Only recently, Zephyrhills became Pasco County’s largest city. Now leaders there have decided that in order to protect the city’s future they are going to have to put on the brakes for a while.
This week, the City Council tentatively agreed to a moratorium that could stop new development and annexation applications by late June.
While there are several reasons the city wants to slow growth, it is the element that made them famous — Zephyrhills water — that brought them to this challenging decision.
In recent months, water usage has spiked, bringing the city close to its limit, according to City Manager Billy Poe. After analyzing the water usage already promised to new projects on the books, he said they realized that, without a pause, “we were going to be short of water.”
The city of Zephyrhills has an active water use permit with the Southwest Florida Water Management District that authorizes use of 3.3 million gallons per day, according to the agency’s spokesperson, Susanna Martinez Tarokh.
“The city has indicated to the (water management) district over the past year that they are concerned with projected growth and would like to modify the permit to obtain an increase in the permitted quantity,” she said. “This permit application is currently under review.”
Currently the city’s daily pumping average is 2.5 million gallons. The analysis by the city showed water use by known future projects could bring that to well over 4 million in less than two decades. That really struck a chord with Steve Spina.
Spina, who spent 20 years as the Zephyrhills city manager, was elected to the council in April and immediately asked for a workshop on the water situation. He said he saw the city’s usage top 3 million gallons per day during a recent high-use period, and it brought home the need for the city to address the impacts of continuing development.
“I think it’s kind of been a long time coming,” Spina said, with developers starting up in the 1990s but then getting derailed by the Great Recession. “It’s just made a perfect storm.”
The issue also comes up just as the city’s famous business, Blue Triton, the company that took over from Nestle running the Zephyrhills bottled water plant, is seeking to annex 7 acres into the city to expand its operation. That expansion would mean using another 128,632 gallons of city water per day over the next five years. The City Council will be considering the annexation and land use changes next month.
While Poe said the water bottling operation is the largest user of water in Zephyrhills, it has little to do with the current water crisis. According to the water management district, bottled water operations represent less than 1% of all the water use in the 16 Florida counties it oversees.
The greater concern is Zephyrhills geography. It draws water from the Hillsborough River Basin, an area that also serves growing Hillsborough County. Poe said this water source is “constrained” and it doesn’t take much additional water withdrawal to impact Florida’s underground water supply.
The moratorium would give the city time for that by prohibiting any new annexations or residential development. Industrial and commercial uses and small in-fill residential projects would not be part of those new restrictions.
Several local businesspeople were concerned about how much they had invested and how unfair they said it would be to stop them. But city officials agreed that the moratorium would only be applied to new projects. Even those looking toward future growth acknowledged the need to take stock of the important water resource.
While real estate has always placed an emphasis on “location, location, location,” said David Waronker, a real estate investor with multiple interests in Zephyrhills, “it’s water, water, water anymore and that is nationally, so I understand your being proactive about our water situation. It’s critical.”
The city is also talking with fast-growing Pasco County about coordinating on several growth-related issues. Next month, they will meet to talk about water, possibly even buying bulk water from Pasco, Poe said.
The city also has transportation concerns, some of which were discussed with Pasco County earlier this month at the Metropolitan Planning Organization. That group, consisting of county commissioners and elected city leaders, agreed to reset road priorities along U.S. 301 because of the congestion there now and developments in process that will bring another 7,000 homes into the area by the end of next year.
Lance Smith, Zephyrhills City Council president, said this week that working with the county is crucial. “We can put whatever restrictions we want on development, but Pasco County is still the wild, wild west,” he said. “They are going to continue to develop.”