BY DAN HILDEBRAN
Save Our Lakes celebrated the imminent completion of the Black Creek Water Resource Development Project on October 25 with a cookout, concert, and ski show at Camp Immokalee.
The project is designed to recharge the Upper Floridan aquifer and raise water levels in Lakes Brooklyn and Geneva. It is part of the lakes’ recovery plan, which helps the district comply with regulatory minimum flows and levels.
The project consists of three components: an intake and pump stations at the intersection of State Road 16 and the creek’s south fork, 17.2-miles of pipeline along State Roads 21 and 16 and a treatment facility on Camp Blanding between Lake Magnolia and Lake Brooklyn.
SOLO President Vivian Katz James said the project’s origins occurred in 2016, when then Keystone Heights City Manager Scott Kornegay organized a water summit at city hall.
“There were a lot of good people at those tables from two water districts and a couple of counties,” she recalled. “Senator (Rob) Bradley was there. Representative Bobby Payne was there, as were several others. Those are the folks that I think brought the Black Creek Project to fruition.”
Katz-James added that the 17-mile pipeline is within a quarter mile of completion.
During his remarks, Kornegay also referenced the 2016 water summit and said Bradley took the decades-old problem of dropping water levels in the lakes on his shoulders.
“It was that day that Senator Bradley took the ball and ran with it,” Kornegay said. “When he took the ball, it was on the one-yard line and we drove it 99 yards, and we scored the touchdown.”
“We went for it on fourth-and-long a couple of times,” the current County Manager for Bradford County added, “and obviously we converted.”
Kornegay also credited Katz-James for the effort’s success, describing her as the bulldog of the group.
Bradley recalled a sea of red shirts in his office when he invited the president of the Florida Senate to listen to SOLO members explain the project. Save Our Lakes members often wear the red polos during government meetings.
The former state senator, who now chairs the St. Johns River Water Management District, said he and the project’s supporters had to lobby for legislative appropriations from 2017 through 2020 to fund the project fully.
“And each year it was a fight,” he said.
Bradley said that when Federal regulators, including the Army Corps of Engineers and the Federal Environmental Protection Agency, got involved, the agencies threw up regulatory roadblocks to kill the project.
“They had some good questions,” Bradley said of the federal agencies, “but they also had what I would consider delay tactics and the sort of things that you see sometimes in government.”
Bradley said the project’s success is a prime example of government listening to the people and that of ordinary citizens making a difference.
“So, when someone tells you that you can’t make a difference,” he told the audience, “that you can’t fight city hall, that you can’t in this country anymore, have the government respond to your real needs and fix a problem that is long overdue to be fixed, the answer is, oh yes, you can.”
“You take them out to this lake,” Bradley continued, gesturing to Lake Brooklyn. “This is proof that we live in a country where we aren’t dictated to, but at the end of the day, when all is said and done, when something we care deeply about, and when we need something done, we can get it done.”
Bradley credited St. Johns River Water Management District Executive Director Mike Register with overcoming federal opposition to the project.
“Mike is the one that had to go up and face the federal bureaucrats in Atlanta,” Bradley said. “When they stated the 15 reasons why this can’t happen, (he said) this is why we’re going to do it.”
Rep. Bobby Payne, who shepherded the project through the Florida House, thanked his House colleagues Travis Cummings and Sam Garrison and the Lake Region’s current State Senator, Jennifer Bradley, for supporting the project.
