Water For Fighting

In this episode, Brett sits down with former four-term member of the Florida House of Representatives, Florida Keys champion, and current mayor of Monroe County – Holly Raschein.

Holly was born and raised in Alaska, but she has ultimately made her home over 5,000 miles away in the Florida Keys.  Holly got her start in the legislative process working for lobbying legend Bob Levy, working with now-Florida Senator, Ana Maria Rodriguez.  She would go on to work as an aide to two House members from Monroe County (Ken Sorensen and Ron Saunders) before staking her own claim on Florida’s Southernmost seat in the legislature for four terms.  In addition to being a county commissioner and the county’s mayor, she is also the Director of Government Affairs for AshBritt, a well-known operator in the world of disaster recovery.

They discuss her parents’ individual journeys to end up in Alaska; her childhood amongst the moose; the decision to head for the opposite side of the country for college at Florida State University; how she ended up in the “Fabulous Florida Keys”; the interesting and quirky similarities between the Keys and Alaska; how she decided to run for state office and the massive impact she made there; what the passage of the Florida Keys Stewardship Act means for the future of her community; what she brought back home to make her more effective as a county commissioner; and the challenges that lie ahead for The Keys.

Holly is as active as ever in her many philanthropic endeavors, and even with an incredibly busy life, she still makes her son her biggest priority.  If you want to find out what makes the Keys special and what it takes to make a difference there, this is a conversation you won’t want to miss.  Plus, you’ll get some advice on what to do if you get chased by a moose.

We hope you enjoy the conversation!

To check out Holly’s Wikipedia page, go here:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holly_Merrill_Raschein

To see what’s in the Florida Keys Stewardship Act, head here: https://www.monroecounty-fl.gov/721/Florida-Keys-Stewardship-Act

If you’d like to know more about Holly’s important work at AshBritt, go here: https://www.ashbritt.com

While you’re here, why not check out a few fun facts about Alaskan Moose here: https://www.alaskatourjobs.com/blog/useful-tips/five-fun-facts-about-alaskan-moose/

This episode of Water for Fighting is brought to you by my friends at Sea and Shoreline.  

Sea and Shoreline is the Southeast’s leading innovator in protecting coastal communities from devastating storms and restoring ecosystems that once faced ecological collapse. Visit their website at www.Seaandshoreline.com.  

This Episode is also thanks to my friends at Resource Environmental Solutions.

RES is the nation’s leader in ecological restoration, helping to restore Florida’s natural resources with water quality and stormwater solutions that offer communities guaranteed performance and outcomes. Check them out at www.res.us 

Please be sure to check out the Florida Specifier Podcast hosted by Ryan Matthews and myself as part of a new venture where we’re striving to become Florida’s first source for environmental news, educational tools, and unique perspectives on our state’s natural environment and the events that shape it.  To learn more about its flagship print publication and more, visit The Florida Specifier.

You can follow the show on LinkedIn and Instagram @flwaterpod, and you can reach me directly at [email protected] with your comments and suggestions for who and/or what you’d like to know more about.

Production of this podcast is by Lonely Fox Studios. Thanks to Karl Sorne for making the best of what he had to work with. And to David Barfield for the amazing graphics and technical assistance.

And finally, a very special thank you goes out to Bo Spring from the Bo Spring Band  for giving permission to use his music for this podcast.  The song is called Doing Work for Free, (Apple Music | Spotify) and you should check out the band live, or wherever great music is sold.

This week, Brett sits down with professor, researcher, and award-winning author, David Sedlak to talk about his latest book, Water for All – Global Solutions for a Changing Climate.  David started his career as a researcher looking to solve our world’s water quality challenges but eventually shifted his focus to working on how to cope with, or even prevent, water scarcity in the United States and throughout the world.  

They discuss the “Six Water Crises”; the “Great Acceleration”; the difference in the scope of challenges between rich and poor countries, as well as rich and poor within a country; the role of dams in a post-Acceleration nation and world; salinization of farmland soils out West and what we need to do about it; and his artful distinction between optimism and hopefulness as it relates to the future of water.   

To buy Water for All, try here before you go to Amazon or the other big guys: https://www.midtownreader.com/book/9780300256932

You can get his first book, Water 4.0, there as well. Here’s the link for it: https://www.midtownreader.com/book/9780300212679

Why not check out David’s TED Talk.  It’s really good, and it’ll give you a sense of what he’s about while you’re waiting for your copy of his books to arrive.  Find it here: https://www.ted.com/talks/david_sedlak_4_ways_we_can_avoid_a_catastrophic_drought?language=en

David talked about what got him interested in working on water issues, and one of the motivators was an environmental disaster that was discovered in the late 70s, known as Love Canal.  If you’re not familiar it, here’s a decent place to start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Canal

To keep up with the other good work David is doing, including as director of the Berkeley Water Center at the University of California, Berkeley, check out his page here: https://ce.berkeley.edu/people/faculty/sedlak

This episode of Water for Fighting is brought to you by my friends at RES.

RES is the nation’s leader in ecological restoration, helping to restore Florida’s natural resources with water quality and stormwater solutions that offer communities guaranteed performance and outcomes. Check them out at www.res.us 

This Episode is also thanks to my friends at Collins Land Services.

When it comes to your disaster recovery and land management needs, you’re looking for the perfect combination of competence, reliability, and affordability.  And that means you’re looking for Collins Land Services.  Check them out at www.collinsland.com

Please be sure to check out the Florida Specifier Podcast hosted by Ryan Matthews and myself as part of a new venture where we’re striving to become Florida’s first source for environmental news, educational tools, and unique perspectives on our state’s natural environment and the events that shape it.  To learn more about its flagship print publication and more, visit The Florida Specifier.

You can follow the show on LinkedIn and Instagram @flwaterpod, and you can reach me directly at [email protected] with your comments and suggestions for who and/or what you’d like to know more about.

Production of this podcast is by Lonely Fox Studios. Thanks to Karl Sorne for making the best of what he had to work with. And to David Barfield for the amazing graphics and technical assistance.

And finally, a very special thank you goes out to Bo Spring from the Bo Spring Band  for giving permission to use his music for this podcast.  The song is called Doing Work for Free, (Apple Music | Spotify) and you should check out the band live, or wherever great music is sold. 4

This week, Brett had the privilege of sharing some time with Tampa and Florida legend – Governor Bob Martinez.  He was Tampa’s 54th mayor and Florida’s 40th governor; both positions held as the first of Spanish descent.  He also has deep roots in Tampa, his grandparents having immigrated from Spain at the turn of the 20th Century during a great boom in the cigar industry there.  His father worked in the restaurant business, including as a long-time employee at the famed Columbia Restaurant in Ybor City, and then later at the family-owned Café Sevilla in West Tampa.

Martinez was a star athlete at Jefferson High School, a graduate of the University of Tampa, and got his professional start as a classroom teacher before becoming the Executive Director of the Hillsborough County Classroom Teachers Association.  He was called upon by Governor Ruben Askew to serve on the Governing Board of the Southwest Florida Water Management District and chair three Basin Boards there: The Hillsborough River, Northwest Hillsborough, and Alafia River.  

They discuss his childhood in Old Tampa where he enjoyed school, excelled at sports, and spent his free moments fishing with his father and his friends; how Café Sevilla became the birthplace of a mayor’s race and the campaign to be Governor of Florida; how his service as head of the teachers union gave him his first taste of real politics; his time at Swiftmud gave him a taste for the water and environmental needs of a region; and a mayorship that gave him the opportunity to restore, innovate, and move his home city forward.

His term as governor would be marked by enacting some of the most consequential environmental policy in Florida history including the enactment of the Preservation 2000 conservation land acquisition program, the Growth Management Act, and the Surface Water Improvement and Management Act.  He also implemented the Florida Lottery, created Florida’s Turnpike Authority, and created Space Port Florida.  

There are a few other achievements in particular that hold a more personal value to Brett including Martinez’s restoration of the Lowry Park Zoo from the ground up as mayor; the creation of Florida Prepaid College; the rebirth of Nature’s Classroom in Hillsborough County; an amazing nearly 70-year (and counting) partnership with his beloved wife Mary Jane; and of course, his analysis of why the Tampa Cuban sandwich is superior to the one from Miami (it’s the bread).

He’s still as active as ever, serving on many boards and clubs, is a Senior Policy Advisor with the Holland & Knight Law Firm, and at 89 years-old, you can still find him on his daily walks or on the tennis court.

We hope you enjoy the conversation!

To visit Governor Martinez’s page at the Holland & Knight law firm, go here:  https://www.hklaw.com/en/professionals/m/martinez-bob

To see his useful, but woefully incomplete Wikipedia page, head here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Martinez

To see a decent history of Florida’s land conservation programs, including Governor Martinez’s efforts which led to Preservation 2000, go here: https://ufdcimages.uflib.ufl.edu/IR/00/00/19/42/00001/FE33100.pdf

To see an image of the menu from the Governor’s family restaurant, check it out here: http://ciadigitalcollections.culinary.edu/digital/collection/p16940coll1/id/14253

The Governor was a star athlete at the University of Tampa, and the sports facility there is even named in his honor.  To get a look at that, head to their site here: https://www.tampaspartans.com/information/athletic_info/facilities/Martinez/index

This episode of Water for Fighting is brought to you by my friends at Sea and Shoreline.  

Sea and Shoreline is the Southeast’s leading innovator in protecting coastal communities from devastating storms and restoring ecosystems that once faced ecological collapse. Visit their website at www.Seaandshoreline.com.  

This Episode is also thanks to my friends at Resource Environmental Solutions.

RES is the nation’s leader in ecological restoration, helping to restore Florida’s natural resources with water quality and stormwater solutions that offer communities guaranteed performance and outcomes. Check them out at www.res.us 

Please be sure to check out the Florida Specifier Podcast hosted by Ryan Matthews and myself as part of a new venture where we’re striving to become Florida’s first source for environmental news, educational tools, and unique perspectives on our state’s natural environment and the events that shape it.  To learn more about its flagship print publication and more, visit The Florida Specifier.

You can follow the show on LinkedIn and Instagram @flwaterpod, and you can reach me directly at [email protected] with your comments and suggestions for who and/or what you’d like to know more about.

Production of this podcast is by Lonely Fox Studios. Thanks to Karl Sorne for making the best of what he had to work with. And to David Barfield for the amazing graphics and technical assistance.  

And finally, a very special thank you goes out to Bo Spring from the Bo Spring Band  for giving permission to use his music for this podcast.  The song is called Doing Work for Free, (Apple Music | Spotify) and you should check out the band live, or wherever great music is sold. 

This week, Brett got to share some time with a true gentleman, friend, and public servant – Hugh Thomas.  Hugh has been the Executive Director of the Suwannee River Water Management District for over seven years, and he has brought a wealth of experience to that role which was earned in the private sector as well as his various roles at the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services.  

He’s a big believer in the innovative work of the Suwannee River Partnership, and he shares some insights on how the “Fifth Largest Water Management District in Florida”, is tackling the water quantity and quality challenges of today and tomorrow.

They talk about his family’s roots in Gilchrist County; the shocking news that Hugh was born in Tampa; how his professional path has crossed a few times with mutual friend and guest of the podcast, Ann Shortelle; his philosophy for partnership with the agricultural community; his appreciation for governing boards, and his in particular; his questionable advice on whether to build a house with your spouse as a young couple; and of course, his likeness to the mythical lumberjack – Paul Bunyan.  

Hugh was generous with his time and insights, and we hope you enjoy the conversation.  

To find out more about the Suwannee River Partnership, head here: https://suwanneeriverpartnership.com

To learn about the Suwannee River Water Management District, go here: https://www.mysuwanneeriver.com

To see the cost-share opportunities available through the District’s portal, go here: https://www.mysuwanneeriver.com/366/Agricultural-Cost-Share-Program and here: https://www.mysuwanneeriver.com/374/RIVER-Cost-Share-Program

And because you probably don’t know where Bell, Florida is (or that the town was named after the winner of a beauty contest, Bell Fletcher), check out the town’s website here: https://www.townofbellflorida.com

This episode of Water for Fighting is brought to you by my friends at Sea and Shoreline.  

Sea and Shoreline is the Southeast’s leading innovator in protecting coastal communities from devastating storms and restoring ecosystems that once faced ecological collapse. Visit their website at www.Seaandshoreline.com.  

This Episode is also thanks to my friends at Resource Environmental Solutions.

