Save Our Indian River Lagoon on 2026-09-18 8:30 AM - Sep 18, 2026

We look forward to continuing to work together for years to come. And we'd like to talk about seagrass protection in the lagoon. We'd like to add that to the agenda. Okay. Okay. My screen. Run. Run. Turn your mic's on, guys. There you go. It wasn't lit. I'm sorry. You really want to restart it? Oh, no, no. It was just a plug. I did it. Okay. All right. All right. We're on the agenda anyway. Let's have a motion and then a second, and then we'll add that and vote on it. So. I'm going to motion. You guys. Okay. That was Dick. Second. Okay. Laura Lee. All right. Discussion? We'd like to add seagrass protection to the agenda. Any problems with that? Okay. All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? No. It passes. Whoops. It'll be on the agenda. Will that be under chair and committee member comments? I think after the committee members in kind of a discussion. Yes. Okay. And we need to do roll call. Oh, roll call. I'm sorry. Skipped one. I'm sorry. Roll call. We'll just test them. I'll sit there. Don Dice. Here. Mark. Here. Rick Nickler. Resigned. Bruce Larson. Present. Kimberly Newton. Here. Deborah Harmon. Here. Laura Lee Thompson. Here. Nicholas Sanzone. Richard Bankhead. Here. Aaron Adams. Here. Kurt Smith. Here. Fred Goldstein. Here. Barbara Wall Scanlon. Here. Eric Maness. John Windsor. Here. Charles Venuto. Here. We have a quorum. Thank you. All right. We're the minutes of the last meeting are on. So everybody's reviewed the minutes of the last meeting. Any comments on those? Can I have a motion? All right. That was Kimberly. A second. Barbara. All in favor? Aye. Aye. Any opposed? All right. Round rules. We're about ready. I keep saying at every meeting that we're about ready to enter a really important phase of the program where we look at projects and get rolling on the next project plan. So just want to keep in mind all the time. Are we going to bring them up on screen? Okay. Yeah. They're very simple. They're just bulleted items. But I think it's very important to bring them up on the screen and just look at them one more time. It's be prepared. Engender trust. Respect each other and others' ideas. Honor time limits. Conduct meetings so that no person dominates. Listen to allies. Don't interrupt. And wait to be recognized before speaking. So if we could keep all those in mind as we go forward into this really important phase of what we do. Thank you. So we're ready for a progress report. Good morning. Good morning. All right. This month, we completed five more quick connects to sewer and 26 more septic upgrades. The Indy River Lagoon clam project installed 24 million clams across eight acres in Titusville. Four more derelict vessels were removed. And we filmed the video on the Cocoa Beach golf muck capping. Where's Alex? Show and tell. So they are spreading sand three inches at a time in a six foot by 30 something foot box. And every time they complete another six feet, they take a core to check whether they achieve that three inch. So this is core. So you see the black muck and you see the three inches of sand floating on top of that black muck. And once they've put three inches everywhere, they'll come back and do another three inches and then another three inches and then the final three inches. So we'll have a foot of clean sand separating the muck from the clean water above. And it's a really impressive operation. So I just asked Alex if he could bring in one of these cores so everybody could see. And we're looking forward to having that video for you next month. Project applications. The window's been open for about a month and a half. The deadline is next Friday, September 25th. We do have a good crop of applications, but we're expecting a whole lot more in the next week. So anybody who hasn't gotten their applications in next needs to get on it. We were working on the committee had asked about sending notices to our highest priority sites for sewer connections and septic upgrades. We were working on a notice to send to some of the highest priority connection sites. However, Melanie, our Quick Connect specialist, is leaving us to go to Brevard Zoo. She's going to be their senior conservation manager. So we're super, super proud and excited for her. But we are not going to mail notices to the public and then not be able to answer the phone. So there will be a brief break while we work on refilling her position, and then we will get those notices sent out. Seems like she just got here. I know. All right. Lucky Clover Mobile Home Park. They have been getting their homes connected. This 81 out of 118 is a week and a half old now, so they may have actually connected all of the homes. They're connecting all of the homes first, and then they're going back around doing the abandonment of the septic system. So we don't count them as complete and add them to the numbers at the top of the page until the septic is abandoned. But there's a lot of connections that are happening there. South Beaches Zone A, we've had five more homes connect this month. Sykes Creek Zone T, septic to sewer. The pump station roof is now installed, so that's feeling like real progress. Sykes Creek Zone N, the pump station walls have been constructed. South Beaches Zone P, the main sewer line installation, is complete. Then jumping down to, back to the, I meant to say this before, the Cocoa Beach Golf muck capping. So they've completed that first three-inch lift over a little more than 60% of the project area now. So good progress there. The O'Galley dredging project is about 20% complete with the muck removal. The Sykes Creek dredging project, we received three bids, and the low bid is within budget, so we're working on all of the background checks that go into certifying that and awarding that contract for construction. We have a sediment inactivation demonstration project that we've been working on. It's grant-funded, entirely grant-funded by DEP, and they have now approved the quality assurance plan. And so, you know, we're excited to proceed, but we don't want to do that during hurricane season, so we're going to wait a couple months until hurricane season is behind us before we move forward with that project. And then Clam Aquaculture, the last farmer, has completed their reimbursement package, and so that has expended all of the funds that were approved for Clam Aquaculture, so we plan to request additional funding in the 2027 plan update, because that's been a really successful program, and the clam farmers really appreciate it, and we're having more people get into clam aquaculture, so heads up on that. All right. Presentations. Thank you to Laura Lee for getting us on the talk radio with Sita and Friends. That was fun. And Melanie spoke about the Pond Watch program at the Florida Lake Management Society Symposium. Coming up at the end of this month, Julia and Brandon and I will be at the Space Coast Association of Realtors, and then the next day, Dwayne DeFreeze and Keith Winston and I will be at the Space Coast Chamber of Commerce. Then the Indian River Lagoon Coalition is having their lagoon, or their first ever lagoon family fun day down in Palm Bay at Good Park on October 4th. October 6th, the Marine Resources Council has asked me to do their Lagoon at Noon program, and then October 17th is the, is Melbourne's Lagoon Fest, their annual Lagoon Fest down at Front Street Park. Anthony and Julia will be tabling at that. And then another reminder that the Low Impact Development Conference that Marine Resources Council has done for multiple years is October 22nd and 23rd. International Coastal Cleanup is tomorrow, yay, many, many different organizations with lots and lots of places that people can go and sign up and volunteer to assist with coastal cleanup in the lagoon. And then for future topics next month, we're planning to sort of do a quick look back at 10 years of projects, do some highlights for you. And Dwayne DeFreeze is going to talk about the Indian River Lagoon National Estuary Program, and so, you know, how the Save Our Lagoon Program and the National Estuary Program have been working together. And then the other, only other thing I wanted to mention was the, your two-year terms are coming up in February. So we sent out a notice that if you want to be considered for renewal, we need you to please let Bethany know, we'll start the process of seeking renewal approvals from the League of Cities and then the County Commission, figure out what seats need to be advertised, do the advertisement, sort the applications, send them to the League of Cities for any seats they need to fill, and then taking all of that to the County Commission. And just a reminder, if anything goes, gets delayed along that process, you are still in it until you have a replacement. So just because your term is over in February doesn't mean your service is over in February. If anything happens, then we need you to keep serving. So thank you very much, and we look forward to hearing from you. If anybody has any questions, you know how to reach us. And that's... Go ahead, Laura. So I know a lot of people are planning on going out for the coastal cleanup tomorrow, and there's projects all up and down the whole lagoon, but if you can't make it to physically do a coastal cleanup project, if you still want an opportunity, a really important opportunity to support the lagoon tomorrow, the Brevard Indian River Lagoon Coalition is having a hands across the lagoon event at the Max Brewer Bridge in Titusville. So it'll be early before it gets hot. If you want to come to Sandpoint Park at 8 o'clock tomorrow morning and walk out on the bridge and watch the beautiful morning and support the Indian River Lagoon, we would appreciate anybody that wants to come. Thank you. Thank you. Go ahead, Deb. I'd like to follow that up with the fact that Keeper of Our Beautiful is partnering with the coalition on this event, and we hope that if you do come to Titusville, and we hope you'll come out in thousands, that you will please stay and help us roll up your sleeves and take some trash away from the shorelines of the Indian River Lagoon. And I have a question for Virginia, if I may. Go ahead. Virginia or Terry, you mentioned the project applications, which is exciting. Could you please remind us of the window that the committee will have to review those applications, just dates? I want to clear my calendar. I plan to send the information packets out two weeks before the November meeting, and I don't remember those dates off the top of my head. That's what I need. Okay. So we'll have two weeks. Good. Good. Fred, just a couple questions on the report. What's the definition of abandonment of the septic system? Is it removed? Is it just cleaned out? Yeah, it's a terrible term. I wish the state had a better word for that. So they can remove it or crush it, fill it with sand, make sure that it's not holding water, still there to trap, you know, curious children or anything awful. And, yeah, so. Okay. The next one is, I noticed that the design review by utility services stayed the same. So how long does that typically take? Phone a friend. And, you know, it really varies depending on how many other things just came in at the same time, what all their engineers are busy doing. It also depends on how good the 100% plans are and whether everything they check is good to go or whether there are issues that, you know, they have to write up and what needs to be addressed. So. Okay. Do you want to add to that? Yeah, go ahead. Permitting is being done at the same time. Check your mind. So that relates to permitting as well. So sometimes there's multiple RAIs, requests for additional information from permitters. And so you might have 100% design based on what you understand is needed. But then until you get that permit in hand, you don't want to close out that stage. Okay. Um, the Sykes Creek project, which originally I went to that meeting and it was split to four zones. You're doing two of the zones and the bid came in below expected or, and so is there funds there to do more of it or is it just a little bitty chunk? Jane, hi. Yes. So we are working on costs right now, but there is a little bit extra from, because we are saving some money, but we're also going to keep some in there for contingency in case, just in case that the prices were all over the place. It came in at 23 million was one bid. I looked at it. 39 million was the next bid and 53 million was the next bid. So, um, we're still reviewing it. If there's a lot of questions we want to ask to make sure the lowest bidder is, you know, concluding everything they need to, um, if it does go with them, we'd like to keep just a little bit of a cushion in there. So, but we're working on the cost right now, so I can get you that answer. That'd be great. And just a second question on that then. Sorry about that. Is, I mean, I've seen this in state bids a lot. Somebody came in real low and literally I had the state call me back one time and said, you were the second bidder. We took that low when they couldn't deliver it. Is there anything you can do? How, how certain are you when you see that big a variation in price? What was the question? How certain are you that they can deliver that when you see that big a variation in price? We're very, we're being very cautious right now. We've got questionnaires going on. Um, we have, um, uh, it goes before every review committee that is comprised of several boards from the county commissioner. I mean, from the county, like public works, um, a couple of departments, maybe even one from natural resources and everybody gets in a room. This is what I've heard. I've never actually been through this process before. And then the engineer of record will be there. I'll be there. The low bidder will be there. And we have another chance to ask a lot of questions to make sure that they're qualified and know what they're doing. And then after that, this selection committee decides whether they feel they're qualified. Great. And that's what it means by lowest qualified bidder. Thank you. Thank you. Go ahead. Virginia, on the report, you mentioned something, the project that is temporarily just postponed until after hurricane season. Could you tell me again what that is and what, what that project scope is about? I'm not familiar. So it's, it's testing an additive that will bind phosphorus to the sediment, keep it out of the water column. That funded strictly through us? Are we just a partner? No, it's funded entirely by a state grant. So we're not funding at all. We're just participants? Correct. We're just managing the project. Okay, great. And that's what location? It's five different canals that drain into Turkey Creek. A couple things. I'm wondering if we can split out the septic tanks that have been converted, that are in highly transmissive soils, those, those of greatest concern and, and see how we're doing on those in a, in a split. Prepared for that question since you gave us a heads up. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. And like magic. Okay. Okay. So, um, just a real quick clarification. Um, this is not specifically those high conductive soils cause it's, it's not really how we do that prioritization, um, at the moment. So that's how the original prioritization was. Now it's, um, predominantly off of that total nitrogen load. So this matches what our septic mapper looks like as far as what is a high priority, a medium and a low. Good. So anything over 25 pounds a year of nitrogen loading is a high priority that gets the full $20,000 in the septic upgrade program. So as you can see, these are the properties that have always had the opportunity to do a septic upgrade. So they're the only ones in the first couple of years and still predominantly what we are working on. Anything in green is something that is now impacted by that $6,000 minimum cost share. So you'll see as the 2030 rule gets passed in 2023, there's more interest from those homeowners. Everything in yellow is anything in between. So those are properties anywhere from seven pounds to 25 pounds. Exactly. Anything in yellow or green would not have been captured in the, in the original plan. That was just those high priority areas. So by opening it up, you know, we've allowed all those homeowners to participate. And I believe if you add all those properties up, we've reduced a little under three and a half thousand pounds of nitrogen a year that otherwise would not have been captured. So everything in red, those property owners have had the opportunity the entire time. By opening it up, we've got another additional 3,000 pounds of nitrogen reduction that otherwise wouldn't have been captured. And this is that summed all together. So showing our high loading, our medium loading, and our low loading is over the course of the entire septic upgrade project. Okay. And so the yellow ones are the ones that get the financial incentive. The higher nutrient reduction system they install, the more funding they are approved for. That's great. Thank you. Let's go ahead, Fred. Could you provide those numbers with the gross totals in each area? Do you have the gross number of red high loading septic tanks out there? In other words, what is it? How many are they? 5.62? Yeah. I had from the original about 2,671. Got it. Okay. So that 2,000 number is part of the 2026 plan update. Yeah. That number reflects, when we open it up to the rest of the county, the $6,000 minimum. In the 2017 plan, that number is closer to 1,400 as far as the goal. All right. So then that 562 or 82, my eyes aren't that great, is relative to 1,400? So in the 2017 plan update, the goal was to go after around 1,400, a little bit under that septic upgrades that were these high-priority, high-loading areas. We have since amended and gotten more ambitious with our goal, so now it's closer to that 2,600. We've also increased our goal for TN reduction. So in 2017, the goal was about 27,500 pounds of TN reduction. We're at 18 currently. So we're two-thirds of the way to that 2017 goal. We've since raised the goal to 43,000 or so pounds of nitrogen reduction, so we're about 42% of the way to the current goal just through these septic upgrades, including those medium and low-priority areas. Thanks a lot. That helps. Yeah. And one other thing I wanted to wonder is, do we have a concentration enough of these advanced