'What would you like to see happen with the Rodman Reservoir?', agency asks public

A state agency is seeking public input on the future of the Rodman Reservoir and the dam that has blocked the St. Johns River’s largest tributary for half a century.

“What would you like to see happen with the Rodman Reservoir and Kirkpatrick Dam moving forward?” asks a survey the St. Johns River Water Management District posted online last week, renewing an old debate over whether to remove the dam southwest of Palatka that blocks the Ocklawaha River.

An online portal for the survey will stay open until Oct. 22, although it’s not clear that anything will change after that.

While environmental groups have lobbied for decades to remove at least part of the dam, a management district spokeswoman said the new question is just an attempt to gauge public sentiment.  

“It’s an effort to gather current feedback and comment before it might [be] needed sometime down the road. No timetables or triggers,” spokeswoman Nancy Rubin said by email.

Just the same, dam-removal advocates have been pleading for their supporters to answer the management district, seeing it as a real chance to be heard by government.

“This may be our last great opportunity to restore this riverway for people and wildlife while fortifying the 100-mile St. Johns River estuary from Welaka to Palatka to Jacksonville,” the St. Johns Riverkeeper organization wrote in a blog post that urged people to support breaching the dam.

Riverkeeper Lisa Rinaman has said for years that a free-flowing Ocklawaha would supply fresh water that’s needed to offset rising salinity in parts of the St. Johns nearer to where it meets the ocean at Mayport.

But Putnam County Commission Chairman Larry Harvey, executive director of the nonprofit Save Rodman Reservoir Inc., said the freshwater flush would end when the 21 billion gallons of water backed up at Rodman emptied and the Ocklawaha resumed the shape it had before it was dammed in the 1960s.

The group celebrates the reservoir, telling visitors to its website that “Rodman must be saved from the small but highly vocal minority that want it destroyed. The ecosystem supports many endangered plants and animals and has become a fisherman’s paradise.”

However, critics have argued the aging dam will need continuing maintenance to avoid failing, potentially threatening nearby properties. A lawyer for the group Florida Defenders of the Environment said last year that records from Florida’s Department of Environmental Protection showed it was “subject to catastrophic failure” that could affect hundreds of properties.

Harvey said he’s also encouraging reservoir supporters to share their views with the management district, but hasn’t raised the subject at commission meetings. The survey should happen outside of politics, he said.

Harvey said he appreciated the management district asking for input from everyone. He contrasted that with discussions about the dam that Jacksonville government and business leaders held with Rinaman in early 2015, before approaching people in his county, and said he was glad everyone could be heard at once.

The survey asks people what they consider the most important information supporting their choice for the dam, their concerns if that choice doesn’t happen and whether they could support some sort of compromise.

Saying the management district is "collecting feedback from local community members and stakeholders," the survey also asks people what county they live in, whether they've ever visited the dam or reservoir and whether they own or work for a business that relies on the dam or reservoir.