RES is the nation’s leader in ecological restoration, helping to restore Florida’s natural resources with water quality and stormwater solutions that offer communities guaranteed performance and outcomes. Check them out at www.res.us 

Please be sure to check out the Florida Specifier Podcast hosted by Ryan Matthews and myself as part of a new venture where we’re striving to become Florida’s first source for environmental news, educational tools, and unique perspectives on our state’s natural environment and the events that shape it.  To learn more about its flagship print publication and more, visit The Florida Specifier.

You can follow the show on LinkedIn and Instagram @flwaterpod, and you can reach me directly at [email protected] with your comments and suggestions for who and/or what you’d like to know more about.

Production of this podcast is by Lonely Fox Studios. Thanks to Karl Sorne for making the best of what he had to work with. And to David Barfield for the amazing graphics and technical assistance.  

And finally, a very special thank you goes out to Bo Spring from the Bo Spring Band  for giving permission to use his music for this podcast.  The song is called Doing Work for Free, (Apple Music | Spotify) and you should check out the band live, or wherever great music is sold. 

00:00:00:00 – 00:00:28:02

Speaker 1

Welcome to water for fighting, where you discuss the past, present and future of water Florida with the people who make it happen. I’m your host, Brett Cyphers. This week’s discussion is brought to you by Sea and Shoreline and Resource Environmental Solutions. Since shoreline is the southeast leading innovator in protecting coastal communities from devastating storms and restoring ecosystems that once faced ecological collapse.

00:00:28:04 – 00:01:01:12

Speaker 1

Visit their website at blue Dot. Seeing shoreline.com. And of course, rez. Rez is a nation’s leader in ecological restoration, helping to restore Florida’s natural resources with water quality and stormwater solutions that offer communities guaranteed performance and outcomes. Check them out at rescues. All right. This episode’s a real treat for me, because I get to sit down with a true gentleman and my friend Hugh Thomas, in addition to being an all around great guy.

00:01:01:12 – 00:01:23:21

Speaker 1

Hugh is the executive director of the Suwannee River Water Management District, where he has been since 2016. In fact, he served Floridians throughout North Florida for over 20 years, including 14 years with the Florida Department of Consumer Services in the Office of AG Water Policy. Hugh and I overlapped our service to North Florida at adjacent water management districts for five years.

00:01:23:21 – 00:01:30:05

Speaker 1

He had Suwannee in me at northwest, and I’m happy to get to hang out with him again today. Hugh, welcome to the show.

00:01:30:07 – 00:01:32:08

Speaker 2

Thanks, Brett. I appreciate the opportunity to be here.

00:01:32:10 – 00:01:51:23

Speaker 1

Yeah. It’s great. It’s great to have you. I’m going to come in with the first big curveball, because it’s kind of like someone telling you that the Pace Picante sauce is from New York City. You’re a North Florida guy at heart. That’s all I’ve ever known you in the context of is North Florida. But you were actually born in Tampa.

00:01:52:04 – 00:02:00:11

Speaker 1

In fact, in a hospital that no longer exists. So the question is, what did you do to break the Good Samaritan hospital?

00:02:00:13 – 00:02:22:17

Speaker 2

Well, my memory doesn’t go quite that far back, but I do remember actually going to the hospital when I was about five years old to get some stitches. I get three brothers and a sister. And growing up as the youngest of the family, you know, I often encountered physical ailments from that one time that I needed stitches. So I do remember going back there, but thankfully hadn’t been back since then.

00:02:22:17 – 00:02:35:16

Speaker 2

But I had no clue what happened. I think it was just progress. and that area, it’s over on the western side. Or was on the western side of Tampa. And, like the remainder of the state, it has grown. They needed something else here.

00:02:35:18 – 00:02:54:19

Speaker 1

I assume is like a Paul Bunyan esque story. Like, if you don’t know, Hugh Thomas, Hugh is about the size of Paul Bunyan. He looks like a lumberjack. And so my assumption is that they couldn’t handle him at the hospital. But we’ll take we’ll take his story as a as the gospel there. But like I said, you’re a Norfolk guy through and through.

00:02:54:19 – 00:03:00:14

Speaker 1

So I mean, tell me about your parents. Like where are they from? And then what took them to Tampa?

00:03:00:16 – 00:03:25:17

Speaker 2

Well, what I would say I do call North Florida home and kind of a fifth generation Floridian. And so my parents were actually from North Florida. They moved away for about 30 years and then moved back up into that area. and so they were gone. And North Florida, Gilchrist County, primarily, and they’re in Bell, Florida. It’s a very rural area, very small county.

00:03:25:22 – 00:03:50:12

Speaker 2

They moved for work and they live down in the Lithia Springs area. Okay. But at one point my dad worked on the dairy farm and opportunity presented itself after three of my brothers moved out. Opportunity presented itself for my parents to move back up to North Florida. I’m glad they did. And we got a lot of relatives that part of the state, so it’s enjoyable for us.

00:03:50:12 – 00:03:56:02

Speaker 2

My wife and I’ve been able to raise our three kids there, and we’ve really enjoyed living in North Florida.

00:03:56:04 – 00:04:13:15

Speaker 1

So you use Tampa in the same way most people do with, say, Tampa, Orlando or Atlanta, which means you didn’t live in Tampa. I you know, I do the same thing if somebody doesn’t know where Stephanie is, and if you’re talking to somebody, they almost never do know where Stephanie is. It’s actually a little bit north of Lithia.

00:04:13:15 – 00:04:20:06

Speaker 1

I grew up going to Lithia Springs as a kid. Was it the the Carey Cattle Company back in those days or someone else over there?

00:04:20:09 – 00:04:22:22

Speaker 2

I’ll be honest, my memory doesn’t go that far back either.

00:04:23:00 – 00:04:24:01

Speaker 1

That’s our that’s I.

00:04:24:01 – 00:04:38:16

Speaker 2

Don’t recall what the name of the cattle company was that they that he worked at there. He had already quit by the time I was born. Think he was. Oh, he was working for Altman truck lines down through there. And, he was able to retire from there. And we moved to North Florida.

00:04:38:18 – 00:04:41:14

Speaker 1

So how long did your family live down in under?

00:04:41:18 – 00:05:02:14

Speaker 2

They left of North Florida. They were going for about 30 years. They lived in the Tampa area there at our residence on Walters Avenue of all places. Wow. They were there for, I want to say it was about 18 years. Okay. They had lived over in Lithia Springs. The notice assets at the time, my dad was working at the dairy there.

00:05:02:16 – 00:05:19:15

Speaker 2

My mom was a stay at home mom, you know, with five kids. You know, that lot in that time frame? Yeah. I mean, we’re talking 50 years ago or longer and it it was a lot in that area. Yeah, I’m glad to. Nothing wrong Brian. With the Tampa area. But I like to think I’m more influenced about North Florida.

00:05:19:19 – 00:05:25:00

Speaker 1

Yeah. No that’s in that’s great because you I mean your parents graduated high school in Bell, right?

00:05:25:05 – 00:05:26:13

Speaker 2

Oh yeah.

00:05:26:15 – 00:05:32:20

Speaker 1

How many kids? I mean, your dad’s a question. I know it’s rules. Like how many kids were in a in their class in those days. You even know. I mean.

00:05:32:23 – 00:06:01:00

Speaker 2

There were six kids whenever my parents graduated in high school. Conversely, when I graduated in 80 from Bell, there were 33 in my graduating class. You you tell someone that nowadays. And I mean, but that’s just speaks to the rural nature. And sure, in Bell and, Gilchrist County, we I think Bell got a caution light probably about for somewhere close to about 45 years ago.

00:06:01:02 – 00:06:22:01

Speaker 2

And that’s all they still have right now. But if you look at the school system, they’re they’re an A-rated school. They have been for several years. Both school systems. you have Trenton and Bell, both school systems. They are rated very highly. And when you speak to people that have moved into the area now, that’s one of the the criteria that they’re looking for are good school systems.

00:06:22:07 – 00:06:27:23

Speaker 1

Yeah. I mean let’s talk about that a little bit. First. Were you always the size of Paul Bunyan?

00:06:27:23 – 00:06:50:12

Speaker 2

No I wasn’t yeah. Like I said I am I will tell you I am the tallest of any of my siblings. Okay. That unfortunately didn’t do me much good until after they had already moved out. But it’s, you know, growing up in a rural area, I was really able to enjoy a lot of the outdoor activities. Gilchrist was and still is primarily agriculturally based.

00:06:50:14 – 00:07:17:19

Speaker 2

And so I did grow up on working on a lot of farms. We had cows at our place ourself and, you know, just grew up in high school. That was the thing at the time is you spend your summers working on the farm, whether it was harvesting peanuts, it may be pitching watermelons. It’s interesting you think about it, I remember and Short Tail and and I went out to a watermelon grower one time when she was director Swanny and I took her out on a tour.

00:07:17:19 – 00:07:38:07

Speaker 2

And now the majority of what are grown are small, personal size melons. Well, back then you had 50 and 60 pound gres or crimson sweets that were grown, and it was a workout. And it was great for the football team for prepping for fall football practice because you got to work out during the summer. That is a, you know, it was enjoyable.

00:07:38:07 – 00:07:44:17

Speaker 2

I really enjoyed my childhood and I’ve tried to preserve some of that for my kids growing up because I think it’s a it’s a good lifestyle.

00:07:44:18 – 00:07:48:08

Speaker 1

Let me ask you this. You met your wife there, right in in Belle.

00:07:48:08 – 00:07:48:20

Speaker 2

I did.

00:07:48:20 – 00:07:51:14

Speaker 1

Right it. Was she in your graduating class?

00:07:51:20 – 00:08:19:09

Speaker 2

No, she was not. I ironically, her oldest brother and I were classmates, and she was a nuisance. And I’ve told her this. She was a nuisance then. But after I graduated and went to community college, my now brother in law, he went to school over at the university right away and just kind of lost touch with him. Didn’t see her for probably about 2 or 3 years.

00:08:19:11 – 00:08:34:14

Speaker 2

And all of a sudden whenever I was back in the area more often, it regained my, my interest. And has held that ever since. So now she is she does have a lot of family in the area there. Okay, girl, having grown up, since she was a young child as well.

00:08:34:19 – 00:08:41:05

Speaker 1

Yeah. And you eventually get married around the time you were at the Lake City Community College, right?

00:08:41:07 – 00:08:44:18

Speaker 2

Actually, it was shortly after I finished up at Lake City.

00:08:44:18 – 00:09:02:17

Speaker 1

I mean, the reason I asked is really to talk about the two of you. Talk about you two as a couple later on. So after you get together, whether it be, you know, just before marriage or getting married, you talk about starting, starting that family in that place. That’s a small one that you’re working to preserve.

00:09:02:19 – 00:09:26:23

Speaker 2

We had a nice, long honeymoon. It lasted about 12 years, and that was by choice. We wanted to do some traveling. She always enjoyed camping, as did I. Growing up. We did a lot of a lot of camping up in the Smokies, and we had a good time with that. During that time frame, we built our first house over on the east side of the county there in Gilchrist County, and then kids came along.

00:09:26:23 – 00:09:45:09

Speaker 2

You know, kids always change your outlook from then on. But, you know, we worked together a lot. She’s a great work partner. We built the house ourselves, contracted out some of the specialty work that was done, but that was a good exercise. I highly recommend it for couples to build a house. You probably never do it again. Well.

00:09:45:11 – 00:09:53:05

Speaker 1

I mean, I read the you were actually in construction in some of those early days. Was that at that time that you were building the house or did you that before?

00:09:53:06 – 00:10:20:06

Speaker 2

Actually, the working construction predated us building our house and had been in construction for about two years, and then prior to us getting married, I had actually purchased some property, over on the eastern side, seven acres. And, we decided that we wanted to build a house over there. So we did over the course of about probably about 8 or 9 months, we constructed the house, and I was still working in construction at the time.

00:10:20:06 – 00:10:47:20

Speaker 2

And then I actually left private construction and went to work over at the University of Florida and worked there for a couple of years with the Division of Housing and Construction. Edward got to work with Edward Foster. He’s now retired from over there. Great gentleman. He taught me a lot about masonry work such that at the time, and it had come in handy several times, actually, even up until last year of doing tile work and renovations, interior renovations.

