The Pensacola Beach waterfront treatment plant is an eyesore that beach residents want moved elsewhere. But that eyesore will remain on the pristine beach for the foreseeable future.
ECUA board member Dale Perkins made that point abundantly clear during a meeting Monday night organized by Pensacola Beach Advocates.
“People have wanted us to move that plant forever, and the bad news is that it’s not really technically, financially or practically feasible to just move the plant at this time,” Perkins said.
Perkins further doused the beach residents with cold water when he explained that an unsightly structure would remain on the property even if the plant was moved.
“A lot of people think if they move the plant, we’re just going to have nice, beautiful Sound-front property that we can utilize. That’s not the case,” he said. “Even if we move the plant, we’re still going to have a massive lift station there. That pipe’s still going to be there, we’re still going to have a huge building.”
Perkins said pumping raw sewage from the beach to another plant would cause issues. He said residents who live near the chosen plant and environmentalists would voice their displeasure.
“You’ve got (people saying) not in my backyard,” he said. We don’t want Pensacola Beach pooping all over us. And then a lot of environmental people don’t want raw sewage lines going across that Bay. If a barge hits it, if it leaks, if it rusts, you don’t have highly treated effluent in the Bay, you have raw sewage in the Bay. That’s a big threat, a big problem.
Perkins used to live on the beach and said he sympathized with the residents. He acknowledged the plant is an eyesore.
“You don’t want a sewage treatment plant in the middle of a beautiful paradise like this, but we have to do something with the stuff you send us,” Perkins said. “That’s the reality of it. We can’t just let it pile up or go into the water or anything like that.”
An engineering firm conducted a study in 2017 on the cost of potentially building pipelines across the Sound and Pensacola Bay to the Cantonment plant. The study estimated the cost to be $175 million.
“It would be a hard sell politically to get the rest of the county citizens to agree to fund that, and that’s even if you could do it technologically and scientifically in addition to the politics and geography,” Perkins said.
Beach resident Tom Luke suggested using some of the remaining BP oil money to cover the expense.
“It’s sitting in a big pile over here,” Luke said. “With an environmental project, we can use the money on it. We just need somebody to ask for it. If nobody asks, you’re not going to get it. There are so many people out there who want to get this done. The financing has been the problem.”
When questioned about that possibility, Perkins said, “I support that 100%. If you can get the BP committee, the local members who sit on there, to move the beach treatment plant and find a way of doing that, I’ll be the first one out there addressing them and saying, ‘Hey, I support this and we’ll do everything we can to facilitate it.’”
Luke said obtaining government grants is another option. He cited how the City of Gulf Breeze received grants for its septic-to-sewer conversion project.
Pensacola Beach Advocates President Rhonda Dorfman sided with Luke and a significant portion of the crowd who believe moving the plant is a viable option if researched thoroughly enough.
“My board members and other people say, we can do this, and then, of course, (Perkins) started off saying, ‘you can’t do this. It’s too expensive.’ It’s to this and to that,” Dorfman said. “We know where there’s a will, there’s a way. It sounds like there’s no will over there, but we’d like to show them the way.”
Photo by Joshua Burdick on Unsplash