Water Quality
Clean water is our health, our economy, and our home.
The cheapest water treatment plant in Lee County is a wetland nobody paved.
Wetlands filter runoff for free, before it gets to the river or the beaches. Land left alone doesn't need an engineered stormwater system, which means there's nothing to build, nothing to maintain, and nothing to fail in the middle of a storm. That's what Conservation 20/20 buys, and it's why voters have backed it overwhelmingly twice. The Board has been letting the fund run down anyway.
It's also how you fight red tide. Those blooms aren't just bad luck that drifts in from offshore. They're fed by what we wash into the water: fertilizer, stormwater, failing septic, and the releases that come down the Caloosahatchee from Lake Okeechobee. The more of that we send into the estuary, the worse it gets, and when the water turns, the tourists leave and the property values on the water go with them.
The underlying problem is a loop, and it's the thing I'd most want people to understand. The more we pave, the more water we have to pump. The more we pump, the saltier the water gets, and the more expensive it is to treat. Cape Coral is already running reverse osmosis on brackish water because the easy groundwater is gone. That shows up on your utility bill. And the land we keep rezoning and paving is the same land that used to put the water back.
So we protect what recharges the aquifer, and we finish converting septic to sewer where it matters most for the river. Neither one is exciting. Both are cheaper than the alternative, and the alternative is what we're currently choosing.