00:10:47:22 – 00:11:06:22

Speaker 2

So that’s that’s still handy. I enjoy doing that. I enjoy working with my hands. Woodworking is a hobby of mine as well, so it worked out very well. While I was at the, the division of housing there in Gainesville University. And then in year three, I decided I wanted to go back and get my degree. So we did.

00:11:06:22 – 00:11:13:10

Speaker 2

My wife was I was working over at Shands there at the time. We carpooled back and forth together.

00:11:13:13 – 00:11:15:09

Speaker 1

What was she doing for a living at that point?

00:11:15:11 – 00:11:33:22

Speaker 2

At that point, she was working as a secretary for the Department of Neurology. Okay. There. And so, you know, it gave us a good, good ride back and forth, the commute time going over there. It’s interesting to see how over the years that commute time has stretch. Now is about an hour and a half, from where it would have been.

00:11:34:01 – 00:12:03:11

Speaker 2

And so, you know, it just speaks to the amount of growth that’s occurred, on the western side of Gainesville there. But I remember giving a keynote speech to, graduating class there in Trenton a few years ago. And one of the things that I spoke about was determination. And whenever my wife and I were both in school, there she was going to school at at Santa Fe Community College, which is kind of the North Gainesville, and of course, the university.

00:12:03:15 – 00:12:25:07

Speaker 2

It’s located where it’s at. Well, it’s about 14 miles between the two and so we would walk in or we’d ride in together. My wife would drop me off at work, unload my bike. We had a small pickup truck. We drove back and forth and, I would unload my bike and I would go to work, and then she would go on over to class.

00:12:25:07 – 00:12:43:00

Speaker 2

Well, then in the afternoons, she would take the vehicle and go out to Santa Fe Community College, and I would take off work because I was working full time. Still, I’d take off work and then I’d go to class at night, and then I’d bike out to Santa Fe. That’ll help your health out. Yeah, yeah, I need some of that now.

00:12:43:00 – 00:12:50:16

Speaker 2

I don’t know that I can hold out for that type of ride, but it was it was a good friend. About the time I would get out there should be getting out of class and we go on home.

00:12:50:16 – 00:12:52:11

Speaker 1

And that’s hilly territory as well.

00:12:52:12 – 00:12:53:19

Speaker 2

Well it is, it is.

00:12:53:19 – 00:13:06:06

Speaker 1

So was it always your plan to work and go to and finish school at UF, or was there something there that was happening? Is like, was it working there and saying, I can do this. You actually these kids out here, I can do this?

00:13:06:07 – 00:13:32:04

Speaker 2

Well, my oldest brother is he retired as a school teacher several years ago, but he taught down in Hernando County and he retired out of it. And he loved teaching. And I’ve always enjoyed teaching or speaking about something that, you know, and trying to trying to train or mentor someone with it. And I’ve always enjoyed the outdoors and biology.

00:13:32:05 – 00:13:55:10

Speaker 2

So whenever I was at the university, I pursued a degree in zoology with a minor in biology education, because that’s where I wanted to be wanted to go to. I realized when I was at Lake City Community College, I was on a civil engineering track and I really enjoyed parts of that. But physics with calculus just, I learned, just was not my strong point.

00:13:55:12 – 00:14:20:03

Speaker 2

You know, I just realized I wasn’t a numbers guy at that point. And anyway, so whenever I was at the university did, pursue their zoology track and, biology minor, and whenever I graduated, there weren’t any teaching jobs locally for biology teachers, which is not unexpected at that time, but an opportunity provided itself at a local consulting firm.

00:14:20:03 – 00:14:38:22

Speaker 2

In fact, at that time it was environmental science and engineering. And and so when I graduated, I went to work there. Great job. I worked for ten years. The biggest drawback that I had about working as an environmental consultant at that time was the number of name changes that we went through in a ten year, which.

00:14:38:22 – 00:14:39:22

Speaker 1

Is just happens.

00:14:39:22 – 00:15:13:16

Speaker 2

Yeah, it does. That’s part of it. But it enabled me to meet a lot of great people, environmental scientists and engineers as well, working in that field as it was known at that time. That was actually one of the first engineering environmental engineering companies in the Gainesville area. And so with that, I was working in the I was hired in the toxicology lab that we had there and worked my way through there over the course of ten years working in toxicology lab and then also doing risk assessment and wetland delineations, wetland certifications on there.

00:15:13:20 – 00:15:23:07

Speaker 2

Great opportunity. I learned a lot, gave me a lot of exposure with it. And and I really enjoyed that type of work. And that’s always helped me over the years.

00:15:23:09 – 00:15:52:05

Speaker 1

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00:15:52:07 – 00:16:16:20

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00:16:17:01 – 00:16:40:13

Speaker 1

To find out how you can partner with Sea in trying to protect your community, visit them. Dot sea and shoreline.com. You’ll be glad you did. All right, let’s get back to the conversation. Let me let me pause for a second, because there are a couple of things, like I get folks that ask me about some of the technical aspects of some of the things the that that guests do.

00:16:40:13 – 00:17:05:02

Speaker 1

And so there’s two that I want you to talk a little bit about. And folks that aren’t familiar with engineering firms don’t realize that it is pretty circular. It is. It’s a life where folks tend to move around that businesses tend to buy other businesses. Right. Is that can you talk a little bit about that in those in those early years?

00:17:05:02 – 00:17:29:22

Speaker 2

To me, over the course of that ten year period, as you stated, there was a lot of transition between companies being bought out and sold. There was a lot of streamlining that occurred at that time. Whenever I first went to SC, there were about, I want to say, somewhere in the neighborhood of about 550 employees here because they had a large analytical lab also, and they did a lot of Department of Defense contracts with that.

00:17:30:00 – 00:17:51:13

Speaker 2

Well, there were some transition. Some of those contracts were lost at the time. And so the the company downsized. It also was sold at that point when I left that company, I want to say there were an analyst in Shoretel was still at that company at the time. That’s where I first met in. As I recall, they were somewhere in the neighborhood of less than 100 employees there.

00:17:51:13 – 00:18:15:05

Speaker 2

They had downsized kind of to a bare bones environmental firm at that point. Mark Giblin was working there. And I think, Mark, if I recall correctly, we’re going back a few years now, but I think Mark was the office manager at that point. Whenever I left no fault of his right. But it is people in those fields. They do tend to operate for one or, you know, another company over time.

00:18:15:06 – 00:18:36:08

Speaker 1

It’s what creates, I think, that maybe unique among the types of work that one can do in Florida is it’s it’s such a small world. It is like if you I didn’t realize this, if you’d asked me, you know, ten, 15 years ago, I would have never known that this, that that’s how you all got to know each other is because everyone eventually works with each other.

00:18:36:10 – 00:18:37:17

Speaker 1

It seemed. It seemed like to me.

00:18:37:21 – 00:18:52:17

Speaker 2

No, you’re right, it is. And, you know, I think I think back now, some of the engineers that we have that work for the district, some that have worked for some of the other districts and even while I was at the department, they are all people that I had worked with previously whenever I was in consulting.

00:18:52:17 – 00:18:58:07

Speaker 1

Well, let’s get to that, that job itself. Because what does someone who works you said the toxicology lab.

00:18:58:07 – 00:19:00:04

Speaker 2

Toxicology lab. Been there.

00:19:00:06 – 00:19:03:11

Speaker 1

What is what do you folks do in the toxicology lab?

00:19:03:11 – 00:19:33:10

Speaker 2

Well, it’s as with the regulatory program, you know, at the water management district, we work with environment resource permits within the regulatory realm. Also, you have what’s called National Pollution Discharge Elimination System permits in PDS that industrial operations have to have even within the agricultural fields, dairies, large dairies, CAFOs, confined animal feeding operate have to have in permits, and they’re within the state.

00:19:33:12 – 00:20:01:15

Speaker 2

DEP has regulatory authority over those. So with that, if there is a discharge of wastewater from that particular industrial operation, commercial operation, they have to meet water quality standards for that. And so with that, there has to be sampling that occurs. And SC they actually provided those sample sampling activities to gather those samples in. Then you utilize biological animals.

00:20:01:16 – 00:20:24:19

Speaker 2

It could be minnows could be the blue crabs depending on what the permit calls for. And then you do a chronic and acute toxicity to determine what the lethal concentrations are of a pollution discharge. And the effects of that could be reproduction. it could be some type of chronic illness. One of the most interesting things that we that projects that we did was actually with blue crabs.

00:20:24:19 – 00:20:36:01

Speaker 2

And we looked at the influence of a, a discharge within an estuary and the effects that it had on the number of moles that we blue crabs go through. So it was kind of kind of interesting for me anyway.

00:20:36:02 – 00:20:54:18

Speaker 1

Yeah. No it is. And that’s I mean, that’s why I asked I like I think it looks like, oh, that sounds like, that sounds like a job. And I want to get a little deeper and, and for folks out there that you know that don’t know about, I guess I’m speaking to Gail Halpern. So when you’re listening out there, Gail, I can you can give me your follow ups later on.

00:20:54:20 – 00:21:11:07

Speaker 1

So tell me, tell me about our mutual friend Doctor and Shoretel who’s who was the executive director? the Swan River Water Management, and also Saint John’s later on. That’s right, that’s right. Oh, I mean, she was my boss at DC. Tell me, how long were you at SC together?

00:21:11:13 – 00:21:37:00

Speaker 2

Well, as I recall, and was there whenever I started, she was working in another group. She was in the risk assessment group. I started out in the Environmental Assessment and Toxicology Group, which is a separate, separate area, probably 5 or 6 years. I mean, I knew Irvin and we had some encounters, them via projects, but probably about the last four years, I actually had good opportunity to work very closely with her.

00:21:37:02 – 00:21:58:08

Speaker 2

I consider her as a friend. She’s been a great mentor over the years. I remember one of the jobs that we had that was her project. It was a DoD project that we had up at Eglin Air Force Base, and we had some, a couple of other staff from SC up there. And she was there was a project manager, and we were doing some assessment work, and it was hot.

00:21:58:13 – 00:22:26:06

Speaker 2

It was hotter and blazes. One of the pictures. I still got it somewhere. We are all out on this range and the only shade around this was like in August and the only shade around was from the telephone poles that were there. And so there’s like four of us lined up in the shade of that power pole while we were waiting on an activity there, just trying to find a cool spot with it, but had a lot of great interactions with and over the years.

00:22:26:06 – 00:22:45:02

Speaker 2

And as I said, she was a great mentor relative to risk assessment. Certainly on the wetland evaluation, wetland criteria, work that I was able to do and getting my certification for that. And over the years when she went to DEP, I was happy to see her there. And I was thankful whenever she came over to Suwannee, I had the opportunity to work with.

00:22:45:02 – 00:22:58:07

Speaker 2

There I was at that time, I was working for the Office of AG Water Policy, Department of Agriculture, and so I was able to work very closely with her at the Water Management District, and we’ve remained friends over the years with it.

00:22:58:09 – 00:23:08:14

Speaker 1

Well, talk and talk for a minute then about that work at the Department bag because you left USC or if, if it was still named SC when you left.

00:23:08:16 – 00:23:15:01

Speaker 2

No, it was not actually Mac tech, which I think I think it’s still today. There you go. There you go. It’s a around.

00:23:15:01 – 00:23:20:21

Speaker 1

So so you left Mac Technical to talk about why you left and talk about your work there.

00:23:21:00 – 00:23:54:07

Speaker 2

Well I left my priorities changed a little bit. As with most environmental consultants and engineers can tell you there’s a lot of travel involved. And I decided that I wanted to be more engaged with my kids. And so, you know, an opportunity provided itself. The Lord blessed me with being able to have an opportunity to go to work for the Department of Agriculture and Office of Water Policy and work to develop best management practices, and also to work on a program called the Swan River partnership.

00:23:54:07 – 00:24:25:20

Speaker 2

And I’ll come back to that in a minute. But my work at the at that time with the Department of AG, I was hired as a coordinator for the the Santa Fe and Lower Suwannee Basin for the Swanee River partnership. Well, the partnership is a it was actually a both a private and public entity that was started in 99 and the department of the Suwannee River Water Management District and also DEP headed up the coordination of that.

00:24:25:22 – 00:24:55:12

Speaker 2

Well, they decided, due to some foresight with doctor, Martha in her last name, evades me at this point. And also Jerry Brooks, he, if you recall him, do Martha Roberts is what I’m thinking them and also Jerry Scarborough, who was at the Swan River Water Management District for a number of years. It was their vision to have shared positions between those three agencies to work together primarily at that time for with agriculture.

