- May 3, 2024
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The city of Ormond Beach wants more reclaimed water storage.
At a City Commission workshop held on Tuesday, Nov. 16, officials instructed city staff to seek out land options for the construction of a reclaimed water reservoir field similar to that of the city of Port Orange, with the hopes that a project like this will help them reduce the amount of surface water discharge into local waterways.
"I really want us as an elected body to look at a large tract of land and make some strategic moves rather expeditiously and get a plan in place so that we don't run out and we quit dumping our reuse into the waterways here," City Commissioner Troy Kent said.
At the workshop, Public Works Director Shawn Finley walked the commission through the three-tier plan submitted to the Department of Environmental Protection to comply with Senate Bill 64, which was signed by the governor this summer. The new law requires utility providers, like the city of Ormond Beach, to have a plan to eliminate all surface water discharges by Jan. 1, 2032.
In 2020, the city pumped 536 million gallons of reclaimed water into the river; it is permitted to pump 6 million gallons a day. According the Nov. 12 city staff report, the city averaged a daily surface water discharge flow of 1.31 million gallons a day from Nov. 1, 2020, to Oct. 31, 2021.
There are 4,000 customers receiving reclaimed water in the city — made possible by the wastewater coming from the city's 23,000 utility customers — and Finley said that after customers experienced reclaimed water shortages in 2019, their first order of business was making sure the city's system was reliable.
"If you turn your tap on in your kitchen, you expect water to come out," Finley said. "The same thing should be expected for people with their sprinklers."
The city, which entered into an agreement with the city of Holly Hill in 2020 to receive its surplus reclaimed water, tends to discharge more reclaimed water during the rainy seasons due to a lack of storage, something City Commissioner Dwight Selby has been advocating for more of in the last couple of years. He noted that the first tier in the city's three-tier plan would expand the city's distribution system to Ormond Crossings, homes in the south area of the beachside and Tattersall, should the development be approved.
"Should we even be talking about that now until we have more storage?" Selby said.
Brad Blais, vice president of Mead & Hunt, a Port Orange-based engineering consulting firm, said the plan for the state was developed with a focus on reducing surface water discharge. Senate Bill 64 requires surface water discharge to be reduced to less than 10% of the total effluent flow by 2032. The city currently discharges about 23% of total effluent flow, and Blais said the goal is for the city to increase reclaimed water utilization by about 1.5 million gallons per day over the next decade.
“Given where we’re at, that's not a huge target and it’s certainly achievable," Blais said.
Another project listed in the first tier of projects in the plan submitted to the state includes a reclaimed water main extension for Airport Road. A 60-acre reservoir recharge basin is also proposed in the second tier of projects, and Blais said the city didn't have to go in order — they could choose projects to prioritize.
The commission was not in favor of increasing reclaimed water storage by way of the traditional tanks. A field like Port Orange is the way to go, said Mayor Bill Partington.
"Storage tanks strike me as expensive, clunky, dangerous to maintain," he said. "They're ugly, I mean when you drive down Orchard [Street] and you see those tanks, they just look horrible. Luckily, there's trees covering most of them and keeping them fairly well out of sight."
The commission directed city staff to return with land options for a reservoir by mid-May 2022.
