West Palm Beach, FL - The South Florida Water Management District (SFWMD) Governing Board last week approved an update to its Lower West Coast Water Supply Plan. The plan is critical to ensuring enough water is available for the needs of residents, agriculture, businesses and the environment in a region that includes Lee, most of Collier and portions of Charlotte, Hendry, Glades and Monroe counties.
"This region is one of the fastest growing areas of the entire nation," said SFWMD Governing Board Member Rick Barber. "Updating this Water Supply Plan at such a crucial time is imperative for the future of the Lower West Coast. I am appreciative of our staff's hard work to develop this recommendation based on science, as well as feedback from key stakeholders."
Ensuring adequate water supply for all its 8.1 million residents and the environment is one of SFWMD's core missions. Every five years the District updates water supply plans for five different regions: the Lower West Coast, Upper Kissimmee River, Lower Kissimmee River, Upper East Coast and Lower East Coast. The Lower West Coast Water Supply Plan, created in 1994 and last updated in 2012, lists all of the utility, restoration and other projects necessary to provide adequate public, agricultural and environmental water supply in this region for all use categories.
The Cape Coral-Fort Myers Metropolitan Statistical Area was the fifth-fastest growing area in the United States in 2016, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The Naples-Immokalee Metropolitan Statistical Area was the eighth-fastest growing area. The updated water supply plan considers these numbers while taking into account the nearly 60 percent increase in population by 2040 to roughly 1.6 million people in the region. Water demands are estimated to increase 25 percent to roughly 1.2 billion gallons of water needed per day.
Several new projects being built by local utilities to provide more public water were added to the plan in this latest update, which was developed in coordination with local stakeholders. To provide water necessary for the environment, crucial restoration projects currently underway were also added to the plan, such as the C-43 Reservoir, a 170,000 acre-foot reservoir in Hendry County that is expected to be completed by 2021. The C-43 Reservoir will hold excess water from the Caloosahatchee River to reduce damaging discharges to its estuary during wetter periods, while providing freshwater flows to help balance salinity levels during drier periods.