00:24:55:14 – 00:25:22:13

Speaker 2

And so I was hired in as a Dak’s employee and was able to work in that capacity. My office was located at the water mains Swanny. And then opportunity provided itself. Later on, I got to work with Daryl Smith. he was the one that actually hired me, and I’m not going to say recruited, but he made me aware that the position was open, but he was aware of my work in the consulting industry.

00:25:22:13 – 00:25:49:08

Speaker 2

And so anyway, I was able to get hired and worked there for, 14, 15 years with a swag water policy. I really enjoyed my time there. Got to see a lot of progression with the BMP program and, the innovation that has come about relative to the implementation of BMPs and be able to work with agriculture, agriculture and make such a large footprint in the Suwannee District.

00:25:49:10 – 00:26:11:20

Speaker 2

And so, you know, it was very instrumental trying to work towards water quality goals. Right. initially and then more recently towards water supply concerns that we’ve got a lot of great people there as well and the Swag water policy, and I’ve continued to stay in touch with them at this time. 2016 I got to go over to the water Management District.

00:26:11:20 – 00:26:36:13

Speaker 2

Daryl had moved over to the Water Management District in 2015 at the time, and between he and Noah Valentine, who was an executive director at Swansea at that time, I was going to say I would was recruited at that point to come over to the water management district and it provided a great opportunity for me to kind of go back to the home area, because the last five years, I think it was about starting in 2010.

00:26:36:14 – 00:26:51:23

Speaker 2

I was an environmental administrator for the Department of Bag in. That was a lot more traveling. That’s when you and I had our first, encounters in northwest, because I was in charge of the programs in northwest Swansea, in Saint John’s.

00:26:51:23 – 00:27:15:00

Speaker 1

I’m not asking you to say like, well, this is worse or this is better, but the difference in having something that’s it’s kind of new and fresh, which is this one river partnership back in those early days. And you do that for a while and you’re narrowly focused on, hey, we’re going to fix we’re going to fix this thing and, and solidify these relationships between not just agencies, but between agents, the government and, and farmers.

00:27:15:02 – 00:27:30:15

Speaker 1

and then and then you go from that to guess what? Now you’re in charge of all of North Florida. You know, I was I was glad to meet you, obviously. But tell me about the the difference in change in your scope to something much broader.

00:27:30:17 – 00:28:01:11

Speaker 2

Well, it one it allowed because my focus had primarily been on agricultural practices in the Suwannee District, although I was aware of the parts of the state and even across the nation, it allowed me to see firsthand, particularly out in the Panhandle, because the amount of agriculture that goes on out there, the different practices and challenges that producers in those areas have, a lot of it is due to the soil, that are out there in the types of crops that are grown with it.

00:28:01:11 – 00:28:47:12

Speaker 2

And it it enabled me to make a lot of great acquaintances yourself included with that, and to really broaden some of the opportunities where we had started programs in the Suwannee Basin. I think Brian predated us with the farm programs. Right. They have down in the Swift mud area, but Suwannee utilized funding from all three of those agencies that I mentioned previously, and to develop cost share programs and try to be innovative with technology and making fertilizer use and water use more efficient, and to try and be able to expand that out into the northwest area and even over into Saint John’s with their cost share programs and assistance programs that they have now.

00:28:47:14 – 00:29:10:01

Speaker 2

To me, was it was very satisfying to be able to bring those types of practices, you know, with best management practices. The intent and definition of those is to try to get a practice in place that’s protective of the environment, and it’s practical to implement. And not everything is that way. And so that’s why the Department of make tweaks as BMPs from time to time.

00:29:10:05 – 00:29:10:12

Speaker 2

Sure.

00:29:10:16 – 00:29:27:20

Speaker 1

So you kind of take the at least very familiar faces. You work with these folks a lot and I’m thinking Daryl and and and so you all know each other well. And so you put this dream team together. Now that I mean, you’re not together for very long at the district. Where are you when you’re in about 20 years?

00:29:27:20 – 00:29:29:08

Speaker 1

Only a handful of years.

00:29:29:08 – 00:29:54:14

Speaker 2

Well, Daryl was actually in Tallahassee working with the Office of Water Policy. Right. He said whenever Rich Beadle stepped down as director there in about 2010 timeframe, he Daryl filled in that role right there for some time and and was hired in 2012 right at the water management district there. Swanny. So, you know, we had probably 3 or 4 years here together.

00:29:54:16 – 00:30:06:02

Speaker 2

and that respect and is an idea person always has been that can create a rub sometimes to get to the details. But that’s okay. He’s got to have an idea person there. Yeah. And she, she provides that role very well.

00:30:06:08 – 00:30:32:00

Speaker 1

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00:31:01:01 – 00:31:30:17

Speaker 1

Discover more about their work and commitment to Florida’s communities and the environmental challenges they face by visiting Dory’s. Discuss. All right. Now back to the conversation. You mentioned, Brian, and you know, it’s absolutely right. It’s like when I looked at at northwest at the Water Management District, looking at how our relationship with agriculture would be in in the types of practices that we wanted to get into in a program that we wanted to have.

00:31:30:22 – 00:31:57:11

Speaker 1

We looked at two places, though, and one of those places didn’t happen to be the Department of Agriculture, although we were familiar with from my Swift, my days with those programs and how they they matched up sometimes with where swift mud in their their farms program. But I looked at southwest and I looked at Swanny because at that time Swanny had the extra, the extra benefit of understanding in my mind.

00:31:57:11 – 00:32:22:16

Speaker 1

It’s the understanding that if you want to go solve a problem, sometimes it means that you got to do a little bit more than your finger fair share when it comes to the cost share. And so that’s why we chose the. The numbers we did was to lean more on to the the Suwannee side of how they chose to do that cost share rather than say, Swift or even certainly even backs.

00:32:22:17 – 00:32:46:12

Speaker 1

And so I’m curious about because you were there right when you were really putting some of those things together at the Swan River Water Management District, right? Yeah. What was the thinking in your mind? Because you’re I mean, from a farm town, you’re around these folks. What did you bring to that as a group at that time? What was your thinking in developing your own program?

00:32:46:15 – 00:33:11:17

Speaker 2

Whenever you look at the practices across the district, certainly the soils. And if you look at the soil types in the northern part of the district and certainly the eastern part, you have more of a surface water control type environment. Whenever ordering, you’re below that Cody Escarpment, whether the geological feature that runs through the Suwannee District and then out into the Panhandle.

00:33:11:19 – 00:33:37:02

Speaker 2

When you get below that, you get a lot deeper sense. And so your farming practices have to change, and that that familiarity with those farming practices is kind of what I brought to the table and awareness of working with ag producers in those areas. And it’s a very collaborative effort. And one of the things that, and I can’t take full credit for it is the development and expansion of the Suwannee River partnership.

00:33:37:04 – 00:34:04:12

Speaker 2

As I mentioned, it was a visioning, and early on there was an advisory group made up of both private industry and you had the forest Service, you had the Florida Fertilizer Association, Farm Bureau that served in the steering committee aspect of it. But you also had your more progressive ag producers that were there wanting to put on the ground what works and being able to build those relationships there.

00:34:04:14 – 00:34:37:08

Speaker 2

And it served well over the years. The Suwannee River partnership is still viable today, and it’s in more of an advisory role. Early on in the years, we were working towards trying to address the Tmdl that were in place on the Suwannee and the Santa Fe and develop some reasonable assurance about, for those and then moving into the development of the B maps with it and working very closely with DEP and engaging, and then also in the stakeholder outreach associated with that.

00:34:37:08 – 00:34:58:03

Speaker 2

So I would say DEP relied heavily, at least in the Suwannee area. DEP relied heavily on us to help bring those stakeholders to the table from an awareness perspective. Even out in northwest, whenever you were there, I remember going out there and working with folks in the Jackson County area and went over the B map on Jackson blue was coming into place out there, right?

00:34:58:03 – 00:35:24:10

Speaker 1

And and just from my own perspective, it’s like those things the Swan River partnership existed for years and years before, you know, I was at northwest somewhere, and especially long before they were establishing the B map at Jackson Blue. And so I think probably some of the, some of the, the hiccups and discomforts and, you know, Charley horses that happened in Jackson Blue, it probably didn’t work through, you know, with, with all those folks were working together.

00:35:24:10 – 00:35:47:19

Speaker 1

I think underlying that is this philosophy of caring about farms and farming and farmers, but understanding that you’ve got a job to do on the other side, which is the state has rules and laws, you know, for not just, you know, water quality, but water quantity as well. And we’ll talk about that shift to water quantity for you.

00:35:47:22 – 00:36:15:13

Speaker 1

But what is I mean, is that something that you share in terms of how you approach that, which is you’ve got the absolute need for food, fiber, timber and the responsibilities that I just mentioned. Did you see that missing when you looked at Jackson Blue later on? I was like, hey, we if you had only done it this way, that you’d seen this rodeo before.

00:36:15:15 – 00:36:37:00

Speaker 2

I will tell you one of the first observations that I had when I went out there for the B map meeting, I had been asked by Farm Bureau as and I was at dak’s at the time, but I’ve been asked by Farm Bureau to come out and speak out there. Dak’s didn’t have a strong presence in the Panhandle at that time, and just from a field staff perspective.

00:36:37:02 – 00:37:06:23

Speaker 2

And so I was a little bit nervous going out there into a strange neighborhood. And I recall at at particular meeting, I don’t remember if you were there or not, but I recall at that meeting talking about some of the challenges that we had over in the Suwannee district, Springs protection and how this water quality, standard water quality goal would help preserve that spring or restore that spring back to where it was.

00:37:07:01 – 00:37:38:10

Speaker 2

And, you know, looking at it as it is across our state, agriculture is not the only influence from a water quality perspective with it. And so making agriculture understand that all the fingers aren’t pointing at them, that there’s a there’s a host of loading sources with this and that the need is to address all of them. Right. In some areas of our state, agriculture has the lion’s share just because of the land use, like in the Swansea district, per se.

00:37:38:14 – 00:38:10:04

Speaker 2

And so trying to finding common ground with those ag producers, I think that that served me very well in being able to engage with those producers going out and spending time with them. And I like to think that developing some level of trust with those producers, early on in my career at the Department of Egg, I recall going and meeting with the producer, and they had a one of these two seat large cab tractors, and I was talking to him about record keeping.

00:38:10:05 – 00:38:36:14

Speaker 2

And so he said, well, yeah, producers are busy from daylight to dark. And so he said, well, you know, if you can climb up in here with me and ride with me so we can talk about it, so I did. I’ve got up, got in the second seat and as he was planting peanuts across his field, I rode with him and talk to him, talk to him about the water quality issues and you know, what we were trying to do at the department to help agriculture be sustainable.

00:38:36:16 – 00:39:07:15

Speaker 2

And so with that, I think that spinning that time out on the farm and that’s one of the things that we have been very blessed with over at the Suwannee District, is a support from IFAs and from the Department of Agriculture and the Department Environmental protection for having technicians out on the ground, working in lockstep with these ag producers and meeting them on their terms, their ground and talking to them, not not asking them to come to a meeting necessarily at the district headquarters.

00:39:07:17 – 00:39:28:06

Speaker 2

They know now, if we call for a meeting at the district headquarters, if they can do it, if they can break away from what they’re doing in the field, they show up. They know it’s important that we have their best interest in mind. And I think that’s what worked out in the Panhandle and getting that, getting the trust of the producers out there and working.

00:39:28:11 – 00:39:43:15

Speaker 2

You know, we hired Dave Cameron out there. and then they went to work northwest. That’s right. And I think that serve the ag community very well served the district northwest very well. With that, him having that relationship developed along with the technicians out in the Panhandle.

00:39:43:15 – 00:39:58:14

Speaker 1

Right. And that, I mean, that’s precisely why I wanted him there was because of that or just like somebody that’s willing to stand on a farm and look somebody in the eye and explain things like, I care about what you do. It’s like, but we’ve got this. We’ve got this job that we’ve got to accomplish in the in the midst of that.

00:39:58:17 – 00:40:02:10

Speaker 1

Right. And you’ve got to be able to find that balance.

00:40:02:12 – 00:40:24:14

Speaker 2

You do. And and, you know, I speak to my staff now about this because we have some younger staff that are working at the office and texting or an email is so easy. I get it, you know, it is. It’s very convenient. If you want me, text me, you know, and and I can fit it into my schedule at that point.