septic systems that we can put in a monitoring well in an area where they're concentrated and start to look at the benefit of those the same way we look at the benefit of septic to sewer upgrades? We can look at that. What we did was we installed wells in septic areas, and we have been watching to see whether any of those properties or their neighbors where we have wells have upgraded, and that has not happened. So if we were to install wells now, we would need years of data. We wouldn't have before data. Yes. Right? I understand. So if we just go to a cluster, then we're only collecting after data, and what does that tell us? So the problem is we don't know who's going to upgrade. With the 2030 rule, we— Hopefully we'll get some— We should get some— A concentration somewhere. Next to our wells. Okay. Good. Soon. All right. Yeah. Thank you. Any other comments from that? Lori, we're ready for you. Good morning. Okay. So for our June collections, we collected $4.2 million, and our quarterly discretion that was collected was $4.4 million. So the total revenue for is $548 million. For the monthly financial statement, the anticipated revenue by the end of the fiscal year is $573 million. The actual received revenue is $512 million. For the expenditures this fiscal year, total assigned is $515 million. And we have spent $39.9 million. And is there any questions? All right. Great. Perfect. Thank you. Thank you. I think we're ready for you, Aaron. Start dancing. Yeah. So while Aaron comes up here, I'm just—I'm so excited about today's discussion topics, and I really appreciate Aaron's going to set this up beautifully. And we have this amazing panel of top fishing guides that have taken time off and actually rescheduled some of their clients to be here with you today. So please, as Aaron presents, be thinking about what questions you have to make the best use of our wonderful panelists. So thank you. Okay. Thanks, Virginia. So this is a project that colleagues and I, you're listed here, conducted a few years ago. It was funded by Brevard County Tourism Lagoon Grant. Those of you who may remember the economic impact plan, the Balmoral Group participated in that, this as well. So I always like to give these talks to—and it kind of seems like the obvious, Captain Obvious here, but just to make sure we're on the same page. If you don't have healthy habitat, you're not going to have healthy fisheries. This is an example, a real-world example of a healthy seagrass bed two years later after a severe algae bloom. That's what's left. So you're not going to have many fish in that type of location. A lot of times, that is not taken into account in our fisheries management. So on the one hand, we have the people doing the habitat stuff. On the other hand, doing fisheries management. They don't come together. And so part of this effort, this project is bringing those together, but in the context of Indian River Lagoon restoration. Another big factor is connectivity. A lot of the fish that we fish for use multiple habitats. On the left is what used to be in Florida. On the right is our water management structures. And it's been discussion here before about, say, water flows out of Sebastian River, that type of thing, looking at some of those connectivity factors. And then the obvious one, the algae blooms, healthy situation on the right, on the left, and on the right is that paradinium bloom we had a few years ago down near Long Point. It was pretty bad if you were fishing down that way. So, again, just kind of giving the contrast of healthy habitats and fisheries. We talk about one lot, and we talk about the other lot, but not together, and that's what we'll talk about today. So why focus on fisheries? The state has said we're the fishing capital of the world, and financially we are for income. So the recreational saltwater fishery brings in over $11 billion a year of economic impact, and you can see the number of jobs. Freshwater fishing, not quite as big, but still very large, and a lot of jobs. And the commercial fishery, as Laura Lee knows, this used to be a much larger number, but this is what we have now as far as commercial fishing. All these fisheries depend upon healthy habitats. And so we're talking about saving the Indian River Lagoon in general, but today's focus is on the fisheries aspect of that. So with that as background, it's also important to see where we are at the state level for what we call the habitat deficit. So the state's already lost 50% of its mangroves compared to, say, 100 years ago due to development for the most part. Over 2 million acres of seagrass, and we're kind of a hotbed of that at the moment. Florida Bay is also a big one. And close to 50% of our wetlands have been lost. We've heard before here and elsewhere about restoring some of those wetlands in Indian River Lagoon, and that all helps the fishery for sure. But the thing is, from a fisheries perspective, even if we stop all fishing harvests right now, we're never going to get the fish populations we had 100 years ago because there's just not enough habitat. And fishermen and these guys might talk about it. You don't have the habitat, you're never going to have the fisheries. So that's what this is about. Water quality, of course, is a huge one we talk about a lot. This is Sebastian Inlet. During one of the algae blooms, you can see the brown water coming out. Even if we had completely pristine water, if you change the timing, the amount, and the location of the fresh water coming into the estuary, you're going to have ecological impacts. A lot of the species in our estuary can't handle full salt water or full fresh. They're somewhere in between or certain. And if you change those drastically, like the clams, you're not going to have those clams around. So that's a big one. The quality, of course. Increase in nutrients, we talk about a lot. They cause and enhance harmful algal blooms. And then, of course, more and more, we're talking about the various contaminants. We've done work on pharmaceuticals. They're pretty much in all of our fish. We're talking about PFAS as well and others. This is a great time to give a shout-out to Brevard County for working on getting rid of the use of glyphosate from the harvest program rather than the spray. They're a state leader in that, so definitely props going there. Okay, so that's the background. Now I'm going to switch over to the Indian River Lagoon and talk about things we all know about. Well, these are pictures before and after 2011, Sebastian Inlet. You can see the seagrass on those sandbars all around, and then afterwards, nothing. It's nice to see the seagrass is coming back on those sandbars, and I think we'll talk about that a little bit later. And, of course, the super bloom of 2011 is kind of the big thing, the precipitous factor, let's say. But the point of this conversation is that talking to anglers and fishing guys who have been fishing this area for many decades, 40, 50 years, they indicated that there was a decline going on prior to 2011. And so that's what we're going to talk about today. When we, as scientists and resource managers, look at the quality and the health of the Indian River Lagoon, these are the types of things, and we hear about it a lot in these meetings, this is what we're looking at. We're monitoring these types of things. But what we really use as our indicator is seagrass aerial center coverage. So if you take an aerial photo or satellite image, how much of the area is covered by seagrass? But there's some qualifiers in there that we're going to get into here that the fishermen can tell us about. So this is from the St. John's River Water Management District, the seagrass coverage. You can see the year at the bottom. The blue line is the 2010 cold event which precipitated the algae bloom. And you can see the decline there and then the secondary algae bloom in 2015 that really knocked the socks off. The problem is, as I just said, the fishermen were saying that there were problems before. That seagrass coverage showed the increase, but there was something going on with the fisheries. So what we did is we sat down with some fishing guides and anglers who've been fishing here for at least 40 years, continuously. Sat down with a map and different colored markers for different decades and asked them to tell us what are their go-to spots. Not everywhere they fished, but if they had a client coming in and really wanted to catch fish, a go-to spot. It could be three, it could be six, depending on the guide. And we looked at it by decade. So different color pen for each decade. The guides were very trusting in that they actually showed those fishing spots. And I will say, after we did the project, we burned the map. Because that's like sharing a business plan, right? That's pretty huge. So we interviewed 10 guides and anglers. Doesn't seem like a lot, but I'll get to that in a little bit. And we basically are using the fisheries as a proxy for the Indian River Lagoon Health. The fish go where the habitat is, the fishermen realize that, and they find the fish, and that's a reflection of the overall habitat, mostly seagrass in this extent. So to give you an idea, in the 1990s, the blue circles, the larger the circle, the more fishing hot spots or go-to spots are in those circles. You can see it's pretty well spread out. There's a few hot spot areas. It's also important to show here the resolution. These are nine square kilometer grids is the closest we get. So we can't actually show, in this type of form, where the fishing locations are, which is huge. We can give an idea for our use for resource management, but not give up the fishing spots. That's 1990s. Here's the 2020s. Only 93 spots, and you can see there's some spread, not nearly as much, and there's a handful of really big blue circles. So the effort's being concentrated in those few areas that still have some habitat. Okay, if we look at this in bar graph form, you see the 1990s is the highest, and there's a decline into the 2000s. This is before the algae bloom. Okay, so what's going on? Because we saw that the seagrass coverage is increasing during this period. And so digging in further, and I also should state that we did, I'm not just showing it just for time brevity, but the commercial landings data mirrored this exactly. If you look at percent cover, when the water management station goes out and does their transects, they put down these quadrants, and they count or estimate the percent of the bottom that's covered by seagrass. That is declining in the 2000s, end of the 2000s, and that is what the fishery is reflecting. So by not working with the fishing community on a regular basis, we miss the signals of a coming crisis that was precipitated by a 2010 freeze that basically opened the door to that big algae bloom. So what does all this mean? One picture on the left is a seagrass bed with high percent cover. On the right is a seagrass bed with low percent cover. In an aerial image, they're both seagrass coverage. So we were having a decline in the overall health of the seagrass habitats in the lagoon prior to 2010. The fishermen were realizing this, but perhaps not making the connection, and all of a sudden the bottom dropped out in 2011. If you're a fisherman, you realize that on the seagrass bed on the left, you're going to catch a lot more fish than the one on the right. But again, as scientists, we're monitoring different things, and we're also not on the water every day to reflect this. So I told you about sample size. Ten doesn't seem like a lot, but if you do the right techniques for interviews, it is. Colleagues doing work in Massachusetts, they only needed to interview 33 fishermen to describe the fishery that's comprised of 170,000 anglers. Anyone involved in science or health science, key informant interviews, say when you go into a hospital, the processes that you go through, say an emergency room, a lot of those are perfected by interviewing key informants. And once you get above 10 key informants, you don't really get much new information per person. So you don't need thousands and thousands of people. You need the right key informants. And I would also say that if you looked at the number of anglers or guides who fished the Indian River Lagoon for the past 40 to 50 years, the number is pretty small. So 10 is a pretty good representation. Okay. So how can this be used? We can establish historical trends, which we didn't have, which I just showed you a good example of that. But the really big one is we can identify priority areas for management and restoration. So there are some places, for example, if you talk to long-time anglers and guides, and these guys may know some, where there used to be really good fishing, and there isn't any more. It used to be great seagrass, and now it's just open mud bottom. That would be a great area to target for restoration because it historically had the characteristics that would support a diverse ecosystem. We're not using that yet as part of our priority, so that's one. In the same way, it can guide restoration projects. Where are good places where we used to have good fishing and seagrass, we don't anymore, maybe target those, because as a scientist, we're not thinking in those terms. We're thinking, like, in these grids and where seagrass might be or might have been before. We can also use it to evaluate restoration. If we're doing a project and we have anglers who are fishing those areas, if they keep records, they can tell us if the fishing is improving, which is a good, again, proxy for if that's. We can also co-produce research and management, talking to Dwayne DeFries about this for some of the NEP work. And what I'm going to go to now to finish things off is it can provide valuable environmental monitoring data. So we are working on a phone-based app. We've been testing it for the past few months. It's called Water Watcher Ledger. Basically, it's a spoken reports. You don't have to write anything, which is really paying for a logbook. You turn on your phone and get going. You can include, you can talk about all these categories and more, all the way from the bottom type to whether there's seagrass or not or algae on it. Watercolor and clarity is a huge one. And you don't have to just do this by estimating it. There's an algorithm in the app that uses a particular scale for watercolor that tells us about the health of the water. So basically, how do you do this? This is a screenshot of my phone. You basically open the app, start a new trip by hitting that button. You hit the plus mark, and then you basically record yourself. You hit the record button or take a picture. When you're done, you hit that button again, and it transcribes everything and then puts it into the categories in our spreadsheet so we can start figuring out some of the patterns. AI is wonderful in some ways, even if it might kill us all. So to give you an idea, this is one of the, a day, a day, I did multiple reports on a trip, so it'll just kind of scroll through what the output is from my perspective. And so I can, I can access this report at any time to, say, gauge my fishing, what I've been seeing. All the data that goes in the database is anonymized, so nobody knows who it is. It's also, there's a big fuzz factor, so it's not like this is your spot. It's like within three square miles, it's your spot. So how does a watercolor, which I'm most excited about right now, how does this work? You take a picture with your phone. The picture comes up, and you put a square or squares around the area that doesn't have reflective on it, so you actually get a good picture of the water. In this instance, on that Pharrell-Yule scale, it's 11, which isn't great. Blue is, you know, tropical clear. Brown, or 20, 21, it's brown and very nasty. 