The Lake Placid Town Council, located inland of Sarasota, Florida, will be voting on the construction of a new wastewater treatment plant.
The vote of building an advanced wastewater treatment plant is to decide if Poole & Kent Company of Tampa gets the go ahead to begin construction.
The new 1 million gallon-a-day (GPD) plant will be built where the existing plant is. The new plant is part of a project that will transition nearby homes onto a modernized sewage collection system.
The town is planning on going from a septic system to a sewer system. This is part of a larger statewide plan that will prevent nutrients and contaminants from running into freshwater sources. Nutrient rich water can result in harmful algae blooms (HABs), and contaminants like nitrogen and phosphorous can wreak havoc on local lakes.
Communities across Florida, like Lake Placid, are making efforts to transition homes off septic systems under the guidance of the Florida Department of Environment Protection (DEP).
The DEP awarded a $40 million grant to the town in 2021. Once the new treatment plant was designed, multiple construction companies began submitting bids. The lowest, submitted by Poole & Kent, came in at $34.8 million.
The new plant wasn’t met without criticism, however. In late 2023 residents of Lake Placid met at a council meeting and voiced feedback. The debate was between installing a gravity fed system, or a low-pressure system, which requires pumps and more maintenance to flow wastewater.
Some residents wanted to halt the project altogether, stating that the low-pressure system should be redesigned into a gravity fed system.
There was also debate on whether the new facility should be built on existing ground or moved elsewhere. However, the cost of getting a new site engineered and all the equipment moved would quickly increase expenses . The existing site is already engineered for 1 million GPD and has been approved under DEP laws and regulations.
