Just after New Year’s Day in 2010, an arctic front blew into Florida. Farmers showered their specialty crops with groundwater, a practice that insulates fruits like citrus, strawberries and blueberries from icy blasts. Around Plant City, growers could pump a daily average of 37 million gallons of groundwater for irrigation without affecting local water levels.
This was not a typical Florida cold snap, though. Record-low temperatures stretched for 11 days. Meanwhile, protective attempts grew more dire for the 7,500 acres of agricultural lands around Plant City and Dover in Hillsborough County. Local farmers were pumping around 892 million gallons of water per day to protect their crops.
The freeze proved unprecedented — and disastrous.
Altogether, growers siphoned an estimated 2.7 billion gallons of groundwater throughout the weather event. It was enough to lower the Floridan aquifer — the traditional source of drinking water for most state residents, including Plant City’s population — by 60 feet in the area. The plummeting water levels forced more than 750 nearby wells to run dry, prompting a frenzy of panicked residents to flock to local officials for answers. More than 140 sinkholes caved open, threatening to swallow homes, roads and an elementary school. The event cost at least $8 million in damages.
To Plant City, the epicenter of the record-breaking draining, the long freeze of 2010 is a reminder of how essential water is — and how its absence can be devastating. Now, the community is finding itself nearing a new type of shortfall.
Plant City’s population of 42,000 is projected to nearly double by 2050. In preparation, the city utility has added a fifth drinking water treatment plant to its roster. It’s also continuously updating existing infrastructure to prolong its shelf life. But the resulting capacity will barely cover anticipated water demands, says utilities director Lynn Spivey, and the city has turned away some potential industrial and residential additions to preserve its last few extra drops.
“We’re growing faster than we can keep up with. Our water demand has already been exceeded,” Spivey says. “We’re looking at our entire area, all the land we’re acquiring — do any of those (parcels) have wells that aren’t being used anymore? Can we squeeze any more water out of what we already have? Because we are busting our limits.”
PEOPLE PRESSURE
Plant City is far from alone in its dilemma. Communities across Florida face mounting pressures on their water systems as growth strains already limited supplies.
Since 2010, the state’s population has swollen from 18.8 million residents to nearly 24 million and will reach an estimated 26.4 million by 2040. That growth pairs with the expansion of residential communities, commercial centers, infrastructure buildouts and water- hungry industries. Altogether, the population spike is expected to increase the state’s water demand by at least 13% over the next 15 years.
Surrounded by coastlines, inundated with natural springs, plagued by summertime showers and constantly combatting flooding, Florida seems to have abundant water resources. But the clean groundwater most residents have historically consumed — siphoned from the Floridan aquifer system that underlies the entire state, plus shallower aquifers — is reaching its sustainable withdrawal capacity.
The conundrum has deemed about two-thirds of Florida as water resource caution areas, where existing water supplies are insufficient to meet projected 20-year demands. In total, the state needs to develop at least 390 million more gallons of water a day to fulfill anticipated 2045 consumption needs, according to a 2025 report by the Florida Office of Economic and Demographic Research.
Florida is desperately trying to fill the gaps. Its five water management districts, alongside local governments and utilities, are tasked with finding new water supplies to get ahead of projected needs. Innovative solutions abound, from boosting the use of reclaimed water to desalination projects to aquifer recharge initiatives. Water conservation endeavors crisscross the state in hopes of lowering demand.
Even so, industry experts warn that days are numbered for the state’s era of relatively inexpensive drinking water. And, without the right forethought and funding, consumers will likely pay the price on their water bills.
“Florida’s a peninsula. We’re surrounded by water. We are never, ever going to run out of water. We’ve just run out of cheap water,” says Brian Armstrong, executive director of the Southwest Florida Water Management District that stretches from Levy County down to Charlotte County. “People are going to keep coming, so we have to come up with different ideas.”
SAVING DROPLETS
The cheapest way to boost Florida’s water supply is by using less of it, saving millions of dollars in infrastructure and treatment. That makes water conservation initiatives the first line of defense.
Florida’s five water management districts have carved conservation goals into each of their water supply plans. Overall, they estimate that successful conservation efforts could offset the projected 2045 statewide water demand by 451 million gallons per day. That’s easier said than done — but efforts abound.
Florida’s water utilities are the state’s biggest users, surpassing agriculture in 2020. Some encourage water conservation by charging higher rates when customers consume more water. Many also offer leak detection programs, irrigation audits and rebates.