11's not great. You're not going to do any site fishing for that, for example. And this gives you an idea, and again, we try and express this stuff in ways that you're not going to be able to use as a fishing map. You can see the dots there. The small blue dots are the different reports of a number of fishing trips. The colored dots are the ones where a picture was taken, and we have an estimate of water quality, and that matches the scale on the right. So you can see there's a few down near Sebastian Inlet on these particular days was pretty not bad. Farther up in the lagoon, they were terrible. And there was a plankton, still is a plankton bloom going on in some of those areas up there. So as we build up our user group, we have people on the water every single day that can start giving us high-resolution data on all the factors that we talk about all the time, but can only get there as biologists once a week or once a month. So this is the Water Watcher ledger. We're at the point now, we've done our beta testing, so we'd love to have people jump on it if they spend time on the water and use it. That's the logo for it. You can get it on Apple and also on Google Play. There's other things, Water Watcher, Water Watcher ledger with this logo, and it's all pretty much self-explanatory. Over the next month or so, we'll come out with a couple how-to videos for stuff that just doesn't make sense directly. But again, we've tested it. It's giving us a type of data that everybody here can use, and hopefully we can ramp it up. That's all I got. That's awesome. That's awesome. Just a thought, there are a bunch of these apps out there. I've been doing the Seagrass one, you know, for somebody. Dennis has one. So as many of you know, I work with the Michael J. Fox Foundation on their Parkinson's stuff, and obviously it takes funds. But through Sergey Brin with Google, who's funded a chunk, they have set up an overarching database linking them all. And we probably should look at something like that to see if we could pull the fishing data, the Seagrass data, and others that are putting stuff in to really get a complete overall sense of what's going on. Because, I mean, I'm going, which one am I going to choose to use, in a sense? So just something to consider. I don't know how we'd ultimately set something like that up, but I think it would make a lot of sense. Okay. Thanks. That's right. This is a free app? Yeah, totally free. And so far, it's just been in beta testing. You haven't actually launched it to the public yet? It's being launched to the public. Like right now? It's open, yeah. So what is your plan to get this in front of everyone in Brevard? And I definitely agree with what Fred said, to be able to combine, you know, data sets, of course, is always good. But to specifically target Brevard users right here in the lagoon, do you have a launch plan, a marketing plan? Well, at this point, this is, no, this is another unfunded mandate. So it's just basically organically. We've been kind of holding back. A handful of guides are helping and starting to spread. But the idea is to just word of mouth, try and get it out. Eventually, to the extent that it takes hold, and an important aspect now, too, is to be working with the scientists, like with the county, with the water manager district, et cetera, to refine how the data are categorized so they can actually, because these are different types of data than they're typically collecting. So it's going to take a learning curve for them as well. Sure. So it's going to be built up slowly over time. So, but to answer your original question, there's no big, big plan. This is just people who are already over-employed just adding to the workload. Okay. I'm in for that. So we have a lot of events coming up through fall. Well, several are mentioned today. Definitely, if there's anything, I know we can't chat about this specifically. It's not sorrel-funded. Are we permitted to talk about this if it's not? So I just want to make sure in front of Heather. Okay. Well, I'd love to help put something together to just launch it out organically in the upcoming. Definitely love your branding. So to utilize that. Sure. And then just to include something that this is Brevard specific or Indian River Lagoon specific, not that it's the only place you could use that, but just to get that organic group. And, of course, we have the best marketing team here sitting over there to be our panel today to help get this to the people on the water, too. Sure. Yeah, the colleague, actually a long-time friend who's creating this, he's also doing an unfunded mandate. He wants to use it as widely as possible. He's actually in conversations with another colleague of ours in Australia to use it as well. So hopefully it goes large. But for local, yeah, we have a small kind of page, page and a half introduction that if anybody wants it for a future event, just reach out to me, and I can give you the PDF of that. You can print out as many as you want. Excellent. And I would love to connect with him as well. I'm also working on a project in Australia now, very, very random that you said that. So maybe it's colleagues that could actually work together once that gets to that police. Sure. All right. Great. All right. Thank you. All right. Our panel put together this kickoff video. Find ourselves in a situation to where we thought it was a paradise that could never end. That wasn't necessarily the case. I mean, this lagoon system is magical, and we need to protect it and treat it as such. It's just that great of a priority for all of us because I don't want to move away from here saying, God, I hate that place. I don't want to ever move away from here. I want to live here forever because I love this place, and I want it to stay as good as it can get. And if we can do anything to make it better, I think we should. In Cocoa Beach, it was a paradise. I didn't have to travel around to fish for anything, you know, specific. We had trout, redfish, tarpon, snook, everything you could possibly imagine. So I really didn't have to travel around to fish. It wasn't until I started the show and actually getting out and seeing other spots in Florida that I realized what a unique diamond that we had right here in Cocoa Beach and Cape Canaveral and Cocoa, this whole Space Coast area, because there's no other place like it in the world. Captain Alex Grichke, lifelong resident of Merritt Island, Florida, and 20-year fishing guide. I spent my entire life on the lagoon and learning its waters intimately throughout my younger years and then also as a profession as I got older. As soon as that water started going brown in 2013 and into 2014-15, I immediately started doing research and wanted to know where my business at that point in time with two young children were going to go. What it was going to go and what it would look like in the next decade and further on if this was a situation. And after investigating and understanding what Brown Tide has done to other areas like Texas and New Jersey, I realized that it was going to be a long road for us. And at that moment in time, I made a commitment to myself and a commitment to my community and a commitment to a body of water that I've loved since I was a child and made sure that I did everything possible to implement not only change, but also be a sounding board for true facts and what's going on on the water on a daily basis. Because I'm on it five to seven days a week, you know, 10 years ago when we decided to implement the Sabar Indian River Lagoon plan and also pass the half cent sales tax. I was in the commission rooms. I was there voicing my opinion and stating that it was going to take these commitments to make the difference. And the commitments came in the form of this Citizens Oversight Committee, in the form of all the activities and all the projects that have been implemented and completed to this point in time. And then on the water, on a daily basis, we see the effects. The algae blooms are less frequent. They're less intense. They're happening for shorter durations of time. The seagrasses, not just in one area in a rural spot, but all up and down the lagoon, right where we're at right here in the middle of Merritt Island with houses everywhere, are coming back. They're fighting for what they want, which is a happy lagoon with good water. Then nature wants to work and nature wants to make better. The IRL clam project that I've been fortunate to work as a field tech with UF on, literally hands-on mud on the boots, waist deep in the water of the lagoon, several days a week, tending to clam beds and helping out, supporting the project with public outreach, not just my hands. It has been amazing to see come to maturity. And by physically being part of it, I can attest to what it's been able to do for the areas where we have outplanted these clams and the difference it makes, not just in the water quality, but also the sea life that's around that general area. There is no doubt that there is a bunch of work that absolutely still needs to be done. There is no doubt it's going to take several more years of that work being implemented to really, truly make full change in this lagoon. But there's also no doubt that there's a whole bunch of committed citizens of this area that want to see better days for our waterways because we want the next generations to have what we had in prior years. Hey, my name is Captain Jim Ross, and I grew up in the Rockledge and Cocoa area since the early 70s. I see a lot of improvement with the restricted water flow that we have started having happen since the Save Our Lagoon tax was implemented. We've started putting in areas where the water can settle, little retention ponds, things of that nature, baffle boxes. Anything that doesn't allow storm water to dump directly into the lagoon system seems to be making a definite impact on the water quality throughout the lagoon system. I think the next step is to make sure that we are starting to do something with septic to sewer and to continue muck dredging because muck dredging, especially in the Cocoa Beach area, and even though that's not necessarily my backyard that I grew up in, in Rockledge, but I have spent thousands of days on that part of the water around the Thousand Island area of Cocoa Beach. And I've seen the improvements in those grass flats and in that water quality after the muck dredging projects had been completed. It was astounding, the difference to me, and I'd like to see that continue throughout the lagoon. And if we can do more of that in the Rockledge and Cocoa area, then that would be a fantastic thing because I can see definite real-world impacts from the muck dredging that has been done. I almost quit being a fishing guide simply because I didn't feel like I was providing the service that I once was able to provide. But with the lagoon system returning, now we can start to look at some of those species again. Not nearly like it was in its former glory, but we're getting there. You know, the recovery of this lagoon system, especially the Rockledge and Cocoa area, is going to take a long time. There are just so many freshwater, stormwater inputs that go into both sides of this lagoon system, from the Indian River east side that buffers Merritt Island, and then, of course, the west side that buffers Rockledge and Cocoa. There's no real way to bring this back to 100%. It's never going to be 100%, especially with the infinite amount of growth that it seems to be going on in this county right now. But the more that we can do to slow the water progression into the lagoon system and the nutrients that are carried in that water, I think we're going to continue to see improvements. We can waste a lot of money in a lot of ways. Government is excellent at doing that. But with this lagoon system, we can't afford to waste money. And so I would say if we want this to truly be a better location for people to live and to play and to come and recreate and basically build an outdoor economy, we're going to have to invest in this lagoon system. And I would just say whatever it takes to get the most bang for the buck. There's a lot of sideline projects that don't really do much, but there's a few of them that are really getting a return on that investment when it comes to taking pollutants out or when it comes to filtering water and getting that water back in the kind of shape that the flora and fauna need to be able to thrive. Probably my two or three top would be muck dredging, stormwater retention instead of letting it into the lagoon. And honestly, the clams that people are putting in are in the areas where we see those clam beds. We see improved water quality and we see huge amounts of life in those areas compared to some of the surrounding areas that still have mucky bottoms and algae, tumbleweed algae type bottoms. That grass is so important. And if you look at the clam and grass together, those are places that people really need more of because that's what's making this lagoon healthier. I'm Captain Blair Wiggins and I grew up here in Cocoa Beach and I've seen a lot of changes. And the changes I've seen have not been for the good. When I was a little kid right here in Cocoa Beach, and I can remember back to about 1970, that time frame, and right here in Cocoa Beach, there was nothing around here. Freedom 7 School was here. This dock was here. Matter of fact, this is the dock I caught my first snook on. He was about 18 inches and I caught him right here, as a matter of fact. That was about 1975, I think it was. And the water was crystal clear then. You could see the bottom. There was Australian pines as tall as you could see. We'd build our forts in there when we were in high school and grade school. It was a neat place to grow up. But lately, over the past 15, 20, 25 years, the river has really taken a nosedive. And I've seen changes that if they would have happened overnight or within a year, there would have been all kinds of money poured into trying to get it back the way it was. But it's gradually taken its time. And back in 2010, 2011, we had a freeze that basically killed, I think it killed about 60 to 70 percent of the life that was here in Banana River, Indian River, Muskie Lagoon. And there was literally fish floating everywhere here. It was dead. And during that time, up until that freeze, they had taken a lot of clams out of the river, an estimated 9.2 billion clams out of the river. And the more clams that came out of the river, the dirtier the water got to me where I was guiding. And I started the Indian River clam restoration project because of that. But I think if we would have started the projects and actually all the restoration stuff that's going on now, if we would have started it back when we first started seeing the decline, I believe we would be in a much better position we're in right now. But we're not. As you can see from 2015, a lot of people weren't here in 2015. Our water was black. You couldn't see three inches in the water. And that's when Sorrel, save our Indian River Lagoon, came into play. And we voted our half-cent sales tax in back then. And since then, we've done septic-to-sewer, or they have done septic-to-sewer transformation. They have sponsored our Indian River clam restoration project, seagrass restoration, oyster restoration. They've done shoreline restoration. And that is something that we absolutely need to keep going. And if you don't have a baseline from 2015 to now, ask somebody that's been here that long that saw the river back then. It stunk. It was black. There was dead stuff floating everywhere. It killed all of our grass, which in turn starved our manatees. It starved the dolphins because the dolphin didn't have any food fish left. It turned our water black, where it killed all of our seagrass. Mother Nature came along here a few years ago and showed what needs to be done. It put a couple of breaches in Mosquito Lagoon, dumped in billions and billions of gallons of nice, fresh seawater, put our salinity up where it needs to be. And we had a seed bank of grass seeds start to sprout and grow. We have a ton of grass in Mosquito Lagoon now. And thanks to Mother Nature, with the drought that we've been having the past couple of years, and we're having a lot of rain right now, but with the drought we've had the past couple of years, the salinity has been just right for oysters to grow, for clams to spawn, for fish to come back in. And we're really, really starting to see the results of all the restoration projects that are going on right now, whether they can be seen as in clams in the water that you can't see. You can see the shoreline, you know, the Restore Our Shorelines. You can see those projects, and you can see the effects those have. But the projects that are out of sight, out of mind are the ones that I think are really going to play into cleaning our rivers up. And without that half-set sales tax, once again, we don't have anything to help us. You know, the tourism here as well. We used to have, I know the guides that used to be here, there was 18, 20 guides that would have, they would be booked two years out in advance. I was at one time booked out like two and a half years in advance for people wanting to come fish. And these days, I mean, the guides are begging for business. There's three or four guides now that are full-time, and there's a lot of part-time guides that are out there. But it's tough for guys to make a living on the water out here now. And the tourism has definitely dropped off as far as the fishing goes. There's eco-tourist and stuff out here now, and you get a lot of those guys. But for people that are trying to make a living out here taking tourist fishing, this used to be a great fishing destination. And right now, I know a lot of the clients go elsewhere, Texas, Louisiana, North Carolina, South Carolina, to do the red fishing now. Hey, guys. I'm Dr. Todd Osborne from the University of Florida's Whitney Laboratory up in St. Augustine. I'm down here today in Grant at the Old Fish House having a look at clams we planted for sorrel in this past year. Actually, back in April, we put 15 million clams out around this island. We're out there today monitoring to see how they're doing, and we're getting good survivorship. We're happy with their growth. But the real thing I want to tell you is how important that sorrel money is. And that money that comes from Save Our Indian Lagoon actually is from the half-cent tax. And I have to say that there's no other way for us to do work like this without that level of funding. The lagoon is so valuable to us. And I know that a lot of people are up in arms about, like, you know, which side of this tax thing they fall on. But let me tell you this, the economic impact of the lagoon here and the counties that cover it is about $28 billion. That's what it would be, a billion dollars a year. And every dollar we put in here to try to restore this lagoon is going to result in a 28X multiplier in terms of its value. So there's no investment that you and I can go out and make that would give us returns like that. But the return on investment for restoration in the lagoon is incredible at 28 times what we put in. So we really need those funds to continue to make this lagoon better and bring it back the way it used to be. Sorry, you want to introduce yourselves? And then I know, Jim, you had a couple questions to start off the panel. Sure. I'm Captain Jermos, and it was taking the time to listen to the three of us. We've been around a long time. The gray is probably a little telltale sign of that. We've been on this lagoon system, as we explained, since we were kids. We love it. We want to see it continue to thrive. And we appreciate everything that happens in this room to make that happen. So thank you to all of you. I really appreciate that. Captain Alex Gerichke, honor to sit next to these two guys and as definitely heroes of mine. And an honor to sit in front of all you people and help you understand that, actually, like Dr. Aaron Adams was talking about, fishermen, be it commercial, be it charter, have insights on the water that, honestly, most people that get doctorates wish they could get because we get the time on it. And please ask us questions. Ask us about anything. We're used to being under fire and taking it all. So thank you for listening to the video, and can't wait to get into it. I'm Captain Blair Wiggins. I started the Indian River Clam Restoration Project back in 2019. And without these guys right here and the support of everybody that's been involved with the Clam Project, it wouldn't be going where it is now. And, you know, I don't think a lot of the restoration projects that are happening out there would be going on right now because, you know, the river was about dead in 2015, as you heard from the video. But I want to thank you guys for hearing us and anticipate a lot of questions. Hopefully we get some. Ready for questions? Is that where we're going with this, is