Folks in Sebastian will have the choice to connect to the sewer system soon as the city and the county team up for a septic-to-sewer conversion project.
"Essentially what we will be doing is we're going to be installing what we call a public infrastructure, so pipes in the ground that will enable the residents and the businesses within the community redevelopment authority to connect to central sewer. From our perspective, the county's perspective, it's installing the public side infrastructure, essentially the public pipes in the ground that enables the residents and businesses to connect," Sean Lieske said.
That was Sean Lieske, Director of Utility Services for Indian River County. He said that the partnership between the city and the county arose to bridge a gap in the sewer system.
"We entered into what we call an interlocal agreement or ILA. They had money funded through CRA for several years and that money over time was used up and it left still a number of businesses and residents not connected and so we started having conversations with Sebastian and between the leaderships of both the city and the county and we came to an conclusion that we would work together to get these businesses and residents connected," he said.
Sean said that the biggest benefit is how it will help the lagoon.
"The benefit is protection of the water quality within the Indian River Lagoon and septic systems can fail, not necessarily the septic system itself that's failing. Oftentimes it's the entire system and the leach field becomes overwhelmed. When those become overwhelmed and fail they cause contaminants to leach into the ground which gets into the local groundwater and that usually has a direct linkage to surrounding waterways," he said.
Once the water leaches its way into the lagoon it can overload it with nutrients.
"The contamination is more from a nutrient loading perspective and those nutrients are nitrogen and phosphorus and so plants need nitrogen and phosphorus to grow and when you have an overabundance of those nutrients it allows algae to grow and other things to grow kind of uncontrollably and those ultimately end up in leading to what we call sometimes hazardous algal blooms and when algae dies off it causes change in the water chemistry and reduces the oxygen level oftentimes and so that ends up having problems for the local wildlife," he said.
The project in Sebastian is just one of many that the county is assisting with.
"We received several grants to do some additional projects within the county. We've got one on an area called Wabasso Island which is an island that kind of sits in the middle of the lagoon. We've got another one for Hobart Landing which is a community that sits adjacent to the lagoon and then we have another one for actually north Sebastian so north of the CRA area and we're going to be doing some additional work on conversions up there," he said.