Some septic bills moving forward would require routine inspections of onsite tanks

Some bills aimed at cleaning up pollution from old and leaky septic tanks are making their way through subcommittees in Tallahassee while others are floundering. 

Several proposed laws target septic tanks, call for inspections every five years and promote conversion to centralized sewage treatment. 

Some water quality scientists have pointed at septic tanks as a major contributor to pollution in coastal areas while others say the heavy nutrient loads come largely from farms north of Lake Okeechobee. 

House Bill 85 would require regular inspection and pumping out of septic tanks throughout the state. 

The bill was moved to the healthcare appropriations subcommittee earlier this week. 

But a similar bill on the Senate side has not made progress in a month, since its introduction on March 5. 

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Senate Bill 1758 would transfer some septic tank oversight from the Department of Health to the Department of Environmental Protection to approach septic tanks from a water quality perspective instead of just human health, as is the case now. 

The bill moved through subcommittees this week but a comparable bill in the House has made little progress. 

Some residents and groups have called for stricter septic tank laws for years, saying that cleaning up any source of pollution will help Florida's overall water quality. 

"It’s important for some sort of bill to occur and I think Floridians are going to be really upset if we have nothing done on wastewater," said Nyla Pipes, with the non-profit One Florida Foundation, which is based in the Stuart area. 

Lee County has more than 96,000 septic tanks and Collier has about 30,000. 

Septic tanks are most dense in northern Cape Coral, North Fort Myers and in the Lehigh Acres area, according to the Florida Department of Health. 

"Nitrogen concentrations increase as you go up stream (along the Caloosahatchee River) and that means there's a greater signature of sewage as you go upstream," said Rick Bartleson, a water quality scientist at the Sanibel-Captiva Conservation Foundation on Sanibel. "It's both the wet season and the dry season and you would expect there would be a signature during the dry season because there's less runoff with fertilizer. (But) even in the wet season there's so much sewage that there's a signal of it all year around."

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Fertilizer from farms upstream of the Cape Coral-Fort Myers area contribute significantly to excessive nutrients loads, which often feed toxic algae blooms in the historic Everglades system. 

In Collier, the majority of septic tanks are in areas like Golden Gates Estates and smaller communities in the rural eastern part of the county. 

Some of those tanks are older than their designed lifespan and are leaking nutrients into the groundwater. 

Depending on location, those nutrients flow toward nearby waterways and eventually end up in coastal waters, where they can feed various algae blooms. 

In Hendry County, where large farming operations dominate the landscape, House Bill 2749 has been proposed to help the community convert septic tanks to centralized sewage management. 

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The bill calls for more than $3 million in matching funds from the state but has not made progress since it was introduced in the opening days of session in early March. 

But some have questioned how large a role septic tanks play in coastal water quality. 

Calusa Waterkeeper John Cassani said that while old septic tanks may fail and leak nutrients, other sources are much larger inputs to the system. 

"All I’ve been able to determine is they’ve identified septics as a source (of nutrients) but I haven’t seen anybody quantify that," Cassani said. "I’ve got to see the loading numbers to understand that."

Their impacts can also vary, depending on location and when they were installed, he said. 

"It depends on how old they are, how close they are to a water body and how high they’re perched in the water table," Cassani said. "Lumping all septic tanks into one branding, I just don’t think that’s right."

Bartleson said he'd like to see a watershed free of septic tanks to better protect the Caloosahatchee River and its delicate estuary. 

"There should definitely be an area around the river that has groundwater flow that is toward the river that shouldn't have any septic systems," Bartleson said. 

Connect with this reporter: ChadGillisNP on Twitter. 

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