Charlie Miranda talks water issues as he contemplates 4 more years on Tampa City Council

One of the issues that Bob Buckhorn has said he wants to tackle in his second term is what to do with the 60 million-plus gallons of day of treated waste water that currently is being dumped into  Tampa Bay, and has been for years.  In November the mayor said that he’s been working with city officials about the prospect of introducing  indirect potable reuse (IPR), a technique that has been successful in California, Virginia, Texas, Israel and parts of Africa. Among those working with the mayor on moving those discussions along is City Council Chairman Charlie Miranda, who declared his candidacy on Monday in the District 2 Citywide Council race, where he’ll be challenged by Joe Citro and Julie Jenkins.

Indirect potable reuse is making clean drinking water from wastewater, often derided as “toilet to tap.”

Speaking on Monday night, Miranda predicted that the city is going to “get very serious” about water in 2015. Citing how indirect potable reuse is being done in Atlanta, Washington D.C. and Orange County, California Miranda says “We have to prepare ourselves and realize what technology has done.”

The longtime Councilman says that the idea is economically viable, in part because the city’s water dept. generates its own funding.  He says that has about 35 billion gallons of water capacity that is underused. “That’s an asset that very few communities have. The water that we’re dumping out into the Bay now is 90 percent better than all the drinking water in the world. Even though we don’t drink it, it’s there.”

But it’s hardly inexpensive. Miranda says the major costs would total around $300 million.

“That’s our estimate at today’s cost. Now I don’t know what’s going to happen in 15-20 years from now, but if we start planning on that and working on it, we could certainly obtain it…so we’re looking at that.”

The process would be to take that treated water (which now goes to the Howard Curren treatment plant) and put it through two more processes. The plant would send the sewage water through reverse osmosis and ultraviolet processing. Then the water would go into the Hillsborough River, where it would ultimately flow to the David Tippen treatment plant. There the water would be treated again before being sent directly to citizens’ homes.

City officials talked about putting the issue on the ballot back in 2011, but that never happened. In 2010, Miranda began preparing the public about hte issue by hosting a couple of town hall events, and said yesterday that officials that the public’s reaction was positive at the time.

But it’s not going to be an easy sell. Former City Councilman John Dingfelder told the Tampa Tribune back in 2010 that even aside from costs, he was skeptical about public perception.”I don’t think the community is ready for something like this,” he told reporter Christian Wade. “We have people that are too frightened to put reclaimed water on their lawns, let alone in their bodies.”

There’s been virtually no discussion about the issue since that time, so undoubtedly more public education would need to occur before the city could move forward on the issue.