questions? All right. That's open. Go ahead, Laura Lee. So, Captain Ross, you touched on this when you commented about the freshwater going into the Indian River from both sides, from the west side and the east side, you know, in the Cocoa Rockledge area. You know, that's always been something that I work on, you know, is trying to reduce. We got in the baffle boxes and we're reducing the nutrients, but reducing the volume of freshwater that's going into the lagoon, I think, is really, really important. My question is, did you start seeing a decline in that particular area before you started seeing it down around the inlet or up in the north end of the lagoon where we don't have that much freshwater going in? Was that kind of the first place that you saw the seagrass beds declining? That's my question. Was that kind of the start of it? Yes. Thanks for the question, Ms. Thompson. I would say that you absolutely nailed it. The central, what I consider to be the central part of my lagoon, which goes from Sebastian to Scottsmoor, that is the hot spot that started the blooms both in the Indian and in the banana, actually. If you just go straight west from Sykes Creek to Newfound Harbor and then across to the Cocoa Beach area, all of those areas that as they developed out, it was like, okay, we've got to get the water off the land so that we can put more houses here. And there really didn't seem to be any thought process to trying to capture the water. Let's just get it off of our streets, off of our, you know, yards. And in 2000, I'm going to say 2003, 2004 time frame, I started talking about what I was seeing. So just to give you guys a little bit of a background, I've been on the water since I was like these guys, knee high to a Junebug. I started guiding in 1997 full time. I did a little part time before that, but my full time career as a guide. So I'm coming up on 30 years next year. And I've done a radio show for Florida Sportsman Magazine. I did a radio show for them from 1997 until 2010. And now I do my own radio show called Catching Memory Outdoors from 2010 to tomorrow. We're going to be doing one tomorrow morning. Every Saturday morning we do this. And as long as I've known Blair, as long as I've known Alex, we have commented on what's going on with the lagoon system at some point in time during that radio show. It's that important to us. It's that important to our listeners. But going back to that 2002, 2003 time frame, I started noticing every time we'd have a rain event, all of a sudden there's a bloom. Well, what is creating the bloom? Well, as you live and grow and learn, you become more knowledgeable about things. Back then it was, oh, it must be the pesticides and the fertilizers killing everything. Because that's the only thing that changes is now the water, the storm water is bringing those nutrients into the lagoon. And you would see it immediately within days after a rain, you would start to get a bloom where the water looked incredible. And those blooms would occur more and more and more often in that Pineda through 528 Causeway section of the Indian River, which I used to spend a lot of time fishing because of the habitat that was there was conducive to the type of fish that my customers wanted to catch. So we were looking at giant trout along the rock-lead shorelines. We were looking at redfish tailing on the eastern side of the lagoon from Pineda Causeway all the way up through to, well, the NASA Causeway. But just to kind of focal point it to the 528 or just beyond the 528. And at about 2006, it got to the point where it was a constant bloom. And the grass was dying out in those areas. And we were getting that tumbleweed algae, those non-productive type of vegetations or algaes. And the fish started spreading out. They started moving north and south of those areas. So instead of leaving my house in Rockledge and launching at Lee Winter Park and literally going to the Brevard Motel, which is now Oleander Point, and starting on that seawall for giant trout on a topwater plug and snook in the morning, now I'm driving to Port St. John or Titusville because that's where the fish have migrated to because that's where the water was still decent, 2005, 2006, 2007, and the grass beds were still good in those areas. As more development has come and the lagoon started to worsen, especially in that 2008-2009 time frame, then you started seeing these six, eight-month-long algae blooms in some areas of the lagoon. And with that duration of algae, the grass can't survive. It just won't survive. And I don't know if it's – I'm not a scientist. I don't know if it was a salinity level. I don't know if it was a light level that was not allowing the grass to grow. I'm assuming at this point in my knowledge base that it was probably both because they seem to go hand in hand. Lower salinity seems to create more algae and just create problems. And so I went from going and saying the pesticides and the fertilizers are the problem to going, well, wait a minute, what's carrying them into the lagoon system? How are they getting there? Because they're on people's grass. They're on their St. Augustine. How is it getting from the St. Augustine into the lagoon? And the one thing that consistently came back up with every pollution type of scenario and every algae bloom type scenario was a freshwater input or a stormwater, I should say, stormwater input or multiple stormwater inputs into those areas. And so the last, what, four or five years, I think our efforts have said, you know, we really need to look at stormwater retention. And if we can do that, we may not be able to build, you know, another subdivision of copycat beige houses. You know, we may not be able to build that one anymore. But we really don't need that anymore, in my opinion. I mean, I think there's enough people here already. So that's just me. But long story short, that 2003-2004 time frame is when I started noticing that central part of the lagoon because of the freshwater inputs. As an example, just one example, Bird Plaza. Everybody knows where Bird Plaza is, US 1 and Dixon Boulevard. They have about five or six drains in that huge parking lot area that go straight to the lagoon. And so when it would rain, I would go in 1997, 1998, 1999, I would launch out of Lee Winter Park and I would run up and fish those drains because that running water would create an opportunity for tarpon and snook and mainly tarpon and snook, but also some redfish. The trout don't like it. The trout don't like the salinity change. So they go deep where the water is more, the slimy is more stable. But I would actually use those inputs as hot spots, if you will, to fish. But as the lagoon started to degrade and more and more freshwater came in there, those stopped being sources of, you know, points of places that I could take people to fish. And it was interesting to me over that time frame to see it go from there was fish around these inputs to now there's not very many fish around these inputs. And I don't know if that's because of what is being flushed in there or if they're just not as – first of all, there's not as many fish. But second of all, the amount of area that has been paved over and is now draining into the lagoon has increased greatly in the last 25 years. So I think that it's just simply a matter of too much freshwater in a saltwater estuary. Hopefully that answers your question. Yeah. Short story. That was a long way around to get back to it. And to kind of add to that, you know, if you rewind back and you can look at some aerial photographs from the 40s pre-all the houses, pre-all the marshes getting torn up. If you rewind back, there was always freshwater coming into the lagoon. It's not something new. It was filtered through marsh. It was filtered through meandering little creeks. It was filtered through land. And now there is no filter, well, except for where we've rectified the situation. And the difference is huge. Stormwater, like you said, on those three points, it's stormwater, it's muck, it's getting control of our nutrients, and it's a long road to get there. We've expedited it. Every bit of stormwater, we've expedited into the lagoon system instead of letting it filter down through and eventually run off. If it rained two weeks ago here, that water would just now be getting to the lagoon system because where we're sitting used to be a cow pasture. I thought about that when I lived in the sun driving up here. If you guys could talk into your microphones, you've got to almost put your mouth on them. Yeah. Better. Yeah. I can relate to what you're saying, Jim. Driving up here, I lived in Sun Tree 33 years ago, and when this was being built out here, we used to come out here at night and actually see how many deer we could count. And I think it was like 150 one night, but it was like right here. But to answer your question, Loralee, I think it was when did we first start noticing changes. I didn't start guiding until about 92, but I can think back to 72 when I first started going to the river and actually getting oysters out of the Banana River. Around Georgia and Brady Island, which are the two islands just north of Pineda Causeway on the Banana River, had oysters all around those islands because back when they dredged the intercoastal, they took all the iron pipes and just left them up around all the islands. And so the oysters that were free swimming, all the, I don't want to call them villagers, all the spats, attached to those iron dredge pipes. And we had great oysters up there until about 1980 when the oyster dredgers came in and took them all out. But I can remember my dad in 1972 saying, you know, there goes our oyster beds, probably going to die out within the next 10 years because our water flow is going. They had just finished Pineda Causeway. But that's when I could first start noticing changes. And then 2010 came around with the glyphosate spraying, going 100%. I noticed the grass flats up in the northern part of Indian River where Flounder Creek came out, where the Union Carbide Plant is there. Wherever the water would drain out, that's where we would go and look for big schools of redfish because there was big, giant, sandy areas there. Starting about 2010, those big, giant, sandy areas just started getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And then we had our giant algae bloom and we lost all the grass. But you could tell when the more spraying that they started doing, the bigger those sand patches got in the Indian River. So it's, as we say, the river's dying from 1,000 cuts. It's not just one certain thing out there. But as we're alluding to right now, the stormwater is going to be our biggest fight because if we don't get that under control, all the programs out there that we've got going are for a saltwater salinity area. So if we get too much fresh water, all these projects we're doing, including the clam project, it's going to be for naught. Go ahead, Eric. Have any of you guys noticed a big difference in how you do fishing-wise before and after dredging projects? More or less on the side of the dredging projects is clarity in the canals and such. And with that, we have gotten our sea trout is kind of one of our more canal-y kind of fish. Now, of course, I'm referring to canal dredging because that's mostly what's happened until we get working on some of those dredge pits that are next to the causeways. You know, you do see with the clarity not just more sea trout but also more crabs swimming around, more life in those areas. And there is a pretty direct relation to that. And in general, a more direct relation to kind of more the increased population of grass or increased density and coverage of grass. And what we're seeing on the recruitment side over the last couple to three years, which a lot of the deep holes, canals, and stuff like that, you know, sea trout can use those deep holes to spawn. But the recruitment we're seeing with sea trout and redfish, which were primarily sea grass, you know, loving species in our area, those first-year fish and second-year fish, we're seeing a pretty large increase over the last handful of years. I know for a fact where we would have trouble, you know, because there was a guarantee you could go to a flat at any point in time and catch sea trout. It was just not even a problem. Well, when there's no grass, there's no sea trout. And we all went to canals, of course. The crash in general shifted how every one of us fished on that lagoon. And anybody who says it didn't is not, wasn't even there or wasn't paying attention. We went from, you could literally just, okay, I want to go there today and catch fish to you had to have spots. You had to have that shoreline that had mangroves on it or you weren't catching fish. You had to have that magic dock or your clients weren't having a happy day. And with cleaner habitat and dredging and cleaning up the canals and then also with the increase of grass, we can go catch sea trout like pretty much everywhere now. And they're all first-year fish. They're all, you know, maybe second-year fish. And same with the redfish. We've seen a lot of that first, second, and third-year fish, redfish coming along, which both are good indicator fish for our area because there is a lot less migration pattern. There's a lot less of those fish transferring up, down. They might slide up and down the lagoon a bit, but it's pretty well known that in a healthy estuary, pre all the issues, there were redfish and sea trout. They wouldn't leave between two causeways for their entire life cycle, all the way from as a little itty-bitty squirmy thing to dead from old age. They wouldn't leave four miles of river. Now, granted, fish move around a bit more and stuff like that now, but the spawning activity of sea trout and particularly redfish in our area because we are known as one of the, or if not only the only, place where a redfish will spawn inshore. There was a direct, and it four years ago, five years ago, caused us to take redfish off the you-can-catch-this or you-can-keep-this. They've been on a moratorium now for four years, recreational. They haven't been sold commercially in a very long time around here. But the direct decline in the recruitment in that gap between 17, 18, 19, and into 20 where it was hard to find a juvenile fish. And if it was a juvenile fish, you found it in your cast net while you were cast netting bait because they were trying to find somebody to be with, somewhere to hide. Well, here's a whole bunch of buddies. Let me hide with these guys. That was one of the first things I noticed after the grass went. That first year after the grass really went, when I would go collect my bait from my charter the next day, I was catching just as many juvenile, and it tapered quickly, just as many juvenile redfish, black drum, sheep's head, and sea trout as mullet in the schools of mullet because fish have to have somebody to hang with or they've got to have something to hide in. There's only, or they get eaten. You know, it's either eat or get eaten out there, and they had, and that was one of their associations was more fish, less chance to get eaten. So one thing that we are seeing with the dredging and the natural influx and the seed bank flourishing of this grass that's been popping up over the last three or four years is those fish that directly spawn in here are spawning more now. And it's something that we can see on a regular basis because of that juvenile fish population has increased. There's more water that's right conditions for them to spawn now. In previous years, it was so polluted and nasty they didn't use those areas. So there's more areas for the fish to spawn. So going back to the dredging directly, Cocoa Beach, when you used to drift across the flats in 2017, 18, 19, you would drift across or pull across the flats trying to sneak up on that one redfish that might be there maybe in amongst the 27 catfish that you really weren't trying to catch. As you're pulling along, you would have a cloud of dust, detritus basically, swirling up behind you and you could see where you had actually pulled. Even though the water was brown, coffee, creamer, coffee with creamer, yoo-hoo, let's call it yoo-hoo brown. As you pulled along or you trolling motored along, all of the detritus and the muck and the stuff that was on the flat, because you're only in 20, 22, 24 inches of water, you would create a trail behind your boat, a visible trail. Just think of a jet flying through the air. You will see a trail behind your boat like that. Once the project in Cocoa Beach was completed, within about six, I'm going to say within about six months of that completion, all of that surrounding flat area, you stopped seeing that. And I think as they pulled the muck out of those, we'll call them sumps, pulled them out of the sumps, as the wind blew, it blew the extra detritus, muck, everything else, into those holes once again. And so the holes of the Cocoa Beach Canal system and also on the north side of 520, as you go north towards Hall Island, those canals are reclaiming the muck. The muck is wanting to settle at the lowest possible point. The other place that it's really, really evident is up around Jones' Fish Camp, which is the, I don't know if they call it Jones' or Mike's, I don't know what they call it these days, the one that's in Mims that has the dirt ramp that's north of the JJ Bridge. That area was a moonscape. I mean, there was as much grass on that flat as there is in that parking lot right there for years. And once they finished that project, within a year of them finishing that project, we started seeing widgeon grass and shoal grass start to return to those areas. And now that area has really gotten good again. So there's, I feel, because I can't explain it with anything, there's no other thing in my mind that can explain it. I feel like those dredged areas are now pulling the muck off of the flat and reassembling them down in those sumps so that the flat is cleaner and that the seed bank can actually take hold and grow again. So I feel like that is probably the number one reason or the number one project that the monies that come in from this lagoon tax should be spent on because there's immediate, I mean, within less than a year's time, immediate impacts that you visibly see as you're out on the water. Go ahead, Fred. The dredger. No, it's, and another good example is