00:40:24:14 – 00:40:54:03

Speaker 2

But ag producers certainly the younger generation of egg producers are incorporating that. And but by and large, ag producers want a phone call or they want a farm visit to do that. And I stress that to my staff, particularly our regulatory staff, is that, you know, if we have an issue with someone and it’s not necessarily just an ag producer, pick up the phone and call, talk to somebody, even if you have to leave them a voicemail, don’t just write them a letter and it don’t just send them an email.

00:40:54:04 – 00:40:56:09

Speaker 2

That’s challenging because that takes.

00:40:56:09 – 00:40:57:05

Speaker 1

Time, right?

00:40:57:07 – 00:41:01:00

Speaker 2

To do that. And you’re you’re getting into your personal space.

00:41:01:00 – 00:41:30:13

Speaker 1

I’ve always felt you have to allow yourself to, to do that because the dividends in the long run are are massive. And you mentioned before as like you said, progressive. I know you didn’t mean in the political sense, you meant in the way they look forward at solving problems, the visionary. Right. And it’s funny because, you know, you and I both know, you know, some of the big ones out there, Mr. Pittman and Bishop and Hall and Forester and a lot of folks that ran their farms from their iPhone.

00:41:30:13 – 00:41:49:20

Speaker 1

That’s right. But at the same time, when you’re talking about relationships, relationships don’t happen over your iPhone. They happen, 1 to 1. They are on your farm. Yep. I always wanted to make that a point for folks and have folks that work that would do that. That’s why I love having David at the district office, because they would they would do that.

00:41:49:20 – 00:41:51:16

Speaker 1

And I think and I think it does matter.

00:41:51:18 – 00:42:21:21

Speaker 2

It does. It really does. You know, when you think about the average age of our farmers, they’re 55 or older. And so when you look at that generation and, and I know how I am because I fit into that generation, they want that one on one time, you know, they’ll use a phone. They’ll know I got 65 year old producers and the Swanny district that utilize your iPhones to, see what their soil moisture probes are telling them, and they’ve adopted it, but they still like that interaction.

00:42:21:22 – 00:42:24:16

Speaker 2

Yeah, it’s just part of the way of life.

00:42:24:21 – 00:42:52:19

Speaker 1

Yeah. And so let’s move you into your position now as executive director. The district has seven years now, right? Seven years. Can you talk about pressure on the water sources in your region and how the pressure on those resources often comes outside the boundaries of your district? And sometimes that means north, which is easy to be mad at in Georgia, but sometimes that means east and God forbid, west.

00:42:52:21 – 00:43:26:11

Speaker 2

Right? It does. It does. And, you know, you have to to me, education about our resources, our aquifer, our water supply, the water cycle they teach in school. Tying all of that together is kind of where you have to start with someone, because in North Florida, the complexity of the geology that we have and how that affects our aquifer, how that affects our recharge and our water use, it’s critical to have an understanding of that.

00:43:26:11 – 00:43:57:06

Speaker 2

The onus is on us as a district to try and understand the connectivity of our aquifer better, and we’re still in the process of that. We’re still putting in monitoring networks and enhancing our monitoring networks to better understand how water moves within our district and what contributes within a spring, shared or a river shed. You know, I think about when Water Management District were first formed, they were formed and they still are today based upon surface watersheds.

00:43:57:08 – 00:44:21:20

Speaker 2

If you look at the Swanee, 53% of the Suwannee Basin is in Georgia. People always think about, you know, where the Swanny is, the Florida River. Well, it is, but it’s the smaller part of the storm, right? When you look at a watershed perspective. And so you have to look at all of those influences, and certainly both within our state and across the state, and then within our district and into the other districts.

00:44:21:22 – 00:44:48:15

Speaker 2

The geology allows for that water to be drawn or to be influenced from outside of the Suwannee district boundaries. And so with that, you have to approach it from a collaborative fashion, because like with Georgia or even internally within the state, nobody wants to wind up in the court system with this because that money does not do any good from rectifying the problem with it.

00:44:48:17 – 00:45:15:21

Speaker 2

So that’s one of the things in similar like but the Swan River partnership and developing incentive based programs or just knowledge in education, by and large, people want to do the right thing with it. And so making them aware of that connectivity and those influences that happen is a large part of it. We’ve been working with the our district and through the Department of AG, we’ve been working with producers, up in the Georgia Basin.

00:45:15:23 – 00:45:49:13

Speaker 2

Wendy Graham had a program for about six years. It was the facets program, and that was the areas of study where the Santa Fe Basin and also the Flint River basin, so that provide it a lot of collaborative discussions relative to what best management practices are, what innovative technology is out there. And so one of the things that I’ve had some discussions with others about in Georgia is the financial incentives to implement efficient technology are very limited.

00:45:49:13 – 00:46:08:21

Speaker 2

Most of that is federal funding. I think it would be beneficial. And those ag producers that have come over and visited us in Suwannee to see what soil moisture probes do, automated technology control, release, fertilizer, how can that be utilized. And so, you know, our problems are solvable.

00:46:08:23 – 00:46:09:09

Speaker 1

Right?

00:46:09:10 – 00:46:14:23

Speaker 2

It’s just getting everybody on board and and being able to implement the technology.

00:46:15:01 – 00:46:43:08

Speaker 1

And some of them aren’t that expensive. I mean, you look at I know in your district mine the same way. It’s like a mobile irrigation lab is not that expensive to operate now. And so to and to be able to go on some nice farm and just evaluate something and say, if you did it this way for almost no money, it’s like you can you’re not going to just save water and save, you know, nutrients, like you’re literally going to save money and you’re going to have the same production right now from from your acreage.

00:46:43:08 – 00:47:08:19

Speaker 2

And then, you know, again, it comes back to that education aspect, right? That I think is at the heart of of making people aware and, and showing them how to do the right thing and what to do with it. You mentioned the mobile irrigation, as I think about one of the one of the pieces of technology that’s been very successful in our area and other parts of the state that install moisture probes, your producers in the northwest started using them whenever I was with that.

00:47:08:21 – 00:47:33:02

Speaker 2

And just that simple piece of technology and it’s evolved over the years or but that that can allow a producer, depending upon the crops and the soil types, they can save 30 to 60% all over what their base irrigation was. And that’s a tremendous savings from a water aspect and just from the cost of pumping, right. Whether it’s diesel or electric.

00:47:33:05 – 00:47:49:14

Speaker 1

Yeah, I think people missed, the ideas like that, that farmers want to just put as much water as they could conceivably get on to a crop, and they don’t realize that it’s one of two ways those pumps and systems run on two things electricity or diesel. And both of those cost a lot of money.

00:47:49:14 – 00:48:15:01

Speaker 2

They do two really do profit margins. Similar to everything else with rising costs, profit margins have shrunk. And so producers are eager to implement where they are convinced and they they trust. Whether it’s true IFAs extension agent it’s your Suwannee River partnership technician Department of egg field set. They trust that what you’re telling them works and that you’ve got the research to back it up.

00:48:15:06 – 00:48:34:08

Speaker 1

So I’ve spent some time around you and your staff while they’re discussing some pretty innovative ways of expanding the water pie, as we like to say sometimes, while also improving water quality. Can you talk about maybe just 1 or 2 of those, just to give people a flavor for what you got going on?

00:48:34:10 – 00:49:09:00

Speaker 2

Yeah, I think that there’s a lot of opportunities to address our water supply concerns and addressing the water quality. At the same time, it just takes thinking out of the box a little bit and doing things maybe a little bit differently than what the way they’ve been done in the past. And and that’s one of the things that early on with the partnership, the effort was primarily oriented towards dairies and poultry operations, you know, and years ago, the dairy wastewater that was a liability, something to have to be dealt with.

00:49:09:00 – 00:49:26:21

Speaker 2

It was it. And producers now look at that is that that can be a revenue stream and it can be also a water supply. And certainly as the districts we can look at it and say, okay, there’s opportunity for reuse there. If we’re able to clean that water up a little bit. All right. And so I’m appreciative of the dairies.

00:49:26:21 – 00:49:57:10

Speaker 2

A lot of the dairies being proactive in stepping up and with a little bit of, financial assistance from the state and from the district, we’re able to assist as producers in filtering that water and being able to reuse some of that water from a flushing perspective, and then certainly putting it out for irrigation, utilizing the nutrients on their field associated with some of that not stuff specifically to dairies, are looking at denitrification structures.

00:49:57:10 – 00:50:00:06

Speaker 2

Did they have any of the did y’all do any of those in North West?

00:50:00:06 – 00:50:04:17

Speaker 1

Well, I don’t think so. That doesn’t sound describe it a little bit more for it.

00:50:04:19 – 00:50:15:08

Speaker 2

If you’re familiar with back when underground storage tanks. And then they would use air sparring to blow off the blocks out of there, you know, basically pulling the vapors up out of the ground with it.

00:50:15:08 – 00:50:16:06

Speaker 1

Right.

00:50:16:08 – 00:50:42:17

Speaker 2

Somewhat similar with this is that with the nitrification structures, you go into an AG operation. If it’s on a crop field, you can go in there and put in relatively shallow wells that intercept the surficial, because it says nitrates move down through the soil profile, they’re going to hit that surficial first. So you put in a small the small wells in there to pull that surficial nitrate.

00:50:42:22 – 00:51:09:23

Speaker 2

Yeah. Okay. Pull it back to the surface. If they’re actively growing crops that can be incorporated into their irrigation system and basically recycle those nutrients or utilize minus those nutrients out, if they’re not growing a crop, then they can actually use a carbon source and put in a small pond, fill it. And the ones that we’ve assisted with have been primarily woodchips.

00:51:10:01 – 00:51:37:07

Speaker 2

Although, doctor Mark Clark with IFAs was doing some work looking at different media to try to optimize the, carbon exchange and nitrification. And so they can put that into the nitrification structure, this pond that holds it, which it media, and then clean that water up and put it back out into the aquifer. So that’s, that’s part of and some dairies have done that.

00:51:37:09 – 00:51:41:05

Speaker 2

Some crop systems are just traditional crop growing.

00:51:41:07 – 00:52:03:21

Speaker 1

The first half that I had heard, you know, in a conceptual sense. But but the other things I’ve seen is not in not necessarily capturing it on the ground side, but looking at saying to your soils, you look at swift mud and orange groves, especially where they’re doing tail water recovery nurseries as well, where you can capture it, put it in a place and then recycle it back in.

00:52:03:21 – 00:52:07:08

Speaker 1

If it’s not, you know, if it’s not harmful to the plant itself.

00:52:07:10 – 00:52:31:14

Speaker 2

Right. Control release technology, that’s another innovative. We’ve just really started working with the IFAs and the Department of A in our district, the research firm that we have over there with IFAs, they’re very proactive. Bob Smith has done a great job leading that group there. At first they were doing work on the IFAs farm itself, and they had buy in from the fertilizer companies.

00:52:31:14 – 00:52:52:22

Speaker 2

They provide the, product. And it really comes down to where it’s it’s a conventional fertilizer. It just has a polymer coating on it that specific to the crop. And the control release curve that you need for the growth of that crop. And so Bob and his team did work out on the farm there for probably about four years.

00:52:53:02 – 00:53:18:20

Speaker 2

And then it came time to move it out on the actual farms themselves. And I think last year we had 11 producers across our district that grew corn and also grew watermelons, and they had interest in utilizing it. And the results were very, very good. Is it a cure all or a total replacement for conventional fertilizer? Not necessarily.

00:53:18:20 – 00:53:38:00

Speaker 2

Depends on the weather and the just overall growing conditions and the management strategy that’s put in place with it. But you can see anywhere from 50 to 80 pounds less nitrogen applied for a comparable or superior crop yield.

00:53:38:05 – 00:53:39:09

Speaker 1

And heavy from an acre, right?

00:53:39:14 – 00:53:41:07

Speaker 2

Yeah, that’s from an acre perspective.

00:53:41:07 – 00:53:45:03

Speaker 1

And for folks who don’t know, I mean, that’s a pretty good number that’s up for reduction.

00:53:45:03 – 00:54:12:12

Speaker 2

Tremendous savings. You know, it it gets people back with either two or below the IFAs recommended rates sometimes because you’re reducing the potential for that fertilizer to leach based off on the irrigation. And it certainly takes irrigation management that that we have learned is the key to all of it is irrigation management, because at least in our district, because of nitrate, nitrogen being the soluble contaminant.

