By Terry Witt – Spotlight Senior Reporter

            Levy County Commissioners will meet Thursday evening at the Rosewood Baptist Church to discuss a proposed water pipeline extending from Bronson to Otter Creek and Cedar Key.

            The meeting begins at 6 p.m. The public is invited.

            A committee consisting of the mayors of Bronson, Otter Creek, and Cedar Key along with Levy County Commissioner John Meeks has met for months to discuss the project.

            The Florida Department of Environmental Protection and the Suwannee River Water Management District also have representatives on the committee.

            Otter Creek and Cedar Key have poor drinking water quality and city officials in those communities are ready to connect to a drinking water supply that meets state quality standards. The Bronson area has good water.

            County Coordinator Wilbur Dean said he believes a wellfield in the Bronson area has been identified as the future water pumping site.

            There has been discussion about possibly building an additional pipeline for the purpose of moving treated effluent from Cedar Key and Otter Creek to a site that hasn’t been identified. Treated effluent has nutrients that make it suitable for fertilizer.

            Partin and Meeks have indicated the state is willing to fully fund the project. Since the pipelines would pass by Sumner and Rosewood there is talk about extending water and sewer lines to both communities.

            Commissioners want input from the members of the public on whether they have an interest in water and possibly sewer lines being built to the communities of Sumner and Rosewood. Rural residents along County Road 347 could potentially use the system. Nothing is certain yet.

            The entire project remains in the discussion stages and many questions need to be answered before the project can be engineered and constructed, or if it will be built at all.

            Originally there was talk of the Town of Bronson piping water to Otter Creek and Cedar Key but it’s unclear whether that early version of the plan remains on the table, or if the plan now is for a utilities cooperative to operate a system that would pipe water from somewhere in the Bronson area, not necessarily Bronson itself, to Otter Creek, Cedar Key and possibly Sumner and Rosewood.

            Commissioner Lilly Rooks, who lives in Rosewood, said the people she has talked to want to know more about the project. She said some can’t make it to the meeting due to a conflict in their schedule and they want her to tell them what was said.

——————————-

Enterprise Reporting by Terry Witt September 7, 2022; Posted September 7, 2022