just last month she's now trying it in the field so this is something that we're trying to look into we're trying to see you know if too much calerpa is there or not and is there an inhibition but meanwhile it is providing some services in the lagoon and so it it it has its pluses and minuses one of our other projects that we're working on is our seeds trying to find out is there a seed bank because if there is if we can find these hot spots of seeds for our seagrass species then maybe that's where we tell people you don't need to do a restoration project the area is going to come back and that's pretty much what we think is going on in mosquito lagoon because the way mosquito lagoon came back so quickly it had to have been seed there's no way fragments could have been running around and shooting out there and increase the amount of seagrass coverage out there you know it had the footprint but the percent cover went from like five percent to fifty sixty percent in just a year or two so it those seeds just turned on and everybody's happy out there and we're seeing large flowering events so the sea project is funded by dep and it's working with dr austin fox and his team and um and our group at st john's is working and we just got a second year funding now to continue doing this throughout the whole lagoon so now we're going to go down into the south florida area and work in there because typically we just work in the st john's area but again we're going at every one of our our transects where we have long-term data to understand what's how the recovery is happening in those areas and just to show you the these are flowering plants that are now living underwater the seagrasses so halidule here's a picture of a halidule flower halidule there's male and female plant the flowers are on different plants now rupia is dioecious and it has both male and female on the same shoot and so you can see the difference halidule may only produce one or two seeds whereas the rupia can produce eight to ten seeds so in our study right now we're finding a lot of rupia seeds and the halidule seems to be a little more elusive but obviously it's out there because the way we're seeing recovery in a lot of these areas so this will produce hot spot maps that will be going towards restoration projects and helping to let people go yeah this is where we might need some extra help but don't worry about planting over here because that's probably not an area that's gonna it's gonna recover on its own once we get those water quality conditions so just kind of to wrap it all up we are seeing seagrass recovering but it isn't happening everywhere equally lagoon wide the main thing is reducing those nutrients trying to get the water quality right so the seagrass can recover on its own calerpa we know is non-invasive it's bed forming goods and bads beneficial and we're still going to work to see if we can find that threshold for tolerance for impeding any rest recovery of the seagrasses and gathering more information on the seeds so just to put piling face to all the people that help us collect some of this data i'll just leave you with that and i would be more than happy to try and answer your questions thank you questions that was great laurie thank you um so when the seagrass really came back in muskie lagoon it it seemed like it coincided with doom washovers that occurred uh during hurricanes um also this the recovery that's in the northern indian river lagoon that seems to be coinciding with drought conditions do you think that the salinity might have something to do with the seagrass i knew i just knew you were gonna push me on that um i do i do think that for seeds i you know the thing about flowering and seeds some of the things we are learning there's things that trigger we all know we all have plants right there's different parts of a season or different um parts of the weather that trigger bloom flowering events of your plants well i i do believe we are seeing we're seeing a lot of rc grass species yesterday i was in mosquito lagoon i had halafala anglamanii haliduli and rupia flowering everywhere so there's there's seeds going on the salinity was about 30 parts per thousand the ocean is 35 right a lot of the lagoon is usually about 20 to 25 but we like to keep it above that right um so i i do think that some of that pop of those seeds was there was lots of light the salinity all the water quality conditions were just right and and it's interesting how it happened in mosquito lagoon first and then northern irl the next year and northern banana as well and this we were watching the salinity come up during that time but a lot of it was clear water too so thank you go ahead two for you today um so with the seagrass being replanted at the scale that it's being replanted in the lagoon and you mentioned the difference in how they produce seed with the haliduli plantings that are happening how much percentage is that male female are they planting male grasses or female grasses or both very good question um we actually just did get a report from um the the plants that they have in the nursery over at hubs that um the brevard zoo manages and right now they're all male plants they're all male flowers and what what that could mean is when when they planted their the um nursery they used fragments right and they planted them and so they they're clones the fragments are clones you know you have a rhizome it looks very like saint augustine grass right so you have a rhizome and you have all your shoots coming up and it could be that they were just happened to be that way now i did find a female flower in mosquito lagoon yesterday but we are finding more male flowers right now but it could be a timing thing maybe they have to come up first and the female i you know right there's so much i've been out here 32 years and i know nothing i am just amazed i i just um the whole flowering shoots and seeds it's not something we paid attention to when we had so much seagrass and now it's such an important thing and we're all learning um because it it produces only that one to two seeds it's very hard to find them well we'll hope that there's a seed bank existing for the males to to get to um for my second question um talking about seagrass and through the tourism kind of lens of of this um where do you see the value of programs like the eyes on seagrass program that's happening soon might want to tell people about that yeah get out there and help count seagrasses um is there a model that can be maybe used or to collect data from an ecotourism perspective of people that visit the area is there a role to be had from a professional standpoint that maybe people that come in could either count seagrasses collected on the app like the eyes on seagrass program is kind of you know starting to do and then maybe is there a future where they can harvest calerpa if they're on vacation and and they're given the right program through the right organization to go out there and say hey this is calerpa you've identified it you've become a citizen scientist can you collect some of that calerpa get those nutrients out of the lagoon in a safe scientifically educated manner is there a role for that in the future maybe through your experience um there there could be the eyes on seagrass is a good test so we are working with this is with an ifis sea grant and they're trying it it is well used on the west coast they use it in tampa bay and sarasota bay and what it is is just basically citizens out on their boats or maybe actually swimming in the water that a scientists aren't the only weirdos always getting out of the boat um the what and getting in there and just documenting presence absence of the seagrass and so we timed this this one they had done it they tried it in the fall but we're timing