Marine Resources Council Executive Director Leesa Souto says her organization’s Indian River Lagoon Action Assembly has created momentum for solving lagoon problems that is still building seven weeks after the event and that she hopes will continue for decades.
“Participants had committed to go out into the community and spread the word and advocate for the priority actions we agreed on, and people are following through with that,” Souto says.
“I have personally presented to more than 1,000 people since the assembly. At every presentation, people have come and said, ‘I want to help, we have the skills to do that, we have the resources to assist with that.’ It has been a wonderful challenge trying to accommodate and direct all that interest and enthusiasm.”
The three-day event, held May 15-17 at the Ted Moorhead Lagoon House in Brevard County, brought together 91 participants, including a Who’s Who of lagoon experts from universities, agencies and environmental groups in the five counties that border the 156-mile-long waterway, along with politicians, businesspeople, and representatives of agriculture, infrastructure and recreation interests.
There was a fun, lavishly-catered kick-off dinner with some great talks and lots of socializing and then two days of down-and-dirty committee work in which participants hashed out the issues they wanted to focus on and prioritized the actions needed to remedy the most pressing problems.
The assembly report, “Lagoon Action Assembly 2014 Priority Actions,” lists five main tasks, each with a handful of subtasks. The five priority actions are: Develop a lagoon-wide, long-term public education plan similar to “Be Floridian”; establish and fund a “State of the Lagoon” report modeled on the groundbreaking Chesapeake Bay Foundation Report Card; remove and reduce muck; reduce impacts from septic tanks; improve stormwater management.
As an example, the subtasks under septic are: Complete a lagoon-wide septic-tank mapping project; prioritize septic tanks based on their likelihood to impact the lagoon; investigate and assign corrective action; identify sources of nitrogen, phosphorus, bacteria, pharmaceuticals and toxins.
MRC board chairman Jim Moir says he was somewhat disappointed that bigger, bolder ideas did not emerge from the assembly. Souto says she had a bit of the same reaction: “When it was over, I was like, “Oh, are we really going to do public education again?’”
But Moir has high regard for the group that came together and a predominantly positive view of the work they did, and Souto believes the assembly activated a kind of viral phenomenon that is spreading through the five-county region.
Participants and new recruits are continuing to collaborate on a dedicated list serve, working under the auspices of the assembly steering committee to do nuts and bolts planning, developing tactics and strategies and figuring out how best to shape proposals and combine forces to move the agenda forward.
“People are asking, ‘What resources do you have, and what do we have, and how can we work together to be more powerful and effective?’” says Souto. “When we see each other at meetings now, the conversations start right back up where they left off.
“MRC is preparing a legislative package and Senator Thad Altman, House Minority Leader Perry Thurston and other legislators have committed to supporting it in the next session. They will be working it from their end while we are in Tallahassee working it from our end.”
Thurston said at the assembly there was unusual bipartisan support for lagoon projects in the recent legislative session during which more than $170 million was allocated for research and cleanup. He and Altman are hopeful that support will increase in the upcoming session.
The county commissions are part of the Assembly process, too, working through the Indian River Lagoon Counties Collaborative, helping keep momentum going by grappling with local regulatory and infrastructure fixes.
“None of these are bandaid solutions,” says Souto. “They are long-term projects that are going to take sustained funding. We are going to have to make tough choices about regulations and funding and change our individual and institutional behavior [if we are going to restore lagoon.]
“People will have to decide if they want to be able to swim and fish and play in the lagoon or if they are going to let the lagoon die and be satisfied sitting in their air-conditioned houses looking out the window at their bright green lawns.”
To learn more about the Marine Resources Council’s Action Assembly go to MRC website where Souto and her staff have put together a well-organized, most usefully-detailed record: http://www.mrcirl.org/our-programs/2014-action-assembly
