I have to believe the definition of shoreline was self-explanatory or the Legislature would have included a definition for it.  “Shoreline” is a surveying/engineering term that has been used for many years and is also defined by the Bureau of Land Management.  The shoreline is  the intersection of a specified plane of water with the shore or beach (Bureau of Land Management).  The American Congress on Surveying and Mapping and the American Society of Civil Engineers defined shoreas: the land which is covered or uncovered by the rise and fall of the normal tide.  It is the strip of land between mean high water and mean low water lines.  In its strictest use, the term applies only to the land along the tidal waters.  The shoreline is defined as the line along which the land surface meets the water surface of the sea or ocean.  Strictly speaking, it is not a line, but a narrow strip or area, embracing that part of the land surface which comes in contact with wave action both above and below the surface of the water.  The term does not apply to tidal flats or marshes which are overflowed by the tides, but is essentially to strips where the land surface has an appreciable slope toward the water.

This picture provides a great example of the misuse of the definition of shoreline.  In the area of these mangroves the mean high water elevation is approximately 0.72′.  The back (landward) edge of the mangroves is 2.0′. The interface of the tidal waters and the land surface is in the middle of the mangrove trees. The elevation at the wetland boundary near the wall is approximately 3.0′.   The owner of this property has been told they cannot qualify for the exemption.

Perhaps make it a monthly task to check the agenda in the planning and growth management departments for rule changes and let your local government know what you think.  One size does not fit all.

As an environmental consultant, I have been involved in environmental permitting in the southeastern United States for 32 years.  Over the years we have been through several downturns in the economy and changes in state and federal administrations.  In all of these situations, I have heard the doomsday predictions for the future state of the environment.  There has never been a significiant lessening of environmental regulations during rough economic times.  You will hear stories about how it will be much easier to get a permit during this recession and that may not necessarily be true for you. What should you expect in these times?  There may be a reduction in the number of staff at the agencies but there is also a significant reduction on the number of projects to review. The agency staff are not as busy and you might see a more in depth review of your project that you might have in the past.

What should you expect from your consultants? You should expect them to ask you to convince them that your project is justifiable.  Do not skip any steps in the environmental planning of your project.  You cannot take back a poorly developed plan once it is on the table.  Your consultants should be asking you the questions the agency staff will ask. Do not take these questions from your consultants as “Who’s side are they on”.     You should be hiring a consultant who has been there and done that and can give you an educated forecast.  Pre-application meetings at all agencies including the utility departments should always be planned no matter how confident everyone feels about the design of the project.

You cannot be denied reasonable use of your property.  However there is no good definition of  “reasonable use”.  Economic justification for wetland impacts was historically difficult to prove.  However, we are now experiencing agency staff being more receptive to an economic justification for wetland impacts.  There are unique circumstances that have occurred during the shifts in this economy.  Distressed parcels are being acquired but it is difficult to complete all the due diligence as access if frequently being denied.   Others are having to continue to develop their land and taking a loss.  An experienced professional can help navigate the system and help you get the appropriate permits.

These water managers hired a psychologist to help them understand the “irrational” response they were getting. So what is the big deal? It is words and associations or as the psychologist defined it, “contagion thinking.” People are perfectly happy to drink treated water from a local river.  People do not have an “icky” association with the river as they do with treated wastewater.  The river is natural.  However, the water in the river requires treatment to make it potable too.  People do not automatically have an image of fish and birds eliminating their waste  in the river. They do not consider all of the stormwater and industrial wastes that are discharged into the river.

It appears that if we want to sell our neighbors on drinking treated wastewater we have to co-mingle it with natural surface or ground water.  To sell treated wastewater as future drinking water, you have to cut the link between the drain in the sink or toilet to the drinking water tap.  Unfortunately, the highly treated waste water has to be treated again after being blended into the other waters.  Did you know that the City of Tampa drinking water is chemically cleaner (EPA Drinking Water Standards) than most bottled water? I am sure this would be true of many municipal water supplies.

We all know the power of associations but usually they are very personal.  I have always thought that, in this situation ignorance could be bliss.