this one with our aerial photography this time so we're flying any any day now and we're hoping we can use those for extra ground truthing points and so anything like that is always helpful especially during our mapping years to get more eyes out there to see because we're not getting it's very hard to get everywhere but it's good to have that quality index of what actually is present there instead of just the quantity and the mapping footprint extent so i'm trying to find a date for it i think it starts um may 1st i think it's i think it runs the whole month of may because because i was out last week and i was like should i be documenting this now but they it doesn't open to i'm pretty sure it doesn't open till may 1st may 1st to the 31st yeah right right right right so um ifa c grant um calerpa is a tricky one don't it's it's doing some it's taking up nutrients if it's not there who's going to take up the nutrients the seagrasses aren't going to grow back that fast so who's our other primary producer who's going to win but we all don't want the phytoplankton maybe there a gracilaria might be another option that that's the drift macroalgae that yeah you all smell in the fall you know when it washes up we remove that that'd be good for for us too yeah thank you so much great presentation thank you go ahead just quickly how far have you gotten with and looking for these seed beds within that mapping thing and are there areas elsewhere that you're actually finding some or are they just devoid of it um no we've done the entire so that the project started last june and we did a one time at every one of our sites and then we did 30 sites quarterly to see if there was a seasonal aspect and we're just now finishing the last quarter the reports due to dp in june again and um there definitely are hot spots the where we have seagrass is where we're finding haliduli seeds rupia seeds seem to be more throughout the lagoon and rupia will sprout up but it's very flashy rupia is an odd one it's an opportunistic kind of very flashy um pioneer species so it it will bloom and kind of then die back but most of the time it blooms got some seed and then we'll come back when the conditions are good so they're um it's still hard even in some of these beds where we know we have seagrass we core for seeds and we're lucky if we get one because you know we got a 10 centimeter core and we've got a kilometer of seagrass and we're trying to plug a hole it's a needle in the haystack so it's we're we're still working on are we coring enough too so we thank you sure you're very welcome you're very enthusiastic i do love well done you okay i'm pushing you want to wait okay we're gonna thank you hang on a second okay i'm going to present about a two-second video um i had taken a video at my dock this past sunday of how clear the water is and and i had sent it to virginia and duane and a lot of other people and it was suggested that maybe it would be good for you folks to look at it's just a my property is about two miles south of the pineta causeway let me bring this up so uh focus on it you got it there we go which side this is on the west side and i've got about six feet of depth in the water and it's really clear and there's a ton of clear above i mean it's everywhere but the amazing thing to me is that as recently as probably about three years ago i thought i was never going to see the bottom again because we had just gotten so much mud and whatever uh and silt and it was just so thick on the bottom that i thought i'll never see a white sandy bottom again and gosh here we go and so everybody involved with this can pat themselves on the back and i think you know you also pointed out that the wind had been blowing for a couple weeks and you can see the flags blowing that's the other thing typically when we have windy vents it stirs up the mud you just don't see a recovery and the wind stopped and the next day it was clear so good you've done a great job okay that's show and tell for today well then where am i young lady good morning um i'm alia adamant i'm an environmental specialist with the sorrel program and i'm going to be telling you about remote sensing and innovative controls for our harmful algal blooms so in 2021 brevard county was awarded an innovative technology grant from the florida department of environmental protection and we selected the use of remote sensing technologies as a cost-effective and encompassing approach to identify harmful algal bloom formation quickly and it's kind of leading towards what kate was talking about quick real-time data that we are getting from satellite images so applied ecology developed and analyzed and implemented the protocols for using the imagery from the sentinel 2 and 3 satellites to map habs in indian river lagoon and it's using the reflective wavelength from chlorophyll a to determine algal abundance these maps are an example of what is sent out weekly through our hub newsletter and posted on our story map so the image on the left is what we send out each week the legend in the bottom left corner shows you what you're looking at so the neon green bright green color is submerged aquatic vegetation so the seagrass and calerpa this you can kind of see lines up pretty accurately with what laurie just presented and below that is the estimated chlorophyll a concentration on a color scale from blue to yellow then red showing an increase in concentration so on this map you see it's most mostly blue and some light yellowish color which would indicate really low level blooms so while we get those maps weekly quarterly this graph is updated from applied ecology which gives us the median monthly estimated chlorophyll a concentrations divided up by basin so we can see that you know the different basins may not always be responding the same way you can see that in 2020 there was that spike everywhere except in central so this just gives us long-term data divided by the basin this project also looked at how habs varied by location over time and different indices were created to address this question so we have the bloom duration index which is essentially just how long the bloom lasts the duration of the bloom the bloom intensity index is the chlorophyll concentration so again back to that map and that color scale what's the concentration micrograms per liter of the bloom and then these two indices combined form our bloom severity index which estimates the potential harm caused by long-lasting high concentration blooms at a given location and many hypotheses were developed during the startup of this project to try and identify patterns in bloom activity so the first hypothesis was hab intensity scale and duration been increasing throughout the indian river lagoon and this hypothesis appeared to be correct for certain segments such as the north irl and northern central irl hypothesis two was do habs occur more frequently in proximity to large stormwater outfalls for this hypothesis applied ecology was unable to identify locations in the irl that were in the same region that didn't have the same number of stormwater outfalls so this hypothesis was not able to be evaluated but they did find a significant relationship between the lack of stormwater runoff and an increased median severity index so this suggests that for these segments of the irl increased bloom activity may occur during dry periods when there's little to no flow from the stormwater outfalls for hypothesis three there was no clear conclusion able to be drawn on whether habs occur more frequently in proximity to locations with on-site sewage treatment disposal systems and same for hypothesis four no significant relationship was found between either the abundance or absence of submerged aquatic vegetation and the bloom duration index hypothesis five