Tonight’s meeting of the Bartow City Commission will be heavy on alternative water sources. We will also take up an issue with the Police Officer’s Retirement Trust Fund.

Alternative Water Sources

On tonight’s agenda are a couple of items related to the City’s participation in a couple of Alternative Water Source projects being pursued by the Polk County Water Cooperative. On Friday, the commission met in a special work session to discuss our participation. Since we don’t typically take formal action in a work session the items will be acted on this evening.

As I have mentioned in other posts, protecting the City’s water rights is mission-critical for our future growth. Since we successfully litigated to protect our water permit during a recent CFWI rule challenge we still can withdraw up to 7.9 million gallons a day from the upper Floridian aquifer.

Currently, we withdraw around 3 million gallons a day. To meet our projected needs we need to add additional water sources other than continuing to tap the upper aquifer. These options would potentially include surface water (rivers, lakes, reservoirs, etc) or the lower aquifer.

We are looking into all these options but the two projects that are on the table are deep well projects. There are pluses and minus to each project but the general feeling of our commission is that it is wise to participate in both projects to mitigate potential risk (What if a project doesn’t produce the amount or quality of water we expect at the price we can afford?). Investing in both projects helps protect the city, especially since our legal team did a great job of negotiating in an “off-ramp” clause that allows us to leave to project early if needed.

Police Pension

The other item of interest is the first reading of an ordinance that makes a change to the city’s Municipal Police Officer’s Retirement Fund. Judging from the staff report this looks to be a clean-up item to address some variation in language from a new version of the agreement and a previous ordinance.

The change being requested to move the number of qualified service years from 10 to 6 years. As it stands, this only affects one employee who has retired but would have to wait 3 years before he could draw his pension.

I expect this item to at least pass on first reading, at which point a financial impact survey can be compiled. Based on the little I know so far I don’t expect there to be a problem with this change. More to come.

The other ordinances are the final actions to approve (or not) the items brought forward at the last meeting.

The commission meetings are now being streamed live over Facebook. You can visit the City’s Facebook page tonight at 6 pm to watch the discussion.