A variety of water conservation programs are working toward the same goal — like Florida Water Star, which originated in the St. Johns River Water Management District two decades ago. It has since morphed into a statewide certification program that encourages water use efficiency in homes and commercial buildings. A study by the University of Florida and Toho Water Authority showed certified properties save up to 6,000 gallons of water indoors and 48,000 gallons of water outdoors annually, amounting to around $530 in yearly utility savings.
At least 18 municipalities now mandate Florida Water Star compliance for new builds in their city codes, and some offer rebates for certified projects. Dozens of builders abide by the Florida Water Star guidelines. More than 8,000 homes have been certified to date.
“Every gallon of water that you can save is one that you don’t have to go find,” says Michael Register, executive director of the St. Johns River Water Management District, which encompasses the northeastern tip of Florida down to Indian River County. “Conservation is becoming more and more of a bargain deal to try to implement those measures.”
Landscape irrigation is another one of Florida’s fastest-growing water uses. At least half of the average household’s water is used for watering lawns — a growing trend in the state since the mid-1980s. Water management districts, counties and cities use irrigation restrictions that limit watering to specific time-frames to help conserve water, with such restrictions in place throughout most of Florida.
For Eric Draper, a former director of the Florida Park Service who has also served on the Water Management District Review Commission, it’s not enough. Only about half the residents under irrigation restrictions are even aware of them, UF research has found. Enforcement is challenging and, in some jurisdictions, nonexistent.
“As long as we’re trying to make sure that people can irrigate grass turf, we’re going to have this extremely wasteful use of water,” Draper says. “There’s a lot of water that can be saved if we had stronger rules affecting landscape irrigation.”
Although its water consumption should stay relatively stable into 2040, agriculture is still Florida’s second- largest water user. For many producers, enhanced water efficiency means using precision irrigation — or technology that ensures their crops are watered at the right times with the right amounts.
Some tech is designed to mimic natural rainfall, boosting soil absorption. Drip irrigation delivers water directly to plant roots, minimizing losses from evaporation and runoff. Their timing can be guided by soil moisture probes or real-time water sensors that signal when irrigation is most needed.
The Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services mobilizes these efforts with several programs, says West Gregory, director of its Office of Agricultural Water Policy. It currently has seven mobile irrigation labs that provide free evaluations of producers’ irrigation systems. These visits amounted to an estimated 4.8 million gallons of water saved per day in 2024. The department has also invested $48 million into cost-share opportunities for irrigation improvements on agricultural lands since 2014.
“Food is a security issue, so we need to be able to create our own and grow our own. We need water to do it. That’s a big issue for us,” Gregory says. “Irrigation management is usually a pretty easy sell.”
Across Florida, conservation efforts are having an effect. Agricultural water demands for irrigation are down, Gregory says. Per capita usage of the public water supply has dropped from 170.2 gallons per day in 1995 to around 120 gallons per day.
But more progress is needed to reach the state’s water conservation goals — and behavioral change can be hard to elicit.
Take it from Mary Lusk, a UF assistant professor of soil and water sciences. In 2021, she researched the effectiveness of Orange County’s pleas to use less water. The area’s wastewater treatment processes require liquid oxygen, which was in high demand for COVID-19 patients. Local leaders asked residents to conserve as much water as possible to save oxygen for overloaded hospitals.
Lusk found virtually no change in water consumption. “I don’t know that I feel really good about putting all our hope in conservation,” she says. “We can’t trust conservation to be our answer. We can’t trust making a plea to people to use less water to be the answer.”
WATER REINVENTED
In Plant City, where leaders are diligently searching for solutions, Spivey is evaluating a new type of water supply: potable reuse, whereby wastewater is transformed into drinking water.
Over a 15-month pilot project, a Plant City demonstration facility ran wastewater through rigorous treatment to produce up to 35 gallons of drinkable water a minute. More than 300 people visited the operations. One man, owner of the local Keel Farms winery and brewery, made a pale lager beer from hundreds of gallons of the treated water. It sold out. (The rest of the water was not integrated into the city’s water supply.)
The pilot was a success. Plant City has since proposed a $143-million potable reuse facility with treatment, operations and educational modules. It could create 3.5 million gallons of drinkable water a day from wastewater, an output that could grow to 8 million gallons per day with expansions. That would nearly double the water supply currently available to the city.
It’s a no-brainer for Spivey — and for the handful of other Florida municipalities testing potable reuse, like Central Florida’s Altamonte Springs and Jacksonville’s JEA.
“We have the technology to clean the water to where it’s ready for human consumption,” says Register of the St. Johns River Water Management District. “Overcoming the yuck factor of that, I think, is going to be a challenge to have that potential source fully utilized.”