00:54:12:15 – 00:54:46:09

Speaker 2

And so being able to manage your irrigation system is critical. That’s why the Suwannee District and Dak’s in our area has focused primarily on irrigation management tools. with that, and we’ve had a great symbiotic relationship with with Dak’s. I like to think that our AG team that was there prior to me coming to the district was instrumental in getting that on the ground, working to where you don’t necessarily have overlap, but you do have a collaborative approach to the agencies to get those efficient practices out on the ground.

00:54:46:10 – 00:55:07:17

Speaker 1

One of the things I’ve been jealous of when I was at Northwest of this wanting district, was the incredible job of highlighting recreational opportunities available to visitors in your area. You all happened to be as small as you’re having a really good at communicating. How big of a priority is that for you and your board?

00:55:07:17 – 00:55:31:05

Speaker 2

Well, communication is key and we have a great comms staff. Caitlin Potter makes up oversees that in Troy Roberts. We were able to bring Troy over from the Department of Transportation, and he’s done a stellar job for us as far as outreach goes and the the communication aspect of it, you know, relative to our public lands, it’s critical.

00:55:31:05 – 00:56:01:19

Speaker 2

And our board is is very serious about keeping our taxpayer lands open and available to the public. We’ve got better than 90% of our lands open for public use. And with that, we’ve got over 160,000 acres, and we’ve got about 390 miles of roads through there, 250 plus or minus miles of hiking trails. And with the Swanny, I like to think we’re the best district in the state.

00:56:01:22 – 00:56:35:06

Speaker 2

We are known as the Springs Heartland because the more than 450 springs that we have in our district, and as Steve Minnis, was always fond of saying, we’re the fifth largest district in the state geographically and the staffing in budgetary wise, it’s a great opportunity if you’re visiting our area to come out our our lands are so diverse and FGS just recognize our Ginnie Springs Bluff is is one of the unique areas in Florida that happened last year.

00:56:35:08 – 00:56:36:08

Speaker 2

it’s a designation.

00:56:36:11 – 00:56:38:15

Speaker 1

What makes it unique? What what do they.

00:56:38:20 – 00:56:48:19

Speaker 2

Just because of the disappearing river that we have here? Okay. and that, you know, that’s one of the things all have some of it in your hip in northwest. We keep saying your area butts Lyle’s area. And I.

00:56:48:19 – 00:56:49:01

Speaker 1

Know.

00:56:49:05 – 00:57:06:19

Speaker 2

One of the one of the more popular areas that’s known about is only in a state park when where you have a natural land bridge there and, and I’m kind of a history buff when it comes to Florida as well. And, you know, I think about the old Bellamy Trail that came from Tallahassee up this way all the way over to Jacksonville.

00:57:06:19 – 00:57:31:05

Speaker 2

Well, that natural land bridge right there on the Santa Fe was an area where pioneers could cross without having to, you know, take a ferry across the river, and it’s about three miles wide. Well, that the entirety of the Santa Fe River goes underground at that point. And then three miles downstream, it comes back up. The interesting thing that I’ve had, and I am not a cave diver, don’t want to be don’t have any interest in it.

00:57:31:05 – 00:57:55:15

Speaker 2

Thank you. But cave divers that I’ve spoken with, while it’s on the surface, it’s only three miles underground. They’ve got more than 11 miles mapped. And you think about that. And that just speaks to the complexity of our aquifer, you know, in our area and the and the uniqueness. with that, you know, I like to think of Suwannee as being one of the most in North Florida in this area, being one of the more unique areas.

00:57:55:17 – 00:58:15:11

Speaker 1

Yeah, for sure. No doubt about it. Going to speaking of your board again, can you give us an idea of like, I don’t think a lot of people, even I think even folks that that do what we do for don’t really spend much time knowing who they are, introducing themselves, what kind of folks that are on these boards.

00:58:15:16 – 00:58:28:20

Speaker 1

Let’s just talk about years. I mean, they’re men and women. They’re volunteers. And I don’t think people have a strong grasp of why they’re there and what and how important they are to your mission at the district.

00:58:28:22 – 00:59:08:06

Speaker 2

our board is critical. Our governing boards are critical, you know, to the development of our water policy. I am very fortunate. I love my board, got a great group of people with it, and they give me and our staff a lot of support with that. They don’t mind calling. We like to I like to have the relationship with our board for me and my staff, that if we have a question about something or if our board has a question about something, they can pick up the phone and call me or call the appropriate staff member so they, you know, when you think about somebody, volunteer their time and the amount of effort that

00:59:08:06 – 00:59:31:19

Speaker 2

goes into our board materials and attending a board meeting once a week, twice in September with a budget. It’s a lot to ask of somebody, right? And they all have a keen interest in our water resources. they have a keen interest in our public interest within the district. And so it takes a special person, I think, to serve on the board.

00:59:31:21 – 01:00:08:06

Speaker 2

our board members, they, they’re made up of currently made up of construction company own. We’ve got folks that work within the ag industry both in the supply and commercial leg operation, retail sales. It’s a diverse background and they tend to certainly support each other. But they it makes to me, it makes it a more rounded, developed board to look at all the water policy we’re developing minimum flows and minimum water levels, which are complex, and taking the time to learn about those so that they can make the right decisions.

01:00:08:07 – 01:00:30:20

Speaker 1

Yeah. And I think that’s something that I think people might miss is how much time they spend outside of those board meetings, you know, or workshops or what have you understanding these things that other people have dedicated their careers to. And now they’re now they’re being forced into position and making these, these broad decisions about those and how much, how much work and effort they put into to doing that.

01:00:30:23 – 01:01:00:10

Speaker 2

And a lot of times they’re the first line of encounter. Oh, out here within the within the communities, the you know, we’ve got some At-Large seats, we’ve got basins, specific seats. And they’re known within the community that they serve on the water management issue. So somebody has got a question about their environmental resource permit or, you know, what might be needed or something they saw in the paper relative to flooding or to a minimum flow, minimal water level development workshop.

01:01:00:12 – 01:01:02:00

Speaker 2

They’re going to get the call.

01:01:02:02 – 01:01:07:14

Speaker 1

How can folks find out more about what your district is up to, and how they can engage with the work that you all are doing?

01:01:07:20 – 01:01:29:18

Speaker 2

Well, I like to think that we have a great looking website now, and that our comms group has been taking care of that, along with our IT folks. Swanny my Suwannee river.com. You can go there and find a whole host of information anywhere from about our staff and board members to the activities that we’re involved in, our cost share grant programs.

01:01:29:18 – 01:01:59:01

Speaker 2

We have a grant portal that’s located on there that if someone has a proposal to submit relative to water quality improvement or water supply project, they can submit that information. There. We also have at that same link, my Swanee river.com. We also have an interactive lens, a district lens map on there that you can go in if you have a particular county that you live in or want to visit, you can click on that county.

01:01:59:03 – 01:02:16:04

Speaker 2

You can find out what district lands are there, what activities are allowed, what springs are present, what amenities there are, whether camping is allowed, whether hunting is allowed, horseback riding, what the trails look like. And you can go in and gather that information from that interactive map. So.

01:02:16:06 – 01:02:32:03

Speaker 1

yeah, it’s great. I encourage people to check it out. It’s really well done. All right. So when it came to your time inside government in the past, and now, is there something you feel left undone or something that you may have approached differently?

01:02:32:05 – 01:02:54:03

Speaker 2

Well, as a as I mentioned earlier, I’m kind of a history buff and I don’t know if you know Clay Henderson or not, but Clay is he’s been involved with I think he last retired from Stetson. but he’s doing a little bit of environmental consulting. He I saw him down at the wildlife corridor meeting, and I always enjoy talking with him and his latest book, Forces of Nature.

01:02:54:03 – 01:03:20:05

Speaker 2

It’s very informative relative to conservation programs in Florida, right over the history of Florida. And it’s been very interesting reading for me. When I look at that and I look at the history of Florida, to me, one of the things that I would looking back, I would like to have been a little bit better done has to be growth management and growth planning to try to protect our natural areas more.

01:03:20:05 – 01:03:40:08

Speaker 2

And when you look at South Florida Everglades and certainly our coastal regions there, and see the amount of growth, you have to know that you’re going to have growth. And we’ve had astronomical growth under current administration and just people wanting to move into into Florida. Sure. You know, when you have days like today, it’s no wonder people want to live in Florida.

01:03:40:10 – 01:04:25:06

Speaker 2

Certainly that growth planning and trying to have smart growth. And when you look at the land pie overall, it’s really split up between agricultural purposes, public ownership, or commercial residential. And so when you start thinking about how does that shape up from a pressure standpoint, agriculture generally loses out because of the other two interests. And so when you think about the benefits of agriculture, the greenspace that it provides in the ecosystem, the complete suite of ecosystem services that it provides that for so long have been taken for granted in figuring out where those green spaces need to be.

01:04:25:10 – 01:04:37:05

Speaker 2

And be maintained, and where development can occur without having as large an impact on the land surface in our in our land, resources that are limited.

01:04:37:07 – 01:04:41:07

Speaker 1

Are you optimistic about the future of the environment and water in Florida?

01:04:41:13 – 01:05:11:12

Speaker 2

I am, you know, I look at the I look at the amount of effort and funding that has been put in for trying to preserve and conserve green space and the technology that’s out there. I think that I think that we have or are getting the answers. The big thing is I think the awareness is there now. When I was growing up, there wasn’t there wasn’t a concern, there wasn’t an awareness of any potential water quality issues that we had not in not in our district anyway.

01:05:11:14 – 01:05:32:05

Speaker 2

And that was part of the education process that early on when I was with the Department of Egg, in talking with egg producers about Tmdl and B maps, they had no awareness in our area of what the terminology meant. And so sorry drew, but I could. I always use South Florida as, as an example with that in Lake Okeechobee area.

01:05:32:05 – 01:05:49:00

Speaker 2

Right. And so certainly I think that that is key in our education has grown so much. We still have a lot more to do, from an awareness perspective. But I think the legislature that we have has been very supportive. Our governors have been very supportive, of addressing those concerns.

01:05:49:00 – 01:05:58:01

Speaker 1

What advice would you give to young people who are just entering or have interested in entering the environmental field, whether it’s public service or the private sector?

01:05:58:05 – 01:06:25:07

Speaker 2

I would say get involved. There’s a lot of programs, there’s a lot of outreach efforts that are out there now. Our youngest daughter is attending FSU up here, and there’s some programs that she’s gotten involved with just because of her awareness of what we’ve had back home. And, and, and she likes the outdoors as well. Become aware of your surroundings, become aware of your environment, not just on the concrete side of things.

01:06:25:09 – 01:06:49:21

Speaker 2

Put your phones down, go out. And I know here in Tallahassee y’all have a number of parks that I didn’t even know existed until my youngest moved up here. But go out and enjoy the outdoors. Learn what you can about the environment. We have learned a lot about our water resources, our aquifer, our coastal areas, but we still got a lot to learn.

01:06:49:23 – 01:06:57:07

Speaker 2

Our climate becoming what it is. Sometimes it can be more challenging and so learn how to address those concerns as well.

01:06:57:13 – 01:06:58:18

Speaker 1

I that’s a good place to start.

01:06:58:20 – 01:07:06:05

Speaker 2

And the last thing I want to add is, yeah, we at Swansea River Water Management District are hiring. So come see us for a job.

01:07:06:07 – 01:07:13:21

Speaker 1

There you go. I mean, working for a really good boss out there, folks. And on on that endorsement. Q Thomas, thanks so much for being on the show.

01:07:14:01 – 01:07:16:05

Speaker 2

Thank you, Brett, I appreciate the opportunity to be here.

01:07:16:09 – 01:07:38:21

Speaker 1

Yeah. Well, that’s it for this episode. Thanks for listening to water for fighting. If you’re enjoying the show, please be sure to subscribe and whatever platform you use. And don’t forget to leave a five star rating and a review. You can follow the show on LinkedIn and Instagram at FL Water Pod, and you can reach me directly at FL Water Pod at gmail.com with your comments and or suggestions about who or what you’d like to know more about production.

01:07:38:21 – 01:07:55:03

Speaker 1

This podcast is by Lonely Box Studios. Thanks to Carl Soren for making the best of what he had to work with, and David Barfield for the amazing graphics and technical assistance. A very special thank you goes out to Bo Spring from the Bow Spring Band for giving permission to use his music for the podcast. The song was called Doing Work for Free.