down there in the Grand Canal, down in Satellite Beach. You know, the cleaner water. I've got a father-in-law that lives right on it. And the areas outside of it, and it, the dredging makes a difference, no doubt, and I'll be all, it makes a difference. And unfortunately, it's something that is not a one-time gig. That's a maintenance issue. Just like if you own a giant parking lot with a retention pond, you've got to dredge the thing out and suck all the gunk out every 15 years. It's a maintenance issue. It's not a one-and-done. It is something that we will do as a community for the next 250 years if we're lucky to be here this long. The canals are not natural. No. Anywhere we already dredged, and we built, we did our best to carve up edges of the lagoon and turn them into canals and turn them into houses. Anywhere where that was dredged, we'll, and anywhere we just dredged, we'll need to be dredged 20 years from now. Or five. Or five if we keep progressing and growing like we are. That was one of the, and I said it in there, and I got to meet a lot of people that are actually sitting in this room in those commission meetings during the beginning of the tax. And one of the very first things I would say when I got on the dais and got to speak was dredging is maintenance. This isn't a, you're done. Dredging has to happen. And I would have liked to see the Brevard County Division of Dredging, but that's it. They start up there, go all the way to the south end, and turn them around 15 years later and make them do it again. Because it is a maintenance issue. It's not a one and done. And it's all part and parcel to the way we grew and what we did with the stormwater. And, again, it all kind of links all back together. Virginia's going to buy a dredge. I'm sure there's somebody around here that might have one. Go ahead, Fred. Thanks. Excellent stuff. And I appreciate all you folks do actually out with talking in the community. Amazing work. Is there anything you think we should be focusing on that we're missing or that would make another difference? I'll start off on this and start it off more on the fisheries side of things. I'd like to see some programs for forage fishery, forage fish, to increase that kind of volume in the lagoon. Something we've noticed over the years is a drastic decline, and obviously pinfish because they're relying on the seagrasses, mud minnows. The things that all the things eat are in pretty low numbers, and they don't have – it's not a redfish. It's not a sea trout. It's not a snook. It's not a tarp. It's not what people think of when they think of fish. But it's a very important part of it, along with maintaining this, the shellfish. Clams, obviously, I work on the – I get to work on the program, and I'm honored to do it. And when I get in that water, and I have now for years and actually see clams that we put there that are now this, they've done something that entire time. I know they've done something, or they wouldn't be there. They'd be dead. They have to do something to live. But the amount of oyster recruitment we're seeing, free oyster, not because it's an oyster project here and 50 yards away, there's a couple oysters growing there, but miles from where any project has been done, other than maybe a person or two hanging them off their dog, you can go find oyster in the slow parts of the lagoon anywhere you want. So maintaining those projects is really a key, I think. Looking at the base, the forage fish base is another key. And I hate to put it kind of a frank way, but do the sexy stuff and make sure people see it. Because, frankly, unless you're on the water every day, you're not seeing it. Unless you're willing to dive through information, you don't know. And, unfortunately, the tenor of the room can sometimes turn to a, there's nothing that's been done. There's absolutely no chance that they've done anything good with any of this money. All you people working here are just not even here because they don't take the time. And, frankly, it's sad, but do the stuff that people want to see and make them see it. And to at least get the thought behind people's head to actually take the time to look and dig a little deeper. Because graphs and stuff are cool, but most people flip right by that one. You know, getting people out there and getting people engaged. And there's been a bunch of great stuff doing it. The whole program in general has done a great job of it. But, you know, it's tough to hold attention these days if nobody's figured that out yet. I would have to say the biggest thing that needs to be done would be, once again, the salinity issue. With all the rooftops, pavement, and new neighborhoods and everything going in, you're getting so much more direct flow. And, you know, your retention ponds that you're building, if you look at them in my neighborhood right now, they're slapped top to the full. They're not going to take any more. So where is that water going to go? It's going to dump over where the, you know, the dams are or whatever, and it's going to go right into the river. So all you're doing is you're holding water in an area and it's going, you know, still into an area, especially when all the retention ponds get full. So they're getting the full nitrogen content and everything coming anyway. Figure out how to get the salinity to stabilize. It's not going to take that long for the forage fish to come back. Once you get Mother Nature right, look at Mosquito Lagoon. It's, you know, it's doing great, not the way it once was back. I remember it when I was a kid. But if you get the salinity issue back right, just like I said in the video, the past couple of years, we've had great salinity because of the drought situation we've had. The rain right now, you're probably going to see a lot of the, if you're anywhere near the river, I'm sure you're seeing a lot of little oysters that are about three inches long right now. Look at them in another couple of weeks after all this rain. Hopefully they're going to make it. That's all I can say is hopefully they're going to make it. But when that salinity, all that water rushes in, the salinity might go from 27 parts per thousand, which is perfect for the saltwater estuary. But then it'll drop immediately down to nine parts per thousand. And nothing in a saltwater estuary, brackish water estuary is really going to survive unless you get the high winds right after the front and it blows all the water out. And, you know, the salinity gradually starts coming back up. But salinity issues, that's, in my mind, that's going to be our biggest fight. Go ahead, Deb. So I'd like to respond to that also, if possible. I've got three thoughts, and they're three separate thoughts. One is, what would we like to see? Well, all of them are, what would we like to see? The one thing that I would like to see is if there's a clam project going in place, that we make sure that that's properly funded because, obviously, that's a filtration system for this lagoon. The second half of that is anywhere where there's a seagrass project, anywhere where it's deemed that seagrass will grow and there's a planting going on, after, I mean, the day after that planting is done, I would like to see a clam overseeding on that grass bed because they're symbiotic. The clams pull in the nutrients out of the water, and when they poop, they poop into the soil. That's what the seagrass grows off of. The seagrass cannot grow off of it when it's just free floating around in the water column. It has to be input into the soil, and that's the job that the clam does. So I think if you can say, hey, we're going to invest in a seagrass planting operation, but we also, at the same time, need to allocate monies to be able to overseed that with clam seed. And I think that that's going to be a win-win for everybody, not just the grass, not just the clams. It's going to be everything involved with the lagoon restoration that's going to help. The second thing I would like to see, and I've talked to this, I have a voice. We all have a voice on social media, radio, TV, but the one thing that I would like to see from the Brevard County Department of Environmental Natural Resources, the Citizens Oversight Committee, whoever is in the know, is I would like to see an aggressive social media campaign saying that, hey, we've just allocated X millions of dollars to this project. It removed this much gunk out of the lagoon system. You can give the nitrogen, the phosphorus, the breakdown, whatever you want to see. And it took this long to be able to get this project done. Now that it is satisfactorily completed, we're reimbursing that company, construction company, whatever it happens to be, for the funds in this amount as contracted. Because there's a lot of pointing of fingers out there in the social media world. And to go back to the tax, you know, are you voting for the tax again or are you not voting for the tax again? Everybody that's got two brain cells to rub against one another knows that we need the tax because there's no other funding source. There are those out there that don't have that. And so for those guys, gals, whoever it happens to be, they need to be made aware of every project that was put forth, every project that was completed, what the cost of it was, what the benefit of it was. And a social media blast for two straight weeks on everybody's feed is a great way to allocate some funds if it needs to be funded so that everybody in Brevard County, just put a geofence around it, and everybody in Brevard County knows, hey, we just spent $30 million to clean up the lagoon in this particular area. These are the benefits, and there is no funny business going on with this funding because there's a lot of, you know, allegations about funny business and people getting paid off. And you guys, I've actually seen posts where it was like, you guys are all getting paid from the Indian River Lagoon tax fund under the table. And, you know, I'm sure that's not happening, but those allegations are out there. And it's when somebody throws that against the wall and even a little bit of that sticks, it all of a sudden multiplies and spreads like wildfire. And so there's got to be a way to combat that. And then the third thing I would like to see is I would like to see whenever a project is being implemented, I would like to see some notification to the people in the area that that project is being done saying, hey, look, we have a dredging project going on. We have a mangrove replanting project. We have a whatever the project going on right here in your backyard to help you and to help this lagoon system because, I mean, can I just do a little poll real quick? How many people have lived here less than 10 years? Okay, good. That's a low number. That's a lot lower than what I thought it was going to be. Okay. Well, I can tell you that we're sitting on the third floor of this building, and if you look out to the west, there's a land of beige out there. Cookie cutter houses, as far as you can see. Nobody moved to Brevard County because that little beige house was just the perfect shade of beige, and it was just the perfect shape. They didn't move here for that. That's where you reside, but that's not why you moved here. You moved to this county because of the waterways, because of the flora and fauna, how beautiful this place is. Our beaches, our intercoastal areas, even our freshwater areas. That's why you moved here because this place is a beautiful place to live, and I don't care how much beige they put out there. It doesn't make it any better. So I would say that whenever there's a project going on in an area that is going to be directly impacted like, let's say, Sykes Creek, let there be a notice, whether it's a social media notice, whether it's a mailer, whether it's a something, to let everybody know, hey, we're spending this amount of money in your backyard to make this a better place for you to live. So those are the three things I'd really like to see. Deb, go ahead. Gentlemen, I really appreciate having your front row seat perspective on things that I think are very powerful statements, very powerful testimony about the good things this program is doing. So thank you for that. And one of my questions is, how do we get hold of that video so that we can share it more widely? And being in the education and advocacy lane of the Oversight Committee, I can tell you that the complexity of getting messages to audiences is just as difficult as the complexity of the program that we're doing here. But there's a lot of work going on, and we'd love to support getting your message out, because I think it's very important. The question I have for you, I really appreciate you pointing out the symbiotic relationships of the many different kinds of projects that we do in the program, because it's not just one thing. One thing didn't get us here, and it didn't happen overnight, didn't get fixed overnight. But I keep coming back to a presentation that we heard earlier this year about our hungry dolphin populations in the river. And so I want to ask you, I'm not, and maybe this is a question for Aaron too, is there anything we should be thinking about in terms of further accelerating that natural recovery that we're seeing out there? It makes me want to, you know, it makes me want to throw fish out for my dolphin buddies that come around my house. Any thoughts you guys have there from what you see when you're out there every day? Yeah, and honestly, that's where a dolphin's an apex predator. Flat out, it's the apex predator of the lagoon. And it's when you take the base away, eventually it filters to the top. There's just no way around that. And the idea that, you know, like they did with the manatees at the St. John Power Plant, a stopgap to try to get them through those couple of winters when they were emaciated and were throwing, you know, heads of lettuce in the water and whatnot, what they were doing. Not that things of that nature are a bad idea, but the way to really truly fix hungry dolphins is to fix the habitat underneath the hungry dolphin and to keep plugging away at making sure that we are doing all we can to fix that habitat, that underlying habitat, that base of the pyramid, so that the top of the pyramid is a happy creature. And, you know, whether that is, you know, stocking forage fish or whatever or just staying the course in what we're seeing, we're seeing transitions out there that have happened over the last 10 years, specifically in the last three to four years. And that is been born out in, uh, and not just, you know, the shellfish recruitment, stuff like that, but, uh, the expansion of the grass beds and things of that nature. Um, and, and what a lot of people might not realize is, uh, because it's great to see, I, I, I, I forget who I was talking to for the first couple of months of kind of like real seagrasses that had popped back up. How many times I stopped my boat and said, excuse me, folks, I'm going to get out real quick, literally took my shoes off and got and walked in the grass. Cause I grew up waiting on grass flats with seagrass in between my toes, what it was, um, you know, but a lot of people don't realize just because these grass beds have come back. Um, it's like, if you take a, your, your yard and you built a brand new house and it's dirt and you throw a bunch of sod down, you don't have a yard. You have saw it, you have a yard in three or four years from now when all the little critters that live in that yard, all the other, all the other things that, that, uh, inhabit that habitat, which is your grass, which is not the best habitat to have in your yard, but it is a habitat. Um, so, uh, as we move further down the road of, of hopeful recovery, um, you know, I personally feel that, that, that we would definitely be backed up with those apex predators feeling more comfortable and being more comfortable. Um, I don't know if like, like feeding dolphins, it would be a good idea as much as it, as much as it would feel good. Um, they already, they already follow us around enough trying to steal all the fish we catch. Uh, so that might just make it a touch bit worse. Um, but, uh, you know, really the, the, the bottom line is you fix the base of the pyramid and everything is built off of that. So that's kind of the, the, the bottom. Yeah. The, the dolphins are our arch nemesis as a fishing guide. They, they really are. My customers love to see them. I love to see them because I know that where they are, there's fish. And that's the problem over the last 10 years is that I'm going to the same mangrove or the same dock as they're going to, because they know that's where the fish are. And I know where that's where the fish are. So it's a, it's a game of beat the dolphin to the spot, because as soon as you get a fish or two hooked up, they can hear it from, I don't even know how they hear it, but they hear it from miles away. It seems like, and they come racing to that trout that's splashing on the top of the water or that baby tarpon that jumps three or four times. I mean, they come racing to your boat. So like Alex was saying, if we can expand the areas where there is a good fish availability, that'll keep them from concentrating on the ones that we're currently both concentrating on. Thank you. And I just want to report that in the area of the river where I live, it's been a long time since I caught a trout and I gave it back to the dolphin that was chasing it too. But we bought our home here in 2013. And we used to have, at certain times of the year, just mats of mullet around our dock at certain times of the year. And I walked out, I haven't seen that since we, I haven't seen that for a very long time, until this summer. And last weekend I walked out. And now I walk out every day because they're back. And we're in a very difficult part of the river. We're just north of Mathers Bridge in the Banana. There's still a lot of work to be done, but even the work that has been done is starting to show results where I am. So I'm hopeful like you. Your predecessors laid the groundwork and you guys are continuing to run with it. And we as fishing guides and outdoor personalities, if you will, are thankful for what you all do every single day. There's one thing, and I've mentioned this to Mr. DeFreeze, and I think I mentioned it to Virginia as well. There's one thing that I think could potentially be a very