LOCAL

Gainesville to pitch in $2.7M for plan to shift Black Creek water to local lakes

Jack Prator
Special to The Sun

Gainesville city leaders voted to have taxpayers pitch in on a recovery plan for a local lake system.

Lakes Brooklyn and Geneva are in recovery, meaning that the water flow is not strong enough to support its ecosystem. Pumping water out of nearby aquifers is partly to blame for this harm, and is a practice GRU routinely engages in.

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To combat this decline, the St. Johns River Water Management District approved a $43.3 million recovery project which involves diverting 10 million gallons a day from Black Creek to the endangered lakes. The diversion will occur only during periods of high water flow.

Middleburg's Black Creek, which water management officials hope to use to recharge the Floridan aquifer, which supplies much of the state's drinking water.

The project calls for using Black Creek as an alternative water supply to meet the region’s future water needs by helping replenish the Floridan aquifer, the state’s main water source. It is the first attempt in Northeast Florida to use water from a creek or river to recharge the aquifer.

A major tributary of the St. Johns River, the 13-mile long creek is split into north and south prongs that merge in Clay County's Middleburg.

The water board also created a new minimum flow and level for the lakes. MFLs set “the limit at which further withdrawals would be significantly harmful to the water resources or the ecology of the area,” according to Florida law.

Tuesday night, the city commission committed $2.71 million to the project.

Gainesville Mayor Lauren Poe said the amount is the result of negotiating down to nearly half the water board's initial request.

“We just want to make sure when there are multiple responsible parties that our part of the solution is truly representative of our impact,” he said.

Earlier this month, the Gainesville utility advisory board voted to advise the commission to lend a hand.

“We were always happy to participate,” Poe said. “We know that it's a priority and a really, really big deal.”

The city has two years to pay for its share of the project, and Poe expects the money to come from GRU’s wastewater management budget.