and six are both related to muck and both appear to be accurate for the galley river where the bloom severity index was um much lower following judging operations and this graph gives you a visual representation of that data that supports those last two hypotheses you can see that the bloom severity index before and during judging for that green line was significantly higher than after judging again you know we're using the satellite imagery for a variety of different projects and just showing that we're using it to monitor and assess the projects that we're funding through the sorrel plan and we continue to ask questions so the initial startup of this project was funded through fdep but sorrel continues to pay for the weekly reports through our monitoring fund and again continuing to ask questions like does bloom activity relate to observed fish kills you know understanding the conditions that result in large fish kills can help clarify management interventions and protect their potential to occur the second set of questions is looking at irl bloom activity related to weather patterns such as wind and the third question is looking at muck presence looking at proposed judge locations such as titusville railroad nasa causeway rock legend oak galley and comparing it to sandy benthic conditions and then so where you can get this data so if you go to the sorrel website and click on the maps tab on the right hand side that blue tab and scroll down to the fourth panel there there's a link to subscribe to our newsletter so you can click on that link put your email first and last name and click the blue bottom click the blue button at the bottom to sign up and stay informed if you are signed up for our newsletter but you don't feel like looking through your emails you can also go to our story map which is that second link on that same tab um that basically has a summary of what's going on currently so this is again managed by applied ecology there's the project description current hab conditions for both the sentinel 2 and sentinel 3 satellite and then there's also a sliding tool that shows you the previous week and compares it to the current week so you can see here the left hand side is april 4th a little bit more of that yellowish color indicating low level blooms and on the right hand side april 13th where it's much more blue showing on the map which means that you know we had a decrease in blooms for that segment and then there's additional graphs here again showing you know the same data in just a different format and the categorizing it based on whether it's a low level mid-level or high level blue or you can scan the qr right code right now and sign up for the newsletter right now so overall this project was able to validate a suite of remote sensing tools that can be applied to the irl for rapid and detailed assessments of bloom activity the satellite images can provide regular assessment and again it's real-time data and it's available to the public so the public has access to this as well and again while fdp funded the startup of this project sorrel continues to fund the weekly reports through our monitoring fund all right now i'm going to talk to you about a couple of our innovative technology grants that we have been awarded and how we can use those to mitigate harmful algal blooms so the first project so in 2022 we received another innovative tech grant to test the barge mounted algae harvester with aecom this technology had been successful in fresh water and enclosed systems so we received funding from fdp to test this technology and do a pilot test in the open lagoon in our brackish water conditions again i just want to highlight that the satellite imagery from the first project it was used with this project in order to identify locations where hubs were forming in order to determine where to move the barge it was always ground truth with chlorophyll a probes but we would use it kind of as an indicator of where we should look for higher bloom activity so the system operated for five work weeks between four locations in the indian river lagoon between september and november and this infographic illustrates how the technology works so the water is pumped into a series of chambers where different purification chemicals conditioned the water causing the algae and other solids to come together or coagulate and form what we call flock and then nano bubbles were added to the system causing the flock to float to the surface and then a skimmer was used to skim that flock out into a collection tank the process does not damage the algae cells therefore the nutrients and toxin in the cells are removed from the water in addition with the cells or with algae this project had a lot of obstacles such as fluctuating water conditions variable algae levels low dissolved oxygen and wave action which did impact the overall performance we also didn't have any major blooms during the duration of this project so when there's not really a lot of algae to remove to begin with you know it's going to impact your results a little bit so the data show here do show that we have some reductions in important parameters such as chlorophyll a total phosphorus and total nitrogen but again these removal efficiencies were quite low aside from the low values presented here um we found that the application of this technology in the lagoon um also had many challenges so the barge is large and takes a while to move um habs are dynamic and move as well so oftentimes by the time the barge reached the location um the targeted location the habs had moved or shifted or the water conditions were just different than what we had originally had thought so since lagoon is an open and very large system the cost effectiveness of this project um didn't really seem feasible for us and again just wanted to reiterate that this was completely funded through fdp's innovative technology grant the second project is the one that we are currently working on looking at ultrasonic transducers and algal treatment again we were using the satellite imagery to identify a good location for this project so you know the banana river area has high severe high severity index and especially up in the sykes creek here um and then our project site is just north of where that map is cut off we are testing the efficacy of this technology in the open water lagoon with our estuarine species and conditions um and again in a funded by the innovative tech grant through fdp the canals in sykes creek are a great location not only because we know that there are frequent and intense blooms in this area but the canals create semi-similar environments where we can create a controlled experiment so some of our canals have the transducers other canals do not so that we have treatment canals and control canals to test the technology and i also just want to shout out and thank all the homeowners who have agreed to participate and are letting us hang our equipment from their docks during the duration of this study so are we right now with this project so um at the end of december we have finished setting up all the equipment so all the ultrasonic transducers and water quality monitoring sondes have been installed and we are out there every two weeks taking chlorophyll a readings so we are waiting for a target threshold of 20 micrograms per liter of chlorophyll a before we will say what we call activate which is when we will turn on the ultrasonic transducers we'll take water samples we'll come back after a few days turn them off take more water samples and that will be what we're using to determine whether this technology works or not when the transducers are turned on they will cycle through a range of frequencies that are supposed to burst the gas vacuole in the algae cell causing them to sink to the