beneficial project for the lagoon system. And it's going to take a lot of money, but we're spending a lot of money each year. So this would be something that I would like to see maybe you guys take the reins and grab a hold of this and see if this is a feasible project or not. We're dredging, we're doing septic to sewer, we're doing all of the things that are taking, hopefully, taking nitrogen and phosphorus and the pollutants out of the lagoon system. The one thing that we are not addressing, and we've said it multiple times now, is the salinity levels. Is there a way to get the salinity levels higher on demand? And this is my thought project on this. Everybody's screaming for an inlet. And we all know anybody, once again, let's go back to the two brain cells thing. Anybody that's got more than two of those to rub together knows that an inlet really isn't necessarily the solution. Breaches, historically, like Blair had mentioned in Mesquite Lagoon, breaches are what this lagoon was founded on. Can we create an artificial breach scenario? And what I mean by that is we have pumps in the Pine Island, Alex grew up on Pine Island, we have pumps in the Pine Island area that can move a million gallons of water a day, 24 and 36 inch pipes, okay, that are pumping fresh water out of their subdivisions into a holding cell, into a holding pond that then filters into the lagoon system. Can we do the same thing with seawater? Because the breach in the Mosquito Lagoon took the parts per thousand from 14 parts per thousand, which is unsustainable for seagrass, to 37 parts per thousand after that hurricane. And the seagrass went absolutely wild. It grew like crazy. Can we set up pumps throughout the county system in the Mosquito Lagoon, the Banana River, and potentially getting them over to the Indian River? I don't know if that's a feasible thing or not, but at least into the Banana River side where we can monitor via those orca sites that are currently there that already tell about the water level, the water chlorophyll and different things, the algae levels that are there. Can we set up either, in conjunction with that, on those same systems, a salinity level or a salinity monitor that would then say, okay, we know that seagrass needs this amount of salinity to grow. And it's dropping below that because now we've got freshwater influx coming in. It's now down below what the seagrass and the clams and the oysters can sustain. There's an automatic signal, rig it up through Bluetooth. I don't know, there's somebody in here that's got to be smart enough, or we can find an engineer smart enough to make this happen. It signals to the pump, turn on and start pumping. When the salinity level gets above the threshold, two, three, four points, it shuts it back off. So that we have a better idea and a more consistent salinity within the lagoon system. And then you'd also have to do one more caveat, because I know that any time that you're pumping water into the lagoon system, you're going to have to look at, well, two things. One, water level. If you were here in 2004 when we had three back-to-back hurricanes, you know that there was a lot of water in the lagoon system, and a lot of people's houses got flooded. We have to make sure that there's a safeguard in place, that it can only pump in the event that the water is safe to pump in, and the water level in the lagoon system isn't already too high and could potentially create a flooding scenario for some housing developments. And two, a monitor on the ocean end of it to make sure that whatever's in the water at that time is safe to pump into the lagoon system. We don't want to pump, as an example, the red algaes. We don't want red tide pumped into the lagoon, because then you can't really get it back out. Okay? So we're talking about engineering something, and I know there's – we're only three years away from Skynet taking over. So – three and a half years. So in 30-30, you saw the movie. You watched Terminator. Okay? We got three years to make this right. In the next couple of years, if this referendum that's on the tax ballot gets reallocated, everybody says, okay, let's do this tax again. Can we look at opening a new project that would then address salinity directly and be able to manipulate salinity directly? I talked to Dwayne DeVries. He says, you're talking about a $5 million to $6 million project. And I said, well, we're doing a $33 million capping project in Cocoa Beach alone. So $5 million a year, $6 million a year, to me, sounds like a bargain. But I'm a fishing guide, so that's all I know. I'm just going to leave it there. I'm just a fishing guide. I'm not a scientist, and I'm just here to try and throw some ideas that maybe could potentially work if we find the right partners to partner with. Trust me, I got one really quick here, and then I'll be done. One thing I would like to see implemented, especially once we get our water back, because I think with the projects going out there right now, we've got a really good chance of coming back and we get our clams and oysters and fish populations back, is it's recreational waters. I don't see why commercial clamming, commercial oystering, commercial fishing really should be going on in our recreational waters. The clam industry out there has been going great for the past few years as far as the commercial growers grow. Restaurants haven't been slacking and serving clams, so why open it up to recreational clamming or oystering or commercial fishing again once out there? I'll go with buy catch alone from clamming alone. Laura Lee knows this one real well. Back in the heyday of clamming, I'm sure a lot of people don't know what buy catch is, and if you do know what buy catch is, you wouldn't think it would come from clamming, but I literally saw thousands upon thousands of horseshoe crabs that were crushed by clam rakes. Spider crabs crushed by clam rakes. Worms dug up out of the mud from clam rakes. Seagrass dug up by acres from the clam rakes. When I first started guiding back in 92, there was four clammers on the water. When I quit guiding back in 2011, 2012, there was 10,800 and change clammers on the water. That's a lot of rakes tearing up the bottom. So my idea would be recreational waters are for recreational. It's for us. And when you've got the commercial guys out there that absolutely tear it up and take everything, and we call it rape in the river, you know, that's something that needs to be curtailed. That would be my change. I'd like to see once we get it back. Aaron's going to allow me one question. First. I always get the last question in, but we'll let you go. We've got the Applied Ecology report on fishery, and it showed that the Black Drum fishery in particular is recovering. I know often also, Captain Ross, you spoke about that at one time, the Black Drum fishery returning. They love polluted water. Can you talk a little bit about that? Black Drum love polluted water. They can find a lot of dead clams, dead oysters, dead stuff on the bottom that they eat. That's one reason why our Black Drum population increased so much is all the dead stuff that was on the bottom. The other thing is that they don't rely on seagrass like sea trout and redfish do. Sea trout and redfish sleep in the grass, and then they come out of that slumber. They slide up out of the grass and feed on the edge of the sand holes, potholes, things of that nature. They're ambush predators. So think of a leopard or something of that nature versus a lion that's baby out on the, well, can't even use a lion as an example. Think of a leopard being a speckled trout, a lion being a redfish, and the water buffalo being the Black Drum. The water buffalo doesn't predate necessarily. It's not chasing bait fish down. It's not chasing things that move quickly down. They're grazers, and so they can graze shrimp out of the bottom. They can graze the clams, snails, things of that nature. The one thing that the lagoon doesn't seem to have a shortage of is crown conchs. I mean, there's billions of those things out there, and the Black Drum fishery has increased because there are so many of those, and they're so much easier for the Black Drum to now feed on because they don't have to go hunt through the grass to find them. They're just right there on top of the sand or the muck, typically in the sandy areas is where you'll find them. They don't get in the muck as much, and the Black Drum can feed on them very easily, so it's a super easy. It's the low-hanging fruit for the short-legged animal, if you will, and so they have expanded and exploded in population over the past 15 years where the other species, their habitat and type of lifestyle has sort of gone away. I think, too, as you see a decrease in other glory species, redfish, sea trout, those Black Drum that were always there become more apparent, more, hey, there's really not much else. And, you know, it is. It's truly a Black Drum is virtually blind. I mean, it can hardly see. It's got the chin whiskers for a reason. They pin around on the bottom. They feed. They graze. They're not an ambush, attack predator. And when your food just kind of sits there and waits for you to come eat it, it's a little easier to keep a foothold. If anything, maybe not necessarily increased, but the visibility and the amount of interaction with them, because we're interacting with other fish so fewly, maybe even seems as an increase in that fish or fishery. Excellent. Thank you. Go ahead, Kevin. I had a couple questions, but mostly you guys discussed everything and answered it. I just wanted to take a minute to thank you for being here. It's a privilege for Sorrel, for the county, to have you all take your time, especially away from your clients, to come out. So thank you very much. And I just want to make sure everybody is aware of, like, the foundation of these gentlemen, like, really that Sorrel exists. Alex kind of briefly mentioned his hours spent in commission meetings, but I personally became involved with the knowledge that the lagoon was actually as bad as it was over a decade ago at Ron John on the corner. With Alex out there sounding the alarm, making sure. So don't let these guys undersell you when they repeatedly say they're not scientists. They could teach some scientists, definitely, best practices, and it's been brilliant. I've learned so much from you guys already today, which I don't know why I was surprised by that, but I thought I would just hear the same, but you've brought a lot of information and specifics, so I will definitely encourage the committee to really concentrate on your input, your suggestions, your wisdom. You know, it's learned. You guys, you know, we get presentations. They're all nice. We're in a chair. It's great. I'd much rather be out there on the water learning with you guys all the time, which I have a few times, but it's great. So thank you very much for being here. I did want to ask, and maybe we can get a little comment on this. I don't know if the information is available, but you mentioned the forced flush kind of inlet, kind of, I don't recall the exact word you used. Breaches. Breaches. Yeah, the breaches. But the natural breach. We did have one project, and I don't know whatever happened to that, but it was a pilot project, I think through FIT, someone that was looking at pumping some into the lagoon. So they were looking at doing it right at the locks, right where the white pelicans are every year. My concern about that project, which I don't even know what the status ever happened with that, was they were going to pump straight from the port. So that's not going to be a clean source. You're going to have all your oils, and thank you for those head nods and appreciation. So definitely, if that's something that is re-addressed, or if it is a project that does go up for funding or collaboration, even support or just of interest, definitely key that we look at that water source. So just like you said, if it's coming straight out of the ocean, that it's still tested for any type of bloom or anything that's hanging out in that water before we put it intentionally into the lagoon. So that's huge. And I do think that's a project that, again, in the next 10 years, if we're still able to continue this, we'll be able to look at a project like that. So we'll put a pin in that and maybe ask you back for your specifics on that as well, Jim, and the rest of you guys about how would be best from your angler position and what you know intimately with those water sources to make that happen the best way. So excellent. Thank you so much. Really appreciate you all being here for sure. Thank you. Thanks for having us. Yeah. Go ahead. Yeah. Thanks for coming, guys. Going back to kind of connecting some of the stuff I was talking about, Alex, you and I have talked about this some, is thinking back on your history, are there areas in the lagoon that were once super productive hotspots that are not yet productive that you think would be good targets for restoration or specific, say, water quality projects? I'll jump into a few. You know, most or some of them are already being worked on. Obviously, the Thousand Islands is a big area that nosedove hard when the grass went away. And grass is recovering out there pretty substantially. You know, continued focus on that. Honestly, the biggest or some of the biggest issue areas that were productive predominant fisheries that aren't are the more urbanized areas. And a lot of that is direct result of runoff of muck collection and canal of those things. And, you know, we're already trying to take steps to work towards that. But in general specific areas, you know, Thousand Islands is definitely a solid one. You know, as you come down the river, those sections that are kind of in between O'Galley and 192, the stagnation that you get on that western shoreline, definitely in the influence you get from the stormwater because of it being mainland, those areas struggled. Like we were saying, there were areas that were struggling well before everybody knew that the whole area was struggling. Those were areas that were kind of struggling at the get. And those were areas that could use some, you know, direct focus to try to bring that habitat back to bring, you know, the kind of life back to it. You know, an area like Mosquito Lagoon, obviously it's great to have, you know, stuff going. But it's done a pretty good job getting itself kind of rough, you know, getting the key kicked over again and getting itself going. That doesn't mean that no focus needs to be happening there. But there's already places that are grabbing hold and working. So identifying like you're trying to do with the mapping stuff in which, you know, there's other data sets that you could kind of go after, too, in the area. Fishing clubs are a big one. Florida Sport Fishing, I mean, we've talked about Florida Sports Fishing Association. They got 50 years or some odd of catch data that people have been turning in to integrate into those data sets to kind of get a broader perspective of what's happened decades and decades and decades out. But, you know, it's sadly, it's the urbanized areas that are the lagging behind areas. And those are the areas that we need to focus on with the runoff and the muck dredging and the stuff like that. And grasses, you know, I'm sure everybody in this room knows, seagrass is not easy to transplant and grow. So it's unbelievably lucky, unbelievably lucky that we have these seed banks popping off that we have right now. Because without those seed banks, it'd still be a moonscape out there. You know, seagrass is not an easy thing to get going at all in a restoration aspect. In a natural aspect, obviously, it can get itself charged back up pretty quickly. But ensuring that we have the water quality to allow those seed banks to do what they do and to continue growing and augmenting new grass beds and also pushing out more seed is vital. So, you know, just stay in that course on those urbanized areas and the runoff and the stuff that influence into the lagoon. And I know it's not as good of an answer as maybe wanted, but, you know, those are those true spots that are the lag behind spots that we're seeing as recovery is kind of starting to take hold a bit. Those lag behinds, you know, the whole western shoreline of Titusville. There's 50 people in Titusville right now, if you put a post up on any of their pages, that it's screaming at you that the river's trashed, it's never going to come back. I can go out right now and look at it when all they got to do is get in a boat, go directly across the river, and there's acres and acres of seagrass, and the fishing is great. You know, so perspective has a lot to do with it. And the perspective that a lot of people are getting and that is drawing or kind of holding some of that recovery back in those areas is people not realizing that things are actually getting better and looking better. So, you know, why do I need to worry about the fact that I'm spraying everything down with gliophysate and fertilizing every other day? I would say from a focal point, there's two places in particular that I would say really need some priority. One is the Cocoa Village, that downtown Cocoa Village area. I think that that area could really benefit from a muck dredging project and along those causeways actually as well. So just growing up there as a kid, riding my bike down to the river, I mean, we would catch stringers of sheephead off of that old, you know, old pier, that old, the old bridge when it was still open, and we would just drive down. We had a little tiny, basically a little Tupperware thing, and we would just turn rocks, put the crabs that we turned, that we picked off the rocks in the little Tupperware and then catch an entire, you know, stringer full of sheephead. And that's the way, that's when I was 12, 13 years old, that's the way I used to make money. I normally had to replace my front bicycle inner tube because the spines on the sheephead always seemed to pop it because I couldn't keep them to stop swinging on the handlebar. But I couldn't get through, you know, from Point Set, which is now Rosa L. Jones, I couldn't go the length of US-1 to Fist Boulevard on Rosa L. Jones and not sell every single one I had. And so that was, you know, as a kid, that was fantastic that I got to go fishing and then I got some benefit from it in monetary aspect. Obviously, I