01:07:55:05 – 01:08:14:21

Speaker 1

You should check out the band live or wherever great music is sold. Join me next time for another amazing conversation with someone who has helped shape water and environmental policy in the sunshine State. Until then, keep your whiskey close and your water closer.

This week, Brett goes on a deep dive with a friend who exemplifies what this podcast is all about – Ansley Tilley.  Ansley is one of the most talented engineers in Florida who has a wide array of experience from her time with the United States Air Force, the City of Palm Beach Gardens, and the South Florida Water Management District.  But her real talent and passion is for service and problem-solving, so they discuss how her experiences have culminated in her current role as the Director of Alternative Delivery Solutions with our friends, Resource Environmental Solutions (RES).  

They delve into the “milk story”, and how her parents sacrificed to provide her with the tools to succeed in later life; her dream of being an astronaut and the early disappointments surrounding that dream; a change in heart while attaining massive success in ROTC at the University of Miami; her brief but poignant experience serving her country in Ukraine; the love of family and the heartbreaking losses that have brought her back home over the years; her philosophy for work and service that have carried her since childhood; and how a brain built for problem-solving approaches the challenges of an ever-changing environmental landscape. 

This conversation was very emotional at times and dealt with some sensitive subjects, but the lessons that can be drawn from it on a personal and professional level are priceless.  We hope you find it as meaningful as we did. 

To learn more about Ansley’s work and how she can help solve your environmental problems too, go here:  www.res.us or email her at: [email protected]

This Episode is brought to you by our friends at Collins Land Services.

When it comes to your disaster recovery and land management needs, you’re looking for the perfect combination of competence, reliability, and affordability.  And that means you’re looking for Collins Land Services.  Check them out at www.collinsland.com

Please be sure to check out the Florida Specifier Podcast hosted by Ryan Matthews and Brett as part of a new venture where they’re striving to become Florida’s first source for environmental news, educational tools, and unique perspectives on our state’s natural environment and the events that shape it.  To learn more about its flagship print publication and more, visit The Florida Specifier.

You can follow the show on LinkedIn and Instagram @flwaterpod, and you can reach me directly at [email protected] with your comments and suggestions for who and/or what you’d like to know more about.

Production of this podcast is by Lonely Fox Studios. Thanks to Karl Sorne for making the best of what he had to work with. And to David Barfield for the amazing graphics and technical assistance.  

And finally, a very special thank you goes out to Bo Spring from the Bo Spring Band  for giving permission to use his music for this podcast.  The song is called Doing Work for Free, (Apple Music | Spotify) and you should check out the band live, or wherever great music is sold. 

This week, Brett sits down with his friend and Executive Director of the Florida Land Council, Ernie Barnett.  Ernie has a wealth of experience from his days in leadership positions at the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, as well as the South Florida Water Management District.  

They discuss his long and consequential public service career; how a scientist ends up as an effective communicator and policy expert; his eventual shift into a successful career in the private sector; and Florida’s shifting understanding of the science behind water quality impairment in South Florida and beyond.  

Oh, and did we mention that Ernie grew up in a friend group that included dolphins?  More on that, too.   

To learn more about Everglades restoration, head here: https://www.evergladesrestoration.gov

To see how the dolphins in Ft. Walton Beach are doing today, check out the Gulfarium’s website here: https://gulfarium.com

This episode of Water for Fighting is brought to you by my friends at RES.  

RES is the nation’s leader in ecological restoration, helping to restore Florida’s natural resources with water quality and stormwater solutions that offer communities guaranteed performance and outcomes. Check them out at www.res.us 

This episode is also thanks to my friends at Collins Land Services.

When it comes to your disaster recovery and land management needs, you’re looking for the perfect combination of competence, reliability, and affordability.  And that means you’re looking for Collins Land Services.  Check them out at www.collinsland.com

Please be sure to check out the Florida Specifier Podcast hosted by Ryan Matthews and Brett as part of a new venture where they’re striving to become Florida’s first source for environmental news, educational tools, and unique perspectives on our state’s natural environment and the events that shape it.  To learn more about its flagship print publication and more, visit The Florida Specifier.

You can follow the show on LinkedIn and Instagram @flwaterpod, and you can reach me directly at [email protected] with your comments and suggestions for who and/or what you’d like to know more about.

Production of this podcast is by Lonely Fox Studios. Thanks to Karl Sorne for making the best of what he had to work with. And to David Barfield for the amazing graphics and technical assistance.  

And finally, a very special thank you goes out to Bo Spring from the Bo Spring Band  for giving permission to use his music for this podcast.  The song is called Doing Work for Free, (Apple Music | Spotify) and you should check out the band live, or wherever great music is sold. 

This week, Brett shares some time with friend and Florida’s Environmental Curmudgeon-in-Chief, Estus Whitfield. Estus has a wealth of experience working for SIX Florida governors where he played an integral role in the creation of the Save Our Everglades, Save Our Rivers, and Preservation 2000 programs – just to name a few. In addition to his service to Florida, he also spent over thirty years serving his country in the Florida National Guard, U.S. Navy, and the U.S. Navy Reserves where he retired at the rank of Captain.

Estus offers a unique perspective from his time serving so many governors and provides his thoughts on them; the dawn of widespread environmental restoration programs; some thoughts on current water quality issues related to septic tanks; and his somewhat pessimistic view of the future of the environment in Florida.

Agree or disagree – Estus is never shy about his thoughts, pulls few punches, and is always generous with his time. We hope you enjoy the conversation.

To find out more about the Save Our Everglades Program and other Everglades restoration initiatives, head here

To learn about the history of the Preservation 2000 (P2000) land acquisition program, head here

To learn more about the Conservation and Recreational Lands (CARL) program, go here:

Because we know you want more Boggy, Florida history:

This episode of Water for Fighting is brought to you by my friends at Sea and Shoreline.

Sea and Shoreline is the Southeast’s leading innovator in protecting coastal communities from devastating storms and restoring ecosystems that once faced ecological collapse. Visit their website at www.Seaandshoreline.com.

This Episode is also thanks to my friends at Resource Environmental Solutions.

RES is the nation’s leader in ecological restoration, helping to restore Florida’s natural resources with water quality and stormwater solutions that offer communities guaranteed performance and outcomes. Check them out at www.res.us

Please be sure to check out the Florida Specifier Podcast hosted by Ryan Matthews and myself as part of a new venture where we’re striving to become Florida’s first source for environmental news, educational tools, and unique perspectives on our state’s natural environment and the events that shape it. To learn more about its flagship print publication and more, visit The Florida Specifier.

You can follow the show on LinkedIn and Instagram @flwaterpod, and you can reach me directly at [email protected] with your comments and suggestions for who and/or what you’d like to know more about.

Production of this podcast is by Lonely Fox Studios. Thanks to Karl Sorne for making the best of what he had to work with. And to David Barfield for the amazing graphics and technical assistance.

And finally, a very special thank you goes out to Bo Spring from the Bo Spring Band for giving permission to use his music for this podcast. The song is called Doing Work for Free, and you should check out the band live, or wherever great music is sold.

In this episode, Brett sits down with his good friend and Anfield alumnus, Pepper Uchino. Pepper is now the President of the Florida Shore and Beach Preservation Association, but he has a wealth of experience from his days as the staff attorney, and then Staff Director, of the Senate Environment and Natural Resources Committee.

Pepper is unique in that he’s the direct descendant of Japanese Samurai as well as Mayflower passengers who landed at Plymouth Rock. They discuss his early life in New England as the son of an environmental activist; the health struggles that nearly derailed his future early on; the successful and growing Resiliency Conference he hosts; and they commiserate on the life of legislative committee staff and how laws are made from the perspective of someone on the “inside”. Did we mention his childhood home was haunted? More about that as well.

To find out more about FSBA’s 37th Annual Conference on Beach Preservation Technology National Conference coming up in February, head here: https://www.fsbpa.com/tech-conference.html

And save the date for the 3rd Annual Florida Resilience Conference coming in September. To learn more and get registered, go here: https://floridaresilienceconference.org

To keep up with Pepper’s old Senate Committee and their deliberations, visit the Senate’s website here: https://www.flsenate.gov/Committees/Show/EN/

Pepper talked about his work with the Trust for Public Land before he joined the Senate. To find out more about what they do, go here: https://www.tpl.org/state/florida

When you’re in Connecticut, why not visit some of New Haven’s most haunted sites? Perhaps Pepper’s childhood home is on the list somewhere. To learn more about that, go here: https://blog.gardencommunitiesct.com/blog/most-haunted-places-new-haven-county-ct/

This episode of Water for Fighting is brought to you by my friends at Sea and Shoreline.

Sea and Shoreline is the Southeast’s leading innovator in protecting coastal communities from devastating storms and restoring ecosystems that once faced ecological collapse. Visit their website at www.Seaandshoreline.com.

This Episode is also thanks to my friends at Resource Environmental Solutions.

RES is the nation’s leader in ecological restoration, helping to restore Florida’s natural resources with water quality and stormwater solutions that offer communities guaranteed performance and outcomes. Check them out at www.res.us

Please be sure to check out the Florida Specifier Podcast hosted by Ryan Matthews and myself as part of a new venture where we’re striving to become Florida’s first source for environmental news, educational tools, and unique perspectives on our state’s natural environment and the events that shape it. To learn more about its flagship print publication and more, visit The Florida Specifier.

You can follow the show on LinkedIn and Instagram @flwaterpod, and you can reach me directly at [email protected] with your comments and suggestions for who and/or what you’d like to know more about.

Production of this podcast is by Lonely Fox Studios. Thanks to Karl Sorne for making the best of what he had to work with. And to David Barfield for the amazing graphics and technical assistance.

And finally, a very special thank you goes out to Bo Spring from the Bo Spring Band for giving permission to use his music for this podcast. The song is called Doing Work for Free, and you should check out the band live, or wherever great music is sold.

The long-awaited return of Water for Fighting is here!

In the first episode of Season 3, Brett travels to Tampa to record live in front of the National Association of Administrative Law Judiciary’s (NAALJ) National Conference.  His conversation partners were Elizabeth Fernandez and Doug Manson.  Elizabeth is the Deputy General Counsel at the Southwest Florida Water Management District.  Doug is President of the Manson, Bolves, Donaldson, Tanner Law Firm.  

They discuss Western versus Eastern Water Law, and where Florida’s water resource philosophy fits on that spectrum.  They also talk about the genesis of conflict as it relates to water resources in Florida, and more importantly, the path to conflict resolution when stakeholders disagree.  

To learn more about what Elizabeth’s great organization is up to and how they’re working to protect West Central Florida’s water resources, head here: 

https://www.swfwmd.state.fl.us

To find out how Doug and his partners can put their decades of legal expertise in water resource regulation and conflict resolution, visit them here:

https://www.mansonbolves.com/attorneys/douglas-manson/

A special thank you goes out to Judges Brian Newman, Bruce Culpepper, Francine Ffolkes, and Bill Horgan from the Florida Division of Administrative Hearings for inviting me to the conference and for supporting the mission of the show.  To learn more about my gracious hosts from the NAALJ, please visit their website here:

https://www.naalj.org

To learn more about the Southern Water Use Caution Area (SWUCA) with Swiftmud, go here:

https://www.swfwmd.state.fl.us/projects/southern-water-use-caution-area

Brett and his guests talk about the Polk Regional Water Cooperative (PRWC) and its goal of meeting water resource needs and protection goals in a place where the demand for water has outpaced supply.  To learn more about that, go here: https://prwcwater.org

West-Central Florida has been a hotbed for water resource conflict over the decades, but the path to cooperative resolution really culminated with the creation of Tampa Bay Water over 25 years ago.  To find out more about its creation, go here: https://www.tampabaywater.org/about-tampa-bay-water

This Episode of Water for Fighting is brought to you by my friends at Resource Environmental Solutions.

RES is the nation’s leader in ecological restoration, helping to restore Florida’s natural resources with water quality and stormwater solutions that offer communities guaranteed performance and outcomes. Check them out at www.res.us 

Please be sure to check out a relatively new podcast Brett hosts with his friend and colleague, Ryan Matthews, called the Florida Specifier Podcast.  It’s part of a new venture that is striving to become Florida’s first source for environmental news, educational tools, and unique perspectives on our state’s natural environment and the events that shape it.  To learn more about its flagship publication and more, visit The Florida Specifier.