bottom where they can no longer photosynthesize and will die so we are expecting to complete this project by the end of this year and should have a report by mid next year um we haven't activated yet so kind of what with the clear water um it's been a little bit cooler this year so we haven't had um we haven't hit our target um and again that 20 micrograms per liter was determined by our best literature review and it's also what applied ecology and those graphs on their story map is the beginning of a mid-level bloom so we're waiting to hit that target before turning anything on and with that i will take any questions questions oh i'm sorry thanks um yeah that area is fascinating i said before i happen to live uh two days ago i was taking fishing with a buddy that northern marker you have that northern area is really sorry um i live in that area so that northern i went fishing two days ago that northern marker is super cloudy up there i'm not sure what's going on but the other two are crystal clear just like kurt showed so i don't know how long it's going to take for you to be able to do that and get those numbers but could could you maybe look and see if that northern area is blooming so you are now and not seeing it so we'll be there monday um and we like i said we are taking measurements in the canals and once we hit that close so sometimes the cloudiness can also be from turbidity which in that case you know wouldn't um be a reason to turn on the transducers but if it is if we have a high chlorophyll a reading on monday we'll activate next week so and just your comment on turbidity that's fascinating because i thought the same thing and thought maybe that the muck removal down south by kiwanis is causing that clear water there but once you get north of that point where the um water treatment plan is that there's a ton of junk in there and i'm wondering if the wind's just blowing that up and that's why the northern area is getting messed up other questions one more oh i'm sorry oh you want to go ahead john no go ahead um great presentation on the first question is the fun question on the slide that has the slider that goes back and forth can you like allow for people to pick the date of the previous one so that they could like look at a specific date and then look at the current one and be able to like adjust that sorry more work i know but is that too hard to do or is that potential we've talked about it i don't really know where we landed on that so so it used to have that ability something about the software changed we've gone back and forth about you know what can be done and what's practical and how much work so this is where we are right now we've also looked at being able to have like a running timeline um so you can see not just one week to the next week but right over the the period of of record i i understand the limits of software uh i'm just thinking like the google earth kind of slider so cool you're already of course you're already doing it um to to the point of the impacts unknown is there any monitoring of fish populations in the area around those docks ahead of time pre post to see if when they're turned on do fish stay away things like that um so not quite with our project so when we're out there right now we are looking at like anytime we see a dolphin or a manatee we're making note of that when we're out there monitoring um for the fish it's a little bit more complicated and um i had similar questions with like the impacts as well um and i just wanted to say that you know the idea so first we need a proof and see if this technology works and if it does work the idea would be to target the super blooms it wouldn't be something that we would turn on on everyone's docks all the time um for months at a time it would be you know targeting a super bloom event that we saw has negative impacts on manatees and dolphins like for you know from chuck's uh presentation as well so um again you know it's we have limited funds to kind of see if it works um but something that we are trying to look at with in the scope of the project great good luck thank you and just to quickly clarify on um you you say the mechanism for the ultrasonic uh technology you're trying to remove the cell quickly from the water column to the sediment is that what you're trying to do yeah so and so do you have any idea how fast that might happen if it's as effective as you hope it is is it like we're looking at days weeks days so we will turn the transducers on and as i mentioned we'll come back in three days and turn them off so that if it works it should work within a few days um and then again the idea how you're saying is to you know kill them before they have a chance to reproduce um and form a bigger bloom than what they already started okay quickly yeah two two real quick one to that my understanding is that it keeps the algae from rising within the light zone so it can't actually get up and get any light and then it dies and drops but the second one is is there any way for you to let me know what days they're turned on i know it's only a 50 acre spread for that thing but i literally am right outside that area and that's where i see all the dolphins and to just at least try to monitor if they're coming back and eating at five in the evening or not if it's okay with virginia it's okay with me good answer yeah let's ask the experts okay thank you very much thank you now we have some videos what a role rogan i began fishing down here in the 90s my father had parkinson's disease and i brought him to the mosquito lagoon in 2003 after he had to retire and we took him out with a guide in the mosquito lagoon and they set up a chair on the front of the flats boat and he caught a really big redfish and i have a picture of him with that redfish standing up when he had parkinson's to show it off and he then took it out to california where he was living with my mom in a small cabin up in the mountains and had it on the wall and told everyone he'd caught it in lake tahoe as a joke and so i now have that mount at my house when i moved here my background originally was from the fourth grade on i was going to study sharks and i was going to be a marine biologist went off to college got the degree and everything and there were like no jobs to study sharks at that time so i went into health care but i've always loved the water i love to fish i love to be out on the water and about 15 years ago when we were living in jacksonville my wife and i said if we could live anywhere where would we want to be and that place was here on the indian river lagoon and we got lucky and had an opportunity to move here about three years ago and so when i got here it rejuvenated my interest in the science and i started volunteering at different places and said oh wow this county's got this half cent sales tax what a great idea i've learned about the citizens oversight committee and said maybe i can take my expertise in hospital administration running hospitals in population health and how you improve the health of a city or a community as well as my love for the marine biology and put those together and see if i can help through the committee and represent the people and make sure that we spend the money appropriately that we're doing projects that are based on science etc i think solving problems with the lagoon is very complex there are a lot of issues there are a lot of inputs that are creating difficulties that you're trying to fix and at the same time the biggest issue we face is actually keeping people interested in understanding that this is a long-term process we're doing things i believe that are correct that are making those differences but we're nowhere near over the hump we're going to have to continue doing this work for a while so keeping people engaged