Longest-serving ECUA Board Member Dale Perkins Passes

REMEMBRANCE

 Walter “Dale” Perkins, who served on the Emerald Coast Utilities Authority Board for 32 years, died Sunday, Sept. 6, at the age of 64. He was first elected to the board in November 1994 and had announced in January that he intended to seek another term.

• ECUA remembered him as the Authority’s longest-serving and most familiar board member, a fishing boat captain known to generations of locals simply as “Captain Dale.” A commemorative plaque unveiled along Pensacola Beach earlier this year, near the ECUA water tanks, honors him as a “fisherman, environmentalist, fierce protector of the people’s purse.”

Before his years on the board, Perkins earned multiple advanced degrees and worked as a social worker, substance abuse counselor, and military and family life counselor. He is survived by his daughters, Jade Perkins and Stacey Livingston; his mother, Marcia Perkins; and his siblings Bill, Mike, Jeff, Melanie, Libby, Sandi and Patti.

Two fights we won together. Over three decades of covering ECUA, Inweekly and Perkins found ourselves on the same side of two of the region’s most consequential environmental battles.

• The relocation of the Main Street Sewage Plant out of downtown Pensacola—a fight Inweekly pushed hard for, and one Perkins played a significant role in getting across the finish line.
• The creation of a county-wide curbside recycling program, another cause Perkins championed on the board, as Inweekly advocated for it in print.

Those two wins reshaped how Escambia County and Pensacola handle their waste and waterfront, and Perkins deserves real credit for both.

But we didn’t always agree. Twice, Perkins and Inweekly landed on opposite sides of major ECUA decisions.

The first came in 2001, when ECUA, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection and International Paper were negotiating a $92 million project to build a pipeline diverting IP’s wastewater away from Eleven Mile Creek and through a wetlands filtration system instead. ECUA’s share of the cost was only about 25 percent, which also covered a planned new wastewater treatment plant in Cantonment (This finally happened 10 years later, replacing the Main Street facility).

Perkins and his fellow board members nearly walked away from the deal entirely, balking at paying $1.25 million to use IP land for the new plant.

It took Adm. Jack Fetterman, then chair of the Pensacola Chamber board, along with hundreds of community leaders and citizens, DEP and the Florida Cabinet applying sustained pressure before the board would sign off.

The second disagreement came in 2009, during the countywide push to consolidate Escambia County government. Perkins traveled to Tallahassee to lobby the Florida House to exclude ECUA from the consolidation commission and from the consolidation process altogether.

Our condolences go out to the Perkins family and to everyone at ECUA who worked alongside him for three decades.

Note: The featured photo is from SCI. It’s the Main Street Sewage Plant before it was demolished. Today, two huge apartment complexes are being built on the site.