didn't have a business license, so they're probably going to come after me for taxes. But those were the things I remember. And so back, you know, back in the day, that whole area right there was really fishy and it's just not anymore. So I would say that area of the Rockledge Cocoa Lagoon, it needs to be looked at. The other area that's really, really, I think is underappreciated is the area from Jones' Fish Camp north along what we call Arantua Ditch. And Arantua Ditch is a dredged area that they built the railroad track bed with. They just simply took an excavator and dug it out of the lagoon and threw it up there and then laid some track across it so that the railway could go. But that whole ditch used to be five or six feet deep, and now it's a foot and a half. It is just solid muck, and that muck fluxes whenever we get a heavy wind, and it kills the grass that's trying to grow on that shoreline. That's actually a project area. Yeah. Okay. Oh, okay. And then the third place, I would say, is the Central Canal, Girard Canal, and all of the canals on the west side of Merritt Island, on the Banana River side of Merritt Island. And I think there's already something maybe going on in that area, because I see some kind of project. That's the lift station project. That's going on on the side of the causeway. But I would like to see those canals. Everybody that I talk to that still lives on those canals, it's like now we catch nothing but catfish. And when I was a child, we would go down and take the aluminum boat off my grandfather's Oldsmobile station wagon and put it in at the little park on Milford Point, and then we would fish all of that area, all of those canals, and catch huge trout as a child with my grandfather. And he used to cuss the redfish that were in there because they were bait stealers in his mind. You know, he wanted those trout. But those fish don't really exist there right now because those conditions aren't quite right yet. So I would say that's another area from 520 to 528 west side of the Banana River that needs to be heavily focused on. Everybody's hitting their homeowners. Yeah, Cocoa Beach needs it bad. All the canals. I mean, when I was a kid, you could go anywhere in Cocoa Beach, throw a shrimp on a bobber. I mean, literally anywhere. Throw a shrimp on a bobber and, you know, on a hook and catch a sea trout. You've got to go really hunt your spots these days. So anywhere you can get the muck out, I mean, it would benefit. I'm not sure of the scope of the sand capping project that's going on out there right there. I haven't been privy to looking at the plans and what the end game for that project is. I can tell you that I took the fellows out that won that contract. They contacted me and said, hey, can you drive us around? We need to do some surveying. And I'm like, yeah, sure, what the heck, you know. So I didn't really know what to expect. This is after those canals have been dredged. And this kind of goes back to what I had said earlier about them acting as sumps and the surrounding flats, the detritus and the muck dropping into those sumps. What we found after the muck dredging project had been completed is that the grass started returning to those flats, both north and south side of Thousand Island. But when I went out with these fellows and they had their test probes, we were testing how deep is the muck at this point after the project has been completed. And in some places it was only a foot or two feet, which was pretty – I was like, wow, that's really good, you know, because I know that it used to be your waist or deeper. But some of the areas, and especially the areas that were on the southwest and northwest side of the golf course, that is a huge collection zone for the muck. And if you guys need GPS coordinates, I could give you GPS coordinates for the approximate box on either the southwest or northwest corner. But one of the things that we found there was that the muck was averaging four and five feet in that area. And this is after the dredging project had been completed. In some places, it was over eight feet before we hit hard sand, especially on the northwest corner of that peninsula. And so I would say the sand capping project back behind the high school and that area is probably going to be pretty good. It's going to be a pretty feasible project. I'm not necessarily convinced that on that outside edge that that's necessarily the way to go. Once again, I'm a fisherman, but just the data that I saw with my own eyes, when the fellow is taking a 20-foot pipe and shoving it down into the muck and doesn't hit bottom by the time his shoulder's wet, he's like, I haven't hit hard sand yet. But that tells me that that's an important area to continue that maintenance dredging that Alex and Blair talked about. Continue maintenance in those areas to pull that muck out of there and continue to gather the surrounding muck from the flats and the shallower areas that drops into there, but just leave those as maintenance sumps, if you will. I think that that's really important for helping keep that area, to keep the improvement going on in that area of the lagoon system. Go ahead, Kim. And then Aaron's going to bring it to a close because we've got one other issue to do yet. I just wanted to, Jim, you repeatedly called the lagoon, you keep referring to it as the lagoon system, and I think that's so key. Sometimes we become so compartmentalized, just like you were talking about oysters with seagrass. I know that it's definitely a conversation that has come up, that integrated projects and the symbiotic benefit of those, but really brilliant to just continue to call it a system. So it really, it's not just the water, it's not just what you're looking at, it's the tributaries, it's the canals, it's the after, where do you put things, the drainage, the new development, the beige houses, for sure. So thank you for all of that. And I would love to talk with you more about the capping project. I believe that is funded and already in place, so I don't know if there's any alterations that can be made if the engineering crew had any discoveries out there with the 20-foot levels of muck. But if it's a possibility, that I think is around $40 million, whole price tag for the whole project. If that could be addressed and maybe revisited prior to completion of that, again, I'm not sure at what stage. I know we had our tube go around to show our progress with the capping success of that three inches on there. But definitely, since it's been brought to our attention early in the project, if it's possible, at the very least, to assess future projects, since the sand capping is somewhat of a pilot project for us, to take that information and look at that pre, especially pre-funding, but pre-starting, pre-launching any other capping projects that might come up is very relevant and very important. So thank you for sharing that. Sure thing. Thank you. Thank you. Sure. All right. I want to commend Virginia for putting this together. We've, yeah, we've talked about, we and others have talked about this for quite some time. It's been in the background. But our fishing community, recreational especially, but also commercial, they have a lot of knowledge, a lot more history than most people in this room might have personally. They're on the water every single day in some form, good weather or bad. And so there's a lot of data there that we can be taking advantage of, but also a lot of just general information and awareness that can be taken advantage of from the social media aspects. The video is fantastic. A hundred more of those would be good because they're very compelling. As a scientist, I can, I do, show up at meetings. And there's all kinds of debate about if the science is valid or not. But when a fisherman, a guide who's been fishing for 40 years shows up, there's not those kind of comments. So you guys have a voice. And I think it's great that it's being represented here. So, yeah, I guess the ending thing is we should take advantage of the collaboration and a partnership with the fishing community more than we have and make it a big part of how we operate moving forward. One end that we are talking about, you talked about taking water from the ocean. We're talking about also the other side is putting the water in the St. John's. It belongs in the St. John's and not in the Indian River Lagoon. So there's many of those projects that are occurring along the section that has these creeks. So if you guys could watch those, too, as they mature, Crane Creek was just completed and we're moving through the other creeks, too. So those are important as far as splitting that water and making sure that it goes the right direction, just to let you know. That's fantastic. I was also, I know that the St. John's River Water Management District has done a couple of projects around Turkey Creek and that area as well. But, you know, my mom said it best. She grew up in Cocoa. She was born there in 1946. And she says, nobody used to live west of the railroad track. And I was like, well, why? It's all floodplain. And what we've done is we've drained the floodplain eastward instead of the natural flow that it went from that sand ridge westward. And so if we can make sure that any project, any development project or any project that's currently flowing water eastward through the sand ridge somehow can be addressed, God, that would help so much. Just put it back the way God made it, and it'll fix itself. Thank you. Yeah, if you'd stick around, we're going to open it up for public comment in a minute. We've got one other issue to go, and then maybe the public can also ask questions of you, too, when we have time. So old business, I don't think we have any old business, but we have new business. Morning. All right, so we currently have the Sykes Creek zone-in sewer project under construction. So this is on North Banana River Drive in Merritt Island. And the engineers and contractor has come to us saying one of our future priority areas, which is in pink on the map here, they think now is the opportune time to bring sewer here. So the existing project was building a stub out so that at a future time, we would be able to extend sewer down that street. We weren't ready to do it when it was time to go to construction and bid this project out. But if we were to act now, they'd run the numbers. It would be about $535,000 in engineering, construction, and construction inspections and costs to capture these nine houses. If we were to wait, we would be bringing this as a future project opportunity to be put in the plan. And it would have to, you know, go through the whole design and engineering process. There would also be additional mobilization costs and bidding costs just to bring a contractor out again. So the engineers are recommending we strike now and capture this project. We do have some flexibility in the budget to take on the construction. I listed out some of the budget costs in the agenda item. So we've already asked for a contingency for this project based on how the bid came in. We ended up bidding this project with Sykes Creek M, Milford Point, and Sykes Creek T, Horty Point, to try and realize some efficiencies of scale and have one larger contractor come into town and do these three projects together. We're still seeing some change orders. They've already realized $700,000 in savings over the entirety of the three projects. And so at this time, we have about $946,000 remaining in the budget in flexibility. Again, the estimated additional cost to strike now would be $535,000 for this street. Looking at the cost per pound, the street alone is a bit cheaper, and I think it's because we already have a contractor in place, so the construction cost is less. So that's why it's looking pretty good for cost per pound. If we were to bring it as a future project area, that cost efficiency would not look as attractive. So if you think it's a good idea to move now, we would just look for a motion to permission to give utilities the approval to move forward. That was a little better explanation than it was in what we got. They gave us this recommendation about four hours before the agenda was due. Good, good. Fred, you had something? Yeah. Could you put the map back up for a second? Because when I first saw this, I'd asked if you had a map. I guess you just recently got the map. I asked for the same thing. So the areas to the west of the pink that are the homes that are in the next street along the canal there, would this allow then for there to be some sort of an endpoint that could quickly then bring that group in at some point in the future? They are already on the sewer. Are those pipes up? What's that? They're on sewer. They're already on sewer. So that's the last of the ones. The colored squares are the septic parcels in this area. And everything else in that area is already on sewer? Yes. You were just filling in the gap? Yes. Okay, great. Thanks. Go ahead, John. You said $535,000 for this, and you said it would probably be a fair amount more if you go back. I mean, just looking ballpark with construction, having to bring this all back out and everything, this is going to be a whole lot more. So this is a really considerable cost savings for you to do this right now? Right. Okay. Very good move, I think. Go ahead. And that square, then, if everything else is on sewer, that would complete this whole general area over to it? Correct. Okay. So is it time to make a motion? I move that we go ahead and approve the funding to get the parcel completed. Well, we're going to vote on that, so. I would hope so, John. I know. Okay. I can second that if we're doing that. So that's, okay, okay, so we've had it. Any more discussion? Any more questions? And I should open it up to the public, too, for any questions that the public may have about this project. Yeah, that's $12 million, roughly, for a hundred percent. Come on up and speak. You have to be on the mic. Okay. Ed Wegrift. Just a question, so this total project zone in would be approximately $12 million for a hundred lots? Correct. Okay. Thank you. I would just like to add that I think this should be noted as a really excellent level of coherence between the projects, that you can bring this to us now, and that it's not something we have to come and revisit. I think it's definitely a bonus in general, just management of the project. It's a great job in getting it to us, especially now that we know you only had four hours. And I also brought up the whole thing of vacuum, of the whole system on vacuum, and really all of Merritt Island probably is pretty much that way because of no elevation changes there, and just the success and the maintenance and things like that. But that could be another subject that we could talk about another time. I brought a few slides if you want some quick background. Okay, sure. Yeah, that would be great. Yeah, so what is vacuum? So we're familiar, like the most common sewer type is gravity. That's where you flush a toilet and everything goes downhill from here and out, and you forget about it. Unfortunately, in the areas left over in Merritt Island, part of the challenges of why sewer wasn't brought there in the past is we have a lot of coquina and not much elevation above the water level, meaning when you combine the two issues, and I presented on it not too long ago, the two issues with both coquina and high water levels, you end up trying to dewater the lagoon just to get a 20-foot hole so you can put a sewer pipe in there. Down in Miami, what they do is they actually have divers install the sewer pipes. It's very expensive. Vacuum is fairly expensive, too. But when you don't have to dewater the lagoon, it ends up being a more affordable option. The vacuum does require a vacuum pump station, and there's a seesawed pipe being installed in the road, and it just sucks whenever it senses that the pipes are full. It will suck them clean again. So as far as the home is concerned, it acts like a gravity sewer, but at the right-of-way, there will be a vacuum pit that collects the wastewater from a few homes, and that will be sucked clean periodically from the vacuum pump station. Like I said, there's some cost savings in that we don't have to dig very far. When we're working these old neighborhoods, because we don't have to dig very far, we can have a narrower trench, meaning we're able to maintain access for services, whether it's ambulance, waste management, school buses, and the residents themselves. So that's cheaper in itself. Somewhere like Milford Point, if we were to put gravity, we would need the homeowners to actually give us construction easements in their front lawn. It does require these vacuum pits, and these will be in the right-of-way at the front. There is this air relief valve next to it, kind of basically the same size as the mailbox. And we make them beige. It could be kind of greenish color, too. And so this can only be installed in the right-of-way, so we do need right-of-way access. So for the parts of the county where there's no right-of-way outside of the asphalt, we can't do vacuum. But in these project areas, we're able to. And one of the other things about vacuuming is because of the vacuum suction, it's built more robustly. So every 100 feet that they install, they test, make sure there's no leakage. And what I've heard from other communities around the state is when hurricanes hit, they don't have to worry about these systems because they're built watertight. Go for it. Anthony, do these things work if you have a power failure? They have a generator on site at the vacuum pump station. The actual pits are all pneumatic, so there's no electrical needs there. And then we're also going above and beyond and adding generator hookups, too, so that if we had an elongated power outage and something went wrong with that generator, the county already has a system for bringing in, shipping in multiple mobile generators, and they just cycle them around to keep the whole sewer system running. Thank you. Getting back to a comment that was made by our official folks here, that standing pipe, can you put a sign on it, Project of Sorrel? The homeowners, this is one of those things where change is hard. So this is new in everyone's neighborhood. So most people don't want attention brought to it. I think, you know, as time goes on, it's just like, it would be like AT&T bringing in fiber and putting new little things up. People get used to it, but at first, people don't want to bring attention. Thank you. Go ahead, Kim. What did you call the pipe, a valve? It's like an air relief valve. So because it's a suction-based system, it's going to suck this pit dry, and that's to prevent any suction from going into the house. Okay. Is there an odor associated with that? Is that something that would happen randomly, on occasion, daily? It'll happen whenever that valve fills up. So is it exporting air or intaking air? No, it's just intaking. Okay. It is intaking. And then at the vacuum pump station, there's active odor control systems put at those stations. So anything that would be released out of there, because it's sucking the air there, anything that releases would go through an odor filtration system. Okay, perfect. And the extension that we're discussing today, that's not a different type of project. It's just the same that's already existing in that, just in addition to it? Yeah, we're already planning a stub out there. So it's just the contractor says they can quickly just keep extending the sewer line up there. Okay, so same engineering concept, just additional homes? Yep, just another run. Good. I really wanted you all to understand, you know, what was going into these systems here. Thank you very much. And since we covered a new topic, I'll open it up again for the public if they have any questions at all. So I think we're ready for a vote. We've had a motion and a second. All in favor? Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Motion passes. Good job, Anthony. Thank you. We didn't clap for our panel either. We are to be finished and open it up for general public comments. I got one from Craig Wallace. Come on up, Craig. Hey there. So I'll make this kind of brief. As we know, we're in our campaign season. And this is more for not for the people in this room, but for anybody hopefully watching out there. This program, as you've heard today, is probably one of the most successful programs. And over the last 10 years, the improvements we've seen have been phenomenal. But, right, we are not done yet. So we have a lot more work to do. Maybe 10 years we'll do it. Maybe it won't. But we've got to at least get these 10 years going. And to quote Dwayne DeFries, you know, if we don't do this project, it freezes. If we don't continue the sorrel program, it freezes everything. It freezes the contractors. Even things that are in process, it just slows things down and people will start to walk away, including staff. So, anyway, to the public out there, we're at a critical tipping point. You know, we've done some fantastic things. We've finally got some recognized improvements in the lagoon with the clean water and the seagrass growing back. But, you know, that's just getting started. If we'd stop today or even a couple years from today, if we stopped, then all that stuff that we've done is just going to come back to us. You know, it's not self-supporting at this point in time. So that's my background story. But if anybody happened to open up the newspaper, Florida Today, here was the front page story, which is basically one of our guys out in the street with their sign waving. We've been doing this at street corners, trying to get the awareness level up. We have an event, and Virginia probably already covered it, but we have an event on Saturday. We really need some volunteers out there. Please, anybody out there, come on, join us. This is basically a press event to try to get a picture of a whole lot of people strung out across the Max Brewer Bridge. So it's at Gathering Point is at Sandpoint Park, which is at the base of the Max Brewer Causeway in Titusville at 8 a.m. tomorrow morning. So come on out, wear your, you know, if you've got any lagoon regalia, wear it. We're going to have signs there, and we'd like to create a ruckus and have it all photographed and continue the press, because we've got to get the press involved in this in order to make an impression. As you guys have said, the message is just not getting out there. So we need a lot of help. And so we've got events planned every weekend for basically until November 3rd. So please join us, and we'll get healthlagoon.org is our website. Go to the events page, and that's got a list of all the events that we're doing. Please try to attend those events. Come out and bring your neighbors, bring your friends, family, whatever. And thanks for listening. Thanks, Craig. Open it up for public comments if anybody has questions to our panel or questions in general. One quick comment. This gentleman, let me get his name. What he said about the dredging in the canal front communities, which I happen to live in one, and folks here know, excuse me, for a long time how I've tried to advocate for dredging in our area. It's very much the case that the canals were dug to a depth deeper than the surrounding waters. Our canals were dug to about nine foot depth. The surrounding waters are two to three feet deep. The canals are starting to fill up. Now, it's kind of ironic that one of the criticisms a lot of times of the Sorrel program is that you're just dredging. This is only to benefit wealthy waterfront homeowners. You can argue about what wealthy is. But there's an old joke, I guess, why do people rob banks? Sorry. Why do people rob banks? And the answer is, well, that's where the money is. So why do you dredge the canals? Well, it's because that's where the muck is. I kind of fear that as our canals get filled up the rest of the way, they're going to overtop that additional depth. And that muck is going to go out and cover the surrounding waters. And it's going to just create a bigger mess. To your point, though, about having, like, a commission or the same way we maintain our roads, why do we not maintain what's really kind of like infrastructure? Why, you know, we shouldn't have to be groveling for half-cent sales taxes and, you know, just handling this on such a limited basis. It should be an ongoing program to do the necessary maintenance on what is infrastructure of those waterways. And, frankly, I think, rather than assessing the general population, it should be assessed to the waterfront property owners. I know that wouldn't be, maybe it wouldn't be popular with the waterfront property owners, but it actually would probably be a lot easier to sell on a general ballot initiative that you're going to stick it to, you're going to stick it to the man, you know, instead of everybody in general. Anyway, just a couple of thoughts there to do with it as you please. I look at it like, you know, you don't live in your house and not clean it. It's basically housekeeping. We just need a housekeeping crew for various areas of the lagoon that tend to get dirtier than other areas. And I think maintenance, especially in those deeper sections, is critical because it is going to keep it from spilling out back into the flats where the grass is trying to grow and the fish are trying to live. So, yes, one way or another we need to maintain funding for that sort of a project. I know we do get, you do get a lot of pushback of, you know, you guys are just dredging it so you guys can get their big boats in and out of the canals. And differentiating between maintenance dredging and channel dredging for access I think would be a good thing. Because actually an area we're talking about right now with the sewer, the Girard area and Central Canal is getting ready to be dredged in the mouths of them, which had nothing to do with the tax, nothing to do with anything. That's the Inland Navigation District, or I'm not exactly sure who is running it, doing maintenance dredging because those canals are actually closing at the mouth of them. You know, differentiating between, hey, this is dredging because these canals need to still be accessed for all these people with these rich people with the houses. And really letting people, and this is just an off-the-cuff remark, I really don't understand how it's hard to grasp the concept of all of our stuff goes, it flows, and it goes to the low spot. And a lot of people still have a hard time understanding that a canal that was nine foot deep when it was dredged out in the 50s or 60s or 70s is now three and a half or four foot deep because it's got five foot of muck sitting at the bottom of it. It's all of our stuff. But getting that differentiation, and like you said, maybe it is a thing of there's a surtax on your, not that people want another tax on their house or whatever. But, you know, you're maybe not necessarily singling out a waterfront homeowner, but if you were to, and God forbid we don't actually pass this tax coming, you know, re-coming up, and these funds start pulling back and drawing back, you know, maybe ownership of your watershed is a situation. So, like my neighborhood, I live in Hampton Homes, which is in Merritt Island. We, I, you can dig in my yard, it's that much dirt, and the rest is dredge. It's all dredge fill. The whole, my whole entire neighborhood was built on dredge fill, period. The whole thing. All of our streets all dump right back into the canal where they got all the dredge fill. You know, not that I need more taxes on me, I'm a fisherman, but to take ownership of your watershed. And the watershed was, at one time, a mangrove swamp. Well, now the watershed is a neighborhood. Well, that's your neighborhood, and that's your watershed. So, you know, maybe not a direct, a direct, the guy that lives on the water, but, hey, you guys live in this, and it's, and this has to be maintained. Ownership of it, you know, could, could, I guess, help sell the idea that we got to do this nonstop, because we do have to do it nonstop, so. Thank you. For two. Alex, I know you've been pushing for that the whole 10 years, so don't get tired of it, because I think eventually, especially once this funds are in place again, it is a concept that we should look at. I love, I haven't heard you actually say division of dredging for Brevard County yet, but that's the winner. It's got a name. Let's go for it. So, you know, we'll circle back after the first of the year and really see if that's a concept. You know, someone out there that's an entrepreneur, a capitalist, an engineer, they can put this together, and they can come in, and they can invest their time and energy to put this together. So, I think it's definitely worth repeating, and thank you for bringing it out again, but it's definitely maintenance. And I think you're, can you tell us, north to south and back again? I know there's that one saying, you always say that, just for that constant maintenance. Yeah, yeah. The whole to go. Take them up north, let them go south, and then bring their rear end right back up north when they're done at the last canal down at the end of the county. Yeah, absolutely. Constant rotation. And my wife will attest to it. I'm a little bit too ignorant to give up. So, I'll be here fighting for it. And there's another thing I said on the dais, and I've looked at every one of those, and I believe Kurt was actually in the room, that if we weren't willing to put, to dedicate decades, not decades of work and billions of dollars, then you don't have a reason to even be sitting in the seat, because that's what it's going to take to even get close to it. And that was with my naivete of 10 years ago. So, I'll double down on that statement. It's not going to be decades. It's going to be the rest of the time that we exist in this county. We're going to be dealing with maintaining this lagoon so it doesn't go sideways again, in all hopes we can continue to keep it from going sideways again. If you look at Chesapeake, if you look at all these other areas that have actually had recovery, it's an ongoing, continuous program that has been going on and going on and going on and going on and going on, and we'll have to continue going on. Definitely. Thank you. Can I let you comment? Sure. I remember, and I think that everybody needs to understand that it will be an ongoing process because we are so unique. If you talk to any of the other national estuary programs around the country, nobody has the unique situation that we have. We have an enclosed body, and it doesn't have natural flow. And when you've added all the people that we've added in the last 30 years to this county and all the building that's taken place along the lagoon, it's going to be a constant maintenance problem. And call it what it is. It's a problem. And it's not just going to cure itself. It's not going to go away. So I think that's one of the things that people have to understand that are in the community and especially the newcomers, that we're charged with maintaining this body of water. And it means so much to the community. People need to understand that. It should be every citizen of Brevard County's duty to help maintain the lagoon. Because like I said, you didn't move here for the beige house. I'll put that over there. Thank you. Right? Thank you. Yeah, we're now to the point of committee comments. And Aaron would like to just kind of bring it to a close here. Yeah, it's on the fishing theme. So as everybody's talked about a lot over the recent months, especially today, the recovery of seagrass in a lot of areas, not everywhere. But what I'm also seeing on the water now is a problem that other areas with seagrass, Charlotte Harbor, Florida Keys have been having for a while, Homasasa, propeller scarring from the seagrass and also some scarring from anchoring. So there's been a lot of work that Brevard County has put into getting the seagrass to come back. I think we need to add to our work list protection of the seagrass. So I'm not sure if sorrel funds are appropriate or if it's more of a collaboration with other entities, but new signage would be fantastic. For example, at Sebastian Inlet, those interior bars, old signs, I mean, they haven't been relevant for 15 years now. And they're not relevant now where the seagrass is coming back. And so I think new signage there and other places would be fantastic as a way to protect the seagrass, which is just as important moving forward as what we've been doing so far for restoration. For sure. Thank you. I'm not sure how that fits in Virginia, the to-do list. That was, I actually worked on the Sebastian Inlet project, and the biggest problem was that people said, you know, we get to the point of sign pollution almost, and that people, you know, there's so many signs out there that they don't read them anymore. So that's a big problem. But establishing those channels and signing those channels has been critically important to maintaining those seagrass beds around the inlet. So we can- Correct. We've said a lot of signs is out of date now. The seagrass has shifted. The one that's become kind of the party bar, people are, some people don't want to touch the seagrass if they're anchoring elsewhere. But I noticed this past weekend, people are starting to anchor in the seagrass. They're starting to see some holes, so, and a lot of people just don't know, so, yeah. We can talk to the tax district and see what they're- Okay. For sure. I'm sorry, couldn't you? We can talk to the Sebastian Inlet tax district staff and see what they have in mind, and- I've been bugging them already about fixing the signs that are not functioning anymore, so- But there are other areas that seem to be out of the lagoon, they're starting to see. All right. Yeah. Can I speak a comment on that? Sure. I was fishing the southern end of Mosquito Lagoon a couple weekends ago, and watched a boat. I mean, I had my GoPro, so I couldn't get it too far away, just hauling through the shallowest thing I've ever seen, and I said, what are they doing over there? You could see they kept getting stuck. They were pulling up crab traps. They were working that area. Oh, jeez. And I couldn't- I mean, they must have made six or seven stops. I was seeing smoke come off the motors as they went through this shallow area, so it's something I think we really got to look at, because that was just the wildest thing I'd seen in a long time. I would like to throw my hat in the ring here. I think FWC does a lot of that signage, as far as the manatee signage and stuff like that goes. They could take the money that they're spraying glyphosate on all of our freshwater areas. Yes, sir. And reassess that to updating the signage and putting law enforcement actually in boats on the water instead of sitting in their truck at the boat ramp in the air conditioning, and they could do a lot of good, would be my comment on that. I don't know how to comment on that. I won't, Bob. We'll go next time. Okay. Yeah. Thank you, Jim. Any other comments from the committee? Yeah, go ahead, Laura Lee. I just want to clarify something that Captain Wiggins said about the commercial clamors. I agree with him. We don't want 10,000 wild harvest clamors out there digging up the sea grass and killing horseshoe crabs again. But I don't think you meant to include the commercial aquaculture clam growers in that category, did you? No, I actually said that the commercial industry is actually supplying everybody out there. The commercial clam growers are supplying everybody that's been with clams. So there's no need to go out there and open up recreational areas anymore for commercial harvest. Okay, thank you. All that's going to do is drive the price down for your commercial growers anyway. Yeah. So, and my comment is that, you know, we need to consider the Indian River Lagoon. It's never going to be wild and free the way it was when we were all kids growing up on it. But we need to think of it as, because of the growth that's occurred around it, we've created a gigantic aquarium. And it's full of life. It's full of fish. We have these fantastic megafauna creatures in it, the manatees and the dolphins, and it's a fabulous thing. But just like an aquarium, it's always going to have to be managed. You have to manage your aquarium or else the water gets cloudy and the fish die. Well, the same thing with the Indian River. Just think of it as a gigantic aquarium. That's a good amount. Thank you. That's an excellent amount. Good. Thank you. Anybody else? Anybody a motion? I'm going to close it down. We got a motion and a second? I'll second. All in favor? All right. All right. Good job. 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