because everybody can play a role in helping whether that's a simple thing like picking up the trash to serving on a committee or volunteering to do work so hopefully we can keep the people engaged so we can do what they did in 2016 we can keep working to fix this lagoon it's been really important for us when we moved into a house here we decided no fertilizer no weed killer on the lawns and the lawn's been fine it's a little more natural looking and so that's cool we do plant native plants around the house i put rain barrels in at the house i'm pulling tires and trash out of the lagoon and i also am doing oyster gardening for the zoo which has been really cool to learn that one of the other activities i've done to help the lagoon out is i've launched explore the irl which is a youtube and facebook channel that i launched about a year and a half ago to get people to learn more about the lagoon and i interview individuals and key leaders in the community i do videos of trash pickup i do videos when i'm out fishing and things like that just to get people to understand all of the various things about the lagoon helping to clean the lagoon and restore it as well as places you can go and things you can do it's a beautiful place if you have questions or comments or ideas about the lagoon my email is fred goldstein coc at yahoo.com please feel free to send me information happy to communicate with you all we represent you all right so if brandon was here he would remind all of the rest of you i know deb's already done hers but um the rest of you to to pick a date and and film your my lagoon story like fred just did so thank you um and next up we have the titusville tree box project this is the city of titusville a city hall and commons basin tree box project a tree box is a box that gets placed next to a stormwater inlet in an already installed stormwater system the box consists of a nutrient reducing media that goes in the box as the stormwater goes through it it helps reduce the nitrogen and phosphorus within the stormwater you also place a tree inside the tree box those tree roots uptake the nitrogen phosphorus to help the tree grow so it removes it from the stormwater before it enters the indian river lagoon these tree boxes are part of an lid project or low impact development and that's a way to capture and treat stormwater in more urban areas where you can't put large stormwater treatments like ponds the indian river lagoon is very important to the city and brevard county as a whole it helps tourism it brings people to our city and protecting the animals and the plants that live in the lagoon is very important this is the first tree box project that the city has done we would not have been able to do this project without help from the save our indian river lagoon program many cities have been incorporating lid projects to help treat their stormwater homeowners can help out by incorporating similar practices on a smaller scale as well they can install things like rain gardens that help slow down the stormwater or rain barrels that trap the stormwater if they live along the water they can install a nomo buffer zone of plants that will help absorb that nutrient pollution before it gets into the water find out ways that you can join us in helping to get to a healthier lagoon faster go to lagoonloyal.com okay thank you now old business no old business no old business do we have to vote on that or just keep going there you appreciate your indulgence new business new business came out of this today thank you now we're ready for general comments do they have cards or i haven't received no cards today well i saw all those people i thought they were going to talk one guy's pretty good pretty good size there i was going to agree with you okay yes ma'am i apologize yes okay i'm uh susan connelly i'm susan connelly this is my first time to be at a sorrel meeting i'm very impressed it fills me with great hope and excitement um currently i'm working with the speak up brevard program i submitted submissions to our county for consideration and um out of curiosity as a citizen i've reviewed other citizens who have submitted and what i've seen is there were 77 submissions and predominantly they have to do with lid saving the lagoon and what citizens can do i see virginia barker here and i'm hoping that through a combination of citizens and what you all are doing that we can and the and the government can find prevention start at prevention and um somehow all these pieces come together for the good but thank you all i can't wait to follow up with many of you individually please come back thank you okay we'll move on final comments from from around the circle suggestions yes ma'am um there's going to be a public b map basin management action plan meeting in titusville um so if you want to participate in in uh and put in some input in that or you know learn what potential updates might be and it's on may the 8th at nine o'clock a.m that's a thursday may 8th 9 a.m at the titusville city hall in the council chambers and so hopefully some of you guys can come thank you thank you they're just to follow up on that they're they're holding b map meetings on all three of the sub lagoons and so the other two are on may 7th there's one in titus i'm sorry in sebastian and coco thank you where was the third right at the ag center yes so one at nine next day yes yes sir i just want to thank all of our presenters for great presentations and to the natural resources department for their continued great work and success and reiterate the one thing that was mentioned earlier about the eyes on seagrass program to encourage everyone to get out there to get in the lagoon take pictures share them use the hashtags explore the irl and the different things out there to promote it to the people that come to visit and the people that live here to remind them to stay involved and to you know help count the seagrasses because that's going to help a lot getting some of that just community support yes ma'am thank you i'm sorry i just like to say the staff did a wonderful job at the april 4th first friday event i was there the t-shirt stuff was really fun people were really really engaged and i just want to say thank you to all of you it was great i want to second that it was really fun to make those shirts well thank you your staff sitting in the back we we don't ever give you enough thank yous and we appreciate it that y'all help us in between and thank you yes i i have a comment if y'all are done and we'll i'm done okay please okay uh last week there were a number of articles that came out in the tampa bay times and then got picked up in the press um around the state about um these reporters looked at florida's water quality programs and um assessed whether they were working or not and they looked at a 25 year history of water quality data and produced these maps um where based on their analysis of the data they gave people uh colors of whether pollution was getting worse or staying the same is in red or whether it was getting better over there on the right in the blue green and so you see that the indian river lagoon is all lit up red and that is kind of different than the perspective that we have seeing the clear water out there and seeing some beginning of seagrass recovery and so i just wanted to to share um some of how uh their analysis can be true our perspective can also be true all at the same time um so uh had a number of presentations earlier today looking at all looking at data specific to different the water body ids right each of these segments of the lagoon has got um water quality data being collected and analyzed and so i'm going to show you data that was pulled from the state's water quality database um and then uh interpreted in graphs by don dice