Water supply solutions are popping up in every water management district. Many depend on reused water.
In 2023, reclaimed water was used to irrigate more than 655,000 residences, 530 golf courses, 1,100 parks and 415 schools — and the demand keeps growing. In South Florida, wastewater-rich Broward County sends up to 10.5 million gallons of reclaimed water a day to Palm Beach County to help irrigate its breadth of golf courses, parks and green spaces. In Collier, Lee and Martin counties, where there’s not enough to go around, there’s a waiting list.
Recycled water can also benefit water-hungry industries like manufacturing or the energy sector. For users in the power generation sector, which consumed 113.4 gallons of water a day in Florida in 2020, reclaimed water can help cool hot equipment. Orlando’s coal-fired power plant, the Curtis H. Stanton Energy Center, uses up to 13 million gallons of reclaimed water a day to cool the plant’s boilers. Altogether, industrial consumers comprised 12% of Florida’s reclaimed water usage in 2023.
Much of Florida’s infrastructure was built to flush water off land as fast as possible to prevent communities and crops from flooding. This also prevents rainwater from infiltrating through the ground to naturally recharge the state’s aquifer system. Reclaimed water can supplement natural recharge when it’s directed to storage basins or wetlands, where it can seep into the water table from above. It can also be injected straight into the ground.
As Florida continues to grow, so will its wastewater output, creating a sustainable supply of reclaimed water. In 2023, the state used around 891 million gallons of reclaimed water per day. That only accounts for 55% of available wastewater from its treatment facilities.
“That’s a consistent source of water because it’s generated from the public. It’s a lot more reliable than, let’s say, just the climate, because you’re dependent upon rainfall,” says Hugh Thomas, executive director of the Suwannee River Water Management District, which encompasses Florida’s Big Bend. His region “would not have any available water for recharge right now, but with (reclaimed water projects), that treated water will be available every day.”
Another option for new water supplies comes from desalination, when salty water is turned into drinkable water. Two facilities in the Florida Keys use the process in emergencies. The Tampa Bay Seawater Desalination Plant is one of the largest such facilities in North America, providing up to 25 million gallons per day of drinking water to the region.
More than 140 facilities in Florida use desalination tech to treat brackish water — a mixture of fresh and saltwater found in deeper layers of the Floridan aquifer, which some utilities are tapping for extra supplies. At least 40 of those facilities are in South Florida. That’s the direction water supply planning is going in the South Florida Water Management District, which stretches from Orlando to the Keys, says Mark Elsner, bureau chief of the district’s Water Supply Bureau.
The process also comes in handy when saltwater infiltrates existing groundwater supplies from Florida’s coasts, encroaching where the water table is lowest from over-pumping. “Sea level rise is probably one of the most threatening things to our water supply in South Florida,” Elsner says. “This is becoming very challenging, like in Miami-Dade and Broward (counties), where land elevation is four or five feet.”
Other water supply options are Florida’s lakes and rivers, collectively referred to as “surface waters” in water supply lingo. Because surface waters have more direct interaction with pollutants, they need more treatment than traditional groundwater. Their use is also regulated by minimum flow levels — meaning humans must maintain a certain water level or risk causing harm to the ecosystem.
In South Florida, where communities can’t easily access the Floridan aquifer, a third of the region’s 2.5 billion gallons of daily drinking water comes from its lake and canal system. In most parts of the state, though, surface waters have yet to be explored. The St. Johns River, which flows north from Indian River County to Jacksonville, holds potential as a future water supply booster. It’s already being utilized by some towns, like Melbourne, which suckles from one of its connected lakes for drinking water.
“It’s not really being fully utilized as an alternative water supply source. ... It’s just so much cheaper to use groundwater while it’s available,” Register says. “So, the economics haven’t been there to really develop that source. That is something that’s there as a potential future alternative water supply project.”
A PRETTY PENNY
Why does most of Florida rely on groundwater from the aquifer system for drinking water? Simply put, it’s the cheapest source. The water is relatively clean, easy to access and requires little treatment. As the state maxes out that resource, it must increasingly depend on more expensive water sources.
A January 2023 cost estimation study of alternative water supply projects for the South Florida Water Management District reveals the pricey reality of new infrastructure: Capital costs for additional water supply wells reach up to $2.8 million per well. A filtration plant with a 20-million-gallonsper- day capacity fetches up to $118.4 million. A desalination facility treating brackish water would cost up to $236.9 million; for one treating seawater, the price tag balloons up to $578.5 million.