The US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) announced in July, 2011 that they intend to add the gopher tortoise to the list of 250 threatened or endangered species protected by the Endangered Species Act.  The information was reported in a local Tampa newspaper and conservation groups welcomed this listing as “there is a lot of  abuse on the state policies”.  The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) ”up-listed” the gopher tortoise from a “species of special concern” to “Threatened” in November 2007.  The state of Florida has a detailed and comprehensive plan for the preservation of this species.

Let me share a dirty little secret with all of you.  The addition of the US Fish and Wildlife to the permitting process to protect the gopher tortoise will only add time and expense to development.  USFWS will not necessarily force the preservation of the land in which the tortoises thrive.  USFWS will have a mitigation option just as the FWC has a mitigation option.  The mitigation option is to relocate the tortoises to other lands being preserved for them.  Preservation on the project site usually  occurs on very large projects e.g. 300 to 500 acres in size.  Most projects are much smaller than this and on site preservation is not feasible or good for the tortoise.  We have a number of tortoise conservation “banks” in the state of Florida which will be managed in pertetuity for the tortoise.

The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission is doing an exemplary job of protecting the gopher tortoise and the animals that share their burrows.  Let the USFWS concentrate their efforts in other states that have little or no plan for the protection of the tortoise.

This is the Space Coast Solar Center located in Brevard County near the Kennedy Space Center Visitor facility.   It is estimated to generate 10 megawatts of energy to serve 1,100 homes.

I would like to point out some things that are not discussed and ask everyone to think about some other alternatives.  The Desoto facility covers approximately 180 acres of good Florida farm land.  While it does not require water to generate the power it does cause runoff as the panels are as impervious as our roads and roofs.  The Space Coast Solar Center covers approximately 40 to 50 acres.

There are many large roofs in all of our cities: shopping centers, schools, industrial buildings, warehouses,  apartment/condo complexes and parking garages.  Why not consider leasing the roof space to install solar panels that could not only supply the building on which they are constructed but neigboring buildings.  These roofs are already contributing runoff so new stormwater ponds should not be required.  No land needs to be purchased. All we need is ingenuity and community cooperation.

The scary graphs you are shown of the horrible rise in CO2 levels are a blow up of the graph of the last 100 years. Mankind has nothing to do with the oscillation of the temperature, CO2 and methane. This phenomenon is multi-variate and much like the proverbial question of what came first the chicken or the egg. What we can infer from this graph is that the increase in temperature occurs before CO2 increases. Some climatologists have said it is the activity on the sun that is responsible for the temperature changes. I wonder if anyone has compared the temperature of the earth’s core with the activity of the sun. Could be also be heating from within? This oscillation of temperature and CO2 has been going on for hundreds of thousands of years. In my opinion our industrial activities of the last 150 years cannot be the cause of the rise in CO2 levels. We are experiencing a global climate change but it changes all the time. What is normal? How would we really know; we have not been recording weather data for more than 115 years. Do not get dragged into this self-serving argument. We are not as significant as a volcanic eruption or a tsunami.

I have served as Treasurer, Vice President, President and I have been the Chair of our Education Committee since 1995.  The Section gave me another honor several years ago by naming all of our education funds after me.  It is a wonderful multi-discipline organization of professionals in water resource fields. The National AWRA also has incredible regional and annual meetings.  I urge you to try to attend one of the Florida Section bi-monthly meetings.  The July meeting is next week in Key West, the September meeting is on the east coast and November will be in Ft. Myers.  Please visit the web site at www.awraflorida.org.  Water is an important and precious resource and there are so many talented people trying to protect and preserve Florida’s waters.

I recently read a paper by Naziha Azli and Norhafizah Ramli (University of Malaysia) regarding trends from climate data that oscillates. There are those who want to perform a regression analysis of the data to plot a straight line. In every case the straight line will be ascending which people translate to mean that the average temperature/rainfall, etc. is steadily rising. However, Azli and Ramli found that if you plot a random series of numbers that oscillate up and down as rainfall and temperature do, the regression analyses will always yield an ascending line. It is not appropriate to do this analysis on this type of data. When reviewing the rainfall data for this region, there is clear oscillation but no apparent change in the range. We cannot say from this data that rainfall is dropping or dramatically rising. It also depends on how you pull the data. If you look at the first 30 years of data for Hillsborough County, the average rainfall is 52 inches, which is considered the average for the area. If you pull 32 years different but consecutive years, the average is 62 inches. So what cycle are we in at any given time? Only God knows.