presented to this committee a few months ago but since don's not here i've i've borrowed his data so um right these are data from the mosquito lagoon summer data is in the green line winter data is in the black line the first time period is 1997 to 2008 2008 we had tropical storm um fae thank you right and fae just released a lot of nutrients from the watershed and a lot of water a lot of fresh water and and so then the center panel is 2008 to 2016 to the the fish kill super bloom not the not the first 2011 super bloom but the fish kill super bloom and then the last panel is sort of the history of this this program um 2017 to uh well this data runs through 2023 and so you can see that in their analysis looking at a 25 year span um we are finally back to sort of where we were 25 years ago but when you look at it at a finer temporal scale you see that nitrogen levels were getting lower so we were getting better uh in that first panel then we were getting worse for a decade in the center panel and then we've been getting better in the last panel so this is mosquito lagoon the next couple slides are um other parts of the lagoon more complicated so here this is the banana river so each uh of the rows across is a different wibid and these are um not north to south for whatever reason um they are south to north but so um the southern banana is across the top pictures the central banana between 520 and 528 across the middle and then the northern banana across the bottom but you sort of see the same pattern of in the first 10 years things were getting a little better in the middle 10 years things were getting worse and in the last 10 years things have been getting better so then we go to uh the northern indian river lagoon um similar similar story here so even though their data doesn't find uh a net improvement we hope that what we're seeing in this last panel will continue if we keep doing the right things um and we are on our way to a better place um but just like uh other conversations today in the central lagoon really from rock ledge through grant you know to almost sebastian inlet we are not seeing that improvement and so you see in the right hand panels um it's it's flat or worsening right we're just not getting those improvements uh in that segment of the lagoon that remains to be a challenge for us and um you know lori presented a whole lot of information on on seagrass today and we talked about the importance of these shallow shoals where we're seeing the recovery right so seagrass needs light to grow in the shallowest areas that's where sunlight's going to be able to penetrate first so we're seeing recovery in those shallow shoals first but to get the the longer transect length and to get more acres of seagrass we've got to get it to grow into deeper and deeper water and that's going to require clearer and clearer water right better conditions and our whole strategy and the basin management action plan strategy is to go after the cheapest most cost effective quickest you know projects to get done first so our septic remediation plan we identified those septic systems that were the most polluting in the system and so if we retrofit those if we either connect them to sewer or we upgrade them to advanced septic we're going to get the best bang for the buck and so those systems that are funded in the save our lagoon plan they are costing they're in the green circle about 800 per pound if that's not enough like chuck said the tmdl is well this is what we think you need to do we'll do that we'll reassess we may need to do more if we need to do more than those medium worst septic systems they're in that middle row right we have to do twice as many of them to achieve a similar amount of nitrogen removal and sorry like four times as many of them and so they're going to cost thirty seven hundred dollars per pound and if that's not enough and we got to go get them all that's the third row those are going to cost like seven thousand dollars a pound and so almost ten times more so just the way that we are going about this return on investment we're doing the cheapest easiest things first but the more that we have to do the further we have to go the harder and more expensive it's going to be and so just you know keeping that in mind that we have big challenges ahead of us and we can't count on the successes that we've seen so far and say okay that's enough we're not done yet got a long way to go thanks for indulging me thank you it went very well for you folks thank you appreciate your patience quick comment i apologize i want to thank you for doing that i that article that i saw when i first read through it as you know it kind of just stunned me because it didn't say anything about what this or what we're actually doing and then to find out some of the communications just made me feel worse and i think what's so important about it is when people read that they're going to get a sense that there's not much happening here and so it's and it's not working so we need to get all of us have to be out there and really just continue to provide education those presentations were unbelievably great so thank you all very much and thank you for addressing i just thought if you look at the article i was waiting where are we where are we going to discuss this and it just never shows up and so very unfortunate thanks apologize i was too quick anything else before we break up thank you everyone thank you the opinions expressed by any member of the public during any period of public comment do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of the board of county commissioners of brevard county florida space coast government television or the program sponsor and are solely those of the presenter the board of county commissioners of brevard county florida space coast government television and the program sponsor hereby expressly disclaim any and all responsibility or liability for any defamatory or slanderous statements expressed by any member of the public during any such period dollars the relocation pot would be roughly 45 million i think that number's changed a little bit but it'll be roughly somewhere between 45 and 50 million dollars bill also creates a mutually agreeable fdot relocation process cost sharing provision and that is the bill the amendment um are there questions yes their question i know are there questions on the senator pizzo this is on the delete all thank you uh just one question uh these are reimbursable expenses which is suggests that the work has been done the capital has been out late already and and and then it's for reimbursement not not for advanced payment correct you recognize correct any other questions on the amendment senator wright you're right thank you senator um is the 7.5 percent they're taking from their uh communication sales tax that they're collecting is that something new they're not the 7.5 is now going to a city or municipality and it's going to be swept to the department of commerce senator mclean that's correct yeah i think senator davis then senator osgood thank you madam chair i heard you say senator that you've gotten to a good spot and these are all the stakeholders that have landed here do you have any of those stakeholders that are still like an outlier um that are just still not satisfied with this solution to my knowledge there are not any of those senator osgood thank you madam chair senator mclean you mentioned that basically we're going to move fund from one area to another area to cover this do we actually have an estimate of the financial impact that this bill could potentially have on municipalities especially small ones and rural ones senator mclean uh thank thank you madam chair uh the estimates 50 about 50 million dollars but that would be spread over 67 counties and 400 and 