Finding that funding is the challenge of the century for water supply planners, especially as project costs escalate. Common construction materials, like iron and steel, grew 40% more expensive from 2020 to 2025, according to the Producer Price Index. Water infrastructure has grown more complex, adding zeroes to project price tags. Also padding the bottom line is a shortage of skilled labor.
Lee Hale, founder of the Maitland-based infrastructure consulting company Hale Innovation, compares today’s water infrastructure updates to replacing a Toyota Corolla with a Ferrari. “An old-school wastewater treatment plant that did basic primary treatment is now being replaced with these state-of-the art science labs to protect our environment and provide clean drinking water to everyone. It’s not a like-for-like replacement,” he says. “We need a pretty major infusion of cash to set us up for the next 50 years.”
But many in the industry say there’s not enough cash to go around in Florida, where funding for alternative water supply projects has historically been divvied up among the government, utilities and water management districts.
While the state’s Drinking Water State Revolving Fund provides low-interest loans for local governments and private utilities to build or upgrade their drinking water systems, interest rates have spiked higher in recent years. So have rates for other popular funding options — the bond market and the Water Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act federal loan program. That leaves the industry in search of additional funding opportunities.
Florida’s water management districts rely on local rates to varying degrees. Collectively, they are expected to collect $658 million in ad valorem taxes in fiscal year 2026, but that could change should property tax reforms pass this year.
In his 2025 budget, Gov. Ron DeSantis set aside $50 million for Florida’s Alternative Water Supply Grant Program — representing less than 1% of the state’s $115.6-billion budget. That money went to 14 alternative water projects, with allocations ranging from $53,600 to $15 million. For the 2026-27 budget, DeSantis recommended $60 million toward the cause. But that’s chump change compared to what’s needed.
In Polk County alone, the 16 municipalities working to meet the region’s future water needs within the Polk Regional Water Cooperative have identified $600 million in necessary alternative water supply projects, including two desalination facilities and 65 miles of water-carrying pipelines.
The Florida Office of Economic & Demographic Research estimated a deficit of more than $50 million for statewide water supply financing in this fiscal year alone. (Neither the EDR nor the Florida Department of Environmental Protection accommodated Florida Trend’s interview requests for this report.) The Florida One Water Commission (see ‘One Water’ on page 76), using data from EDR reports, estimates a $2.24-billion gap in annual funding for all of Florida’s necessary water-related projects. Even that number is believed to be an underestimate.
“Within the water management districts, a lot of us depend on money that’s being provided by the state,” says the South Florida Water Management District’s Elsner. “When you look at statewide needs, and the $2.24 billion that’s needed annually, I’ll say it falls short. … These are not cheap projects.”
Without enough government funds to help subsidize water supply projects, costs must be spread among ratepayers. Local impacts will vary per utilities’ rate structures and population sizes. Additional infrastructure costs are especially a burden for Florida’s rural utilities, some of which only have a few dozen customers, with many on fixed incomes.
From 2014 to 2024, the average monthly water bill for Florida’s public utilities spiked 33% for residential consumption levels, according to a 2025 report from Maitland-based utility consultant Raftelis. That accounts for a 2.9% jump every year.
Surveyed water bills stretched from $11.04 in Orange County’s Winter Garden to $57.72 in Broward County’s Wilton Manors. Groundwater shortages, expensive alternative water supplies, infrastructure replacements and additions and escalating project costs are among the factors contributing to rising rates, the report says.
“Over time, if we aren’t properly investing in infrastructure for clean water, it will become unaffordable. … The wealthier people will not be impacted as much — they’ll see a more expensive water bill — but some of the lower-income families will have a difficult time just surviving,” Hale says. “If we don’t make this investment and we don’t do this, we’re not going to have a successful state. … What happens if this area didn’t have water? Everybody’s going to leave. You have no tax base. You have nothing.”
Water Worries
PRESSURE POINTS: Florida’s population is expected to reach 26.4 million by 2040, hiking the state’s water needs by at least 13%.
SUPPLY STRAIN: A shortfall is on the horizon. About two-thirds of Florida are water resource caution areas, where existing water supplies are insufficient to meet future demands.
RIPPLE EFFECTS: State water officials are brainstorming solutions to create at least 390 million more gallons of water a day — and they won’t be cheap.
Eric Draper, a former director of the Florida Park Service who also served on the Water Management District Review Commission, says Florida needs “stronger rules” regarding landscape irrigation.
A Plant City demonstration project transformed wastewater into drinking water. The owner of Keel Farms winery and brewery made a pale lager beer from hundreds of gallons of the treated water. It sold out.