420 municipalities 419 whatever 400 i think it's 420 so it'd be spread across the entire uh you recognize 411 thank you 411 municipalities thank you madam chair in those discussions did you guys discuss what's possibly how much of this is going to be passed on to us as consumers that live in these municipalities senator mclean uh thank you uh madam chair i i mean i i think that any time that a business is able to reduce a cost it's gonna uh you you know i think at the end of the day the decision here is a policy decision somewhat in the sense of the the taxpayer and the consumer pay for everything so either they're going to pay it to the they would either pay it to the private business or they're going to pay it to their local governments this again this is compromised language that i think everybody you know has agreed to and i think it again it's a good landing spot uh certainly anytime a business can reduce costs normally competition will drive prices to uh to go down one final question thank you madam chair in your consultation and discussions were the agriculture stakeholders included in those discussions uh thank you madam chair yes ma'am yes they were thank you any other any other questions gonna write yeah thank you thank you one more bite at the apple thank you very much so um from from reading the bill it looks like like f fpnl or those types of organizations that they're they're gonna have to take care of themselves primarily what i read in your bill is that people that provide television internet those types of services are the ones that may then come back and say i would like to be reimbursed for the cost of moving would that be correct senator mcclain thank thank you that is correct you follow up you're recognized why why are they the only ones why are they carved out senator mcclain thank you madam chair uh currently the uh most of your ious and uh any of your other utilities would be able to the ious actually can anybody that's under psc would be able to go to psc and have and ask for recovery costs for relocation um most of your local governments would just raise your rates to cover the cost of their relocations on water sewer those types of things thank you senate senator russon thank you very much madam chair i want to follow up on senator davis inquiry about stakeholders but i want to be specific is florida league of cities on board with this iteration senator mcclain madam chair uh they were consulted i did not have a personal conversation with them there were discussions that were taking place between stakeholders the league of cities and the florida association of counties this was the language the compromise language that was agreed to my understanding is league of cities was also involved in that in the compromise discussion any other questions okay we have several appearance forms chris dulin small county coalition waves in support charles dudley florida internet and television association waves in support support floyd self charter communications waves in support peter abelo florida association of counties waves in support florida league of cities uh matthew singer waves in support is there any debate on the amendment mcclain you recognize close on the amendment um thank you uh i'll wave close all in favor of the amendment say yay yay opposed say nay the amendment is adopted so we're back on the bill as amended are there any further questions on the bill as amended there are several appearance forms on the bill senator osgood you recognize thank you madam chair um senator mcclain many jurisdictions have multiple communication service providers within the role so multiplying relocation costs for each of these projects how how did your conversations factor that in senator mcclain thank you madam chair so the estimate and i think i'll try to the estimate for relocation last year was about a hundred million dollars between all of the providers that that's my understanding that's the number that was that i was given to me um and that would be by all providers this fund will be 50 million dollars and it will be available first come first serve whoever gets their application in and whatever their cost is they would be able to recover when the fund is gone it's it's gone and then it would revert back to current methodology of how all that would be done so the fund is somewhat limited as it relates to how much relocation it would pay for okay and thank you that was going to be my next question so we are kind of mandating and usurping local control in this bill so when there is when we're requiring these relocations of utility lines and there is not enough money and i i represent broward who are fortunate enough to have 31 cities very differently then there is a mandate and there is not enough funding so how is the gap feel how does a municipality follow the mandate the law and they don't have the money to do it you reckon uh thank you madam chair i think uh so the seven and a half percent will be deducted out of the cst it will then be sent to sent to commerce there will be a we'll just use 50 million dollars there will be a 50 million dollar fund there the utilities will be will be able to ask for reimbursement once they've uh done the work they would ask for reimbursement when that 50 million dollars is gone if it ever gets gone once that 50 million is gone then the utility then the the providers the cable they would be then required to go back to the normal methodologies which would be they would be paying they would have to cover the cost themselves you're recognized thank you thank you madam chair so that's our hardship fund our means of handling hardships let me use that word thank you senator mclean thank you madam chair um this is really just a way to help defray some of the costs for the for the um cable providers to be able to relocate obviously we've had a lot of that going on in the last several years because of um construction projects also the one thing to remember is that the providers have made a major uh um uh impact into our rural communities with rural broadband they you know all of them are participating with that that's their money that's you know that they've used to do that and so part of this conversation is as we have moved forward um uh one you're going to see more customers you know become will come into the system but it's just a way to help defray some of that cost as we you know going forward but but once the fund is gone another one if it's used up in let's just say they you know make enough uh applications as is used up in 30 days then that money is gone it reverts back to the original process which would be the the um uh cable providers would then be have to go back and they would be paying for their own relocation this is just this is just the way of trying to help defray some of that cost is for relocation one final question if i may thank you and thank you for your patience and your grace this is not my wheelhouse but i'm trying to understand i represent cities uh there are a lot of rural areas so if one of these companies is trying to expand and where they need to expand let's just say i'm i'm living in one of these rural areas and their lines need to go right through my nice mango garden what is that process uh do they have the capacity to eminent domain uh thank you madam chair if it was a declared public project that was going through your mango garden um then it would it could the government could do eminent domain uh to to do the project i mean it's eminent domain is always available for a public project and if this were a public project and part of the relocation by the cable company was was was needing to be done then it would fall under the the local government would do them in an eminent domain part and then they would just merely make sure that their line is in the right of way or where it needs to be so that they could provide the service to the customer thank you are there any other questions okay there's a couple of appearance forms uh tanner warwick associated industries of florida waves and support um daphne sainville waves against is there any debate on the bill is amended senator mcclain you reckon is closed thank you madam chair senators thank you for your questions and certainly um uh they were good questions uh senator osgood there is a there is a chart that was provided to me i'll be glad to provide it to you and it shows every county and i think mostly counties but if you went through you could find out from all the cities as well what their portion of cst currently is and then multiply that by seven and a half and you could figure out you know kind of what how it affects each one of them that some of the smaller counties uh that i saw this will affect them by four or five hundred dollars a year or something like that and so it's not a huge impact we tried to make sure that we understood what the impact was going to be to everyone and again um lots of conversations took place to land at this spot and so senators i i would ask that you uh for your favorable support today cindy please call the roll on cs4 cs for 818. senator avala senator berman senator boyd senator bradley senator broder senator burgess senator burton senator davis senator disegli senator gates senator garcia senator gruters senator harrell senator hooper senator angolia senator martin senator osgood yes senator pizzo senator rodriguez senator ruson senator simon senator trumbull senator wright vice chair jones chair pasodomo yes by your vote cs4 cs4 sb 818 is reported favorably uh next we're going to take up tab 13 cs for sb 1076 on roof contracting senator mcclain you're recognized to explain the bill uh thank you uh you want to do the amendment first or is it minor um uh i think let me i'll do a little bit because the amendments um are somewhat specific to the bill but so uh um senate bill 1076 focuses on regulations pertaining to roofing contractors the bill proposes the following key changes redefinition of roofing contractor the bill seeks to update the definition of a roofing contractor to encompass a broader range of services and responsibilities within the roofing trade uh it revises the conditions under which residential property owners can cancel a roof repair replacement contract and uh the the bill updates the required notices that contractors must provide residential property owners that is the bill uh madam chair okay we'll do the amendment then go back to questions on the bill late filed amendment barcode 879128 uh is there objection to considering the late filed amendment without objection show the amendment introduced senator mcclain you recognize to explain the amendment thank you madam chairman my uh staff member asked me to to let all of you know that was late filed by 14 seconds um just uh his clock his his watch was a little bit slow or something but anyway so but uh the uh the amendment will so uh currently well the amendment requires a some um continuing education requirements for roofers that are going to provide roof to wall connections that's part of what they're going to be doing which is what we're going to which is the underlying bill will allow them to do that um and uh so so it'll just require if the roofing contractor wants to be able to provide roof to wall connections he would have to do the continuing education if he decides that's not what he wants he's not going to participate in doing that then he will not have to have continue he won't have to have this specific continued piece of continuing education that's the amendment is there any questions on the amendment um something no okay is there there are appearance forms on the amendment jennifer ashton international association of certified home inspectors uh waves in support is there any debate on the amendment senator mcclain you recognize closing the amendment wave close all in favor of the amendment say yay all opposed say nay the amendment is adopted we're back excuse me on the bill as amended are there any questions on the bill as amended thank you you're recognized thank you madam chair um i come from hurricane alley so whenever anybody says the word roof all the eyebrows go up and so my question uh senator is uh what is the intersection if at all between this bill and what you uh understand to be the typical covered services uh that insurance companies uh include in their policies for roof replacement you're recognized thank you madam chair um senator gates thank you for that question one of the part of this issue is that for the consumer currently a roofer can replace the roof and then when he has when in the process if he's if he peels the roof but if he peels some of the plywood back or whatever the the hurt the roof to wall connections which you would get credit for but from your insurance company if you have the correct roof to wall connections so he's not sort of he's not qualified to do that so then the consumer has to reach out to a builder who then has to show up and and do the roof to wall connection all we're what we're trying to do here is allow the roofer to be able to do all of that while he's on the job versus have the consumer having to call two or three different people to have them do the same job to be able to get a um get their roof replacement done and then also uh it would allow the uh once the home has been inspected they would then be able to file for lower rate on their insurance because they've made this roof to wall connection uh and so that again that it's not it doesn't it's not to uh increase the ability of a roofer to do anything more it's really for the consumer to be able to to access that while it so the typical situation would be i would go in there and cut the roof all back and then i'd have to replace part of the roof and then i would and so it just it doesn't work out the timing issue so it's just a nexus of how can how can we allow the roofer while he's there doing all this work to be able to do the roof to wall connections as well you recognize thank you madam chair to follow up so there are insurance policies and there are insurance policies and i realize everyone has the capacity to be different but have you looked at or do you anticipate any advantage any disadvantage or any lack of clarity now as between um roofing policies that cover roofing and the effects of this bill you recognize thank you madam chair i i believe that the effect is going to be more positive in the sense that the the consumer the homeowner will have been able to um receive the upgrade without having had to gone have to go through two separate processes the insurers um there there is some language in there for some protection from from you know scrupulous practices if you will or something like that and so and certainly most insurers uh would like roof to wall connections uh insert you know for hurricane purposes they they would they would like for this to be done and so i think it's you know again it's it's really more of helping the consumer not to have to go through double process are there any other uh you recognize thank you madam chair just really quickly senator roofing is covered in chapter 489 when you're is this added is this a statue or a section that's going to be added to chapter 489 where the roofing is is covered already or is this something that will be added to a section of the building code or is it already there with this roof to wall connection you recognize thank you uh manager the current roof wall connection would be part of the current building code what we're what we're doing here this is a license this is more of a licensing licensing this is a licensing