If you’re enjoying this show, please be sure to subscribe on whatever platform you use, and don’t forget to leave a 5-star rating and review.

You can follow the show on LinkedIn and Instagram @flwaterpod, and you can reach me directly at [email protected] with your comments and suggestions for who and/or what you’d like to know more about.

Production of this podcast is by Lonely Fox Studios. Thanks to Karl Sorne for making the best of what he had to work with. And to David Barfield for the amazing graphics and technical assistance.  

A very special thank you goes out to Bo Spring from the Bo Spring Band for giving permission to use his music for this podcast.  The song is called Doing Work for Free, and you should check out the band live, or wherever great music is sold. 

In this episode, Brett gets to talk with Mary Szafraniec, a Florida scientist with a remarkable personal story.  They talk about her grandparents’ survival in Nazi work camps during World War II and her parents’ eventual escape from communism in Europe to arrive in the United States, ready to start a new life; how a chance meeting at a music festival changed her career path toward environmental issues and the Florida Department of Environmental Protection; how she moved into the Surface Water Improvement and Management (SWIM) program at the Southwest Florida Water Management District and the importance of mentorship there; how her time in government created value in the private sector; and of course, her new role at Resource Environmental Solutions (RES) and how she strives to do good by creating accountability in her work and measuring long-term outcomes for Florida’s natural systems.

To check out the things Mary and her colleagues at RES are doing to restore and protect water quality and habitat all over the U.S., visit their website here: res.us

To find out what Mary can do to help you and your community, email her at this address: [email protected]

While Mary is batting cleanup for Season 2 of Water for Fighting, there’s a connect between her work partners and the first guest of this season, Steve Hawley.  In Steve’s book, Cracked, he discusses the restoration of the Klamath River out west.  To see what RES is doing to bring life back to that natural treasure, go here: https://res.us/home/restoring-at-scale/klamath-river-restoration/ and here: https://res.us/news/res-swiftwater-films-release-restoring-balance/

To learn more about Surface Water Improvement and Management (SWIM) planning and implementation are going at Mary’s old stomping grounds at the Southwest Florida Water Management District, go here: https://www.swfwmd.state.fl.us/projects/swim 

Please support our sponsors, RES and Sea & Shoreline.

Sea & Shoreline is a Florida-based aquatic restoration firm that is on a mission to restore Florida’s water bodies and to protect our coastline communities against severe storms.  You can check out their projects at www.seaandshoreline.com

RES is a national leader in ecological and hydrological restoration, offering nature-based solutions with guaranteed performance through innovative delivery options. Discover more about their work and commitment to Florida and its environmental challenges by visiting www.res.us. 

Our theme song is “Doing Work For Free”, by Bo Spring Band (Apple Music) (Spotify) (Pandora)

[Music]

(…)

Welcome to Water for Fighting where we discuss the past, present, and future of water in Florida with the people who make it happen. I’m your host, Brett Cyphers. This week’s discussion is brought to you by Sea and Shoreline. Sea and Shoreline is a Florida-based aquatic restoration firm that’s on a mission to restore Florida’s water bodies and to protect our coastline communities against severe storms. You can check out their projects at seainshoreline.com. All right, I’m really anxious to get into this week’s conversation with my friend and one of my favorite scientists working today, Dr. Mary Szafraniec Mary is a veteran of state government and private practice throughout the state of Florida, including at one of my old stomping grounds, the Southwest Florida Water Management District.(…) She’s now the director of water quality initiatives at Resource and Environmental Solutions.(…) She also has an incredible life story that really captures the imagination. So let’s get right to it. Mary, thanks so much for being on the show today. Thanks so much for having me. I’m very excited to talk to you today. Yeah, I apologize if I sound sniffly throughout. That’s a warning to other folks as well, but these things happen. So you were born in Chicago, but your life story begins much earlier and across the world in Poland, doesn’t it? Yes, it does. It actually did with my parents actually coming from Poland and my grandparents being in concentration camps, essentially in work camps.(…) There was a lot that went on during that time in the 40s and World War II that actually brought about the whole story of myself and my family.(…) Yeah, were your grandparents Polish? I mean, I know the camp was in Poland, but were they Polish?(…) Yeah, my parents and grandparents all from Poland, they all came from there. My grandparents actually were taken to a concentration camp. It was a work camp in Linz, Austria, and they were there for five years. And that’s actually where my grandparents have met during the war.(…) Incredible.(…) Talk about them personally. I guess maybe the thing that I want to know most is, did they ever talk about how they rebuilt their lives after the war? Because I think your parents met during that time. But I want to hear a little bit about them first and in those circumstances, if you don’t mind.(…) Oh, sure. No. And I think it’s actually interesting. The time while they were in the camp is quite interesting because they always talk about the men being the breadwinners back then. But in effect, my grandmother was the “breadwinner” because she was bringing kind of smuggling food over to my grandfather after they had met. If he was kind of trapped in an area that he wasn’t able to get out. So he was working in an area like more of a machine type shop. She was actually kind of a farmer. So she was a growing the wheat, making the food for the Nazi. And then she actually would smuggle some and take it to him because they had met in the camp, actually. So I think it’s absolutely amazing that children were created in the camps. And somehow my namesake, my aunt Marisha, which is how you say my name is Polish, who I’m named after, she was conceived right after the war ended. So something went on during the camp. There’s some way that people were still able to do that. But my grandparents actually, after they were released from the camp after five years, they went back to Poland. And they sort of had a makeshift wedding near the Krakow town. So very large town in Poland, beautiful, if anyone definitely should go see it. But he kind of built a shack style house with a dirt floor that he had built with his own hands, essentially, basically no tools, just kind of built this thing and started their lives there with my aunt. And then my mom was born about two years after that. So this is 1947, two years after the war had ended. In total, they had about six kids. And my grandfather just started their lives in total disruption, you know, everything’s recently been bombed. And he became a postman and started delivering mail on a bicycle in a small village near the big city. And then my grandmother just started farming a few hectares in the area and was tending to all the livestock, pigs, cows and what not. And I think they had some chickens and things. But yeah, so she was the breadwinner. And essentially, my grandfather was the postman. So they just started this life. And they moved to another town in Poland on the west side and kind of had a bigger house there. So everything started to move along. However, communism got set in place. And that’s sort of where my family, my parents derived from that part of the time frame.(…) Yeah, talk a bit about that as well. You had a funny story, Yusa, I think you told me about how your father came to be really interested in your mom in those days. Can you talk about that? Yeah, so my parents, this is in the mid 60s, right? And in Poland, it’s full communism time, there was one theater within about a hundred mile area. And it happened to be in the town that my dad lived in, where my mom was working as a telecommunication specialist. So she was at the movie theater by herself, just standing in line very far back in line to the point where she wasn’t going to get in. And my dad being a little bit of a macho man walked up to her, essentially picked her up and said, I can get you a ticket. So he got her a movie ticket. And it was basically from there, you know, he was kind of showing off his motorcycle and all the things. So she saw that he was someone that she would be interested in. And they started dating. But they both came from farming families, my dad had a really large farm. And my mom basically came from a small farming family. So they kind of started helping each other with doing the farming. But yeah, that was pretty funny word. My dad just came in kind of swooped in, knight shining armor, got her into the movie. And then story goes on from there. Do they remember what movie it was? I don’t know. I don’t know. I’d have to ask my mom. I don’t know the movie.

(…)

I’m sure it’s something in Poland. Yeah, probably Polish. I doubt it’s an American movie.(…) So your parents eventually get married and you have an older brother, right? And he was born, was he born in Poland? Yes, he was born in Poland in the late 60s. He had passed about four or five years ago. But he was born there and in Poland during that time frame. And then they ended up kind of living there. I think he was about five years old or so before they decided that they wanted to move on and leave there because of the political climate, which is not conducive to for them to raise him in that area. So they were ready to leave and ended up leaving to go to Denmark and Copenhagen through a travel visa, sort of like an escape route, first phase of the escape route for when they left Poland to go there. It was one of those things where it’s like a real defection or is this like escape in the middle of the night kind of situation? Yeah, it was a defection. Essentially, I mean, they had a travel visa to go visit for two weeks in Copenhagen because my mom had an aunt that lived there. So they said, we’re going to be back. And then once they weren’t back, people started coming after them. So they ended up leaving there. And then there’s a pretty crazy story that happened after that for them to move to Germany to leave to go to Germany. So there’s quite a bit of events that went through for them to be able to go there. Yeah, it sounds like this one was fascinating cloak and dagger stories from the old days. How long had they been in Denmark before realizing that they’re going to have to take off? I think you mentioned before, like the KGB was even involved. Yeah, they had, you know, so basically the communist government, soon as somebody is essentially defecting or not returning upon the time frame that they’re supposed to with their visas, they start to go after them and search for them. And then they would have probably ended up in jail. But they I think they were there for less than a few months. Like it was like a couple months. My dad had gotten a job working, kind of handing out flyers and things like that. And they my mom and brother were just essentially hiding in my aunt’s house. And at some point, she felt very uncomfortable with the situation and told them that they had to leave or would cause her issues. They ended up leaving after a couple months being there. And again, my father being a very good negotiator, and really good at kind of getting getting what he needs done, he actually got some papers for them. So this is all not real papers. It’s kind of stuff you see in the movies where there was some other Polish people that lived in Denmark. And this guy, he met this guy, and he gave him some papers for my mom and dad only. And they couldn’t get it from my brother, unfortunately. So my brother was still really young. He’s only five years old. And what they ended up having to do was take my brother and shove him underneath the front bench of a truck of these trucker guys that were offering to drive them over across the border from Denmark to Germany. So my dad had one foot apparently on my brother’s chest, the other foot on his leg, and squeezing him as they’re speaking to the security officers that were evaluating all the papers and wanting them to get out to like check the truck and they didn’t thankfully, but they made it across the border safely. But it was, it sounds like a very traumatic experience, my brother, and just super intense and dangerous. So they made it through though. They got to Germany, which is amazing, to freedom essentially. Yeah, it’s incredible. I mean, were all those worries gone when they made to Germany? I mean, there were parts of Germany, obviously, in those days where it was not safe. I don’t think the worries were gone. I think they’re full intent from the very beginning was to get to America. These other places were just like pastures. They wanted to they knew they had to make some different challenging stops. So Germany was another stop. However, Germany really did. They had a really good life there. He was trained as a German auto mechanic while they were there for five years. They almost received their citizenship. But at that point, they realized they’d made a decision. Do we stay in Germany? Or do we go to America? And they said, America’s a place. So they ended up packing up and leaving within five years. My dad, he was working and fully paid well and everything. And they had a house and everything. And my mom was a checkout girl in a grocery store called Super Spy Thousand, which means 2000 in German. So they had a good life. And my brother was in school and everything. So they just said, America’s a place. And my dad says, let’s pack up tips and suitcases. And they went to Chicago. Yeah, I guess the the training part that comes into play later on when your dad’s looking for for work, you know, going to third, completely new country and this one across the Atlantic. Him being an auto mechanic helped you and your mom start their new life in the US, didn’t it? Yes, very much so. I mean, especially in Chicago when they came, he learned German engineering. So basically the fancy cars, Porsche’s, and all the BMW’s. And they needed people for that. So luckily in Chicago, there’s a very large population of Poles. Basically, at the time, I think they said there was more Pollocks there than in Warsaw. So lots of Polish people, they were able to kind of integrate really easily and get work right away. People, they started their lives there. And I was born about a year after they moved to America in the mid to late 70s. But yeah, I think that that part of their story is nice because they actually were able to root in a community, you know, that was similar to theirs, not speaking English is was very difficult still, but it was a lot easier than if they had come to like straight to Florida or, you know, another state. Right. But that’s what happened after, right? So what, what takes you from, you know, such a large Polish community in the US, but you grew up on opposite coasts, you grew up in California and Florida, right? Well, how did that happen, first of all? Well, we, so we were in Chicago until about, I was six years old, I think, when we moved. And at that time, I think they also had some questioning entities that were appearing at the house, and they wanted to move on a little bit. So there was still issues with the whole collection and the asylum and all of that stuff. So without being a citizen right away, it is, it was difficult for a lot of families, they had to keep kind of moving along. But I was six years old, as far as I remember, when we left Chicago area, we’re in the suburbs, I just remember being really cold there. And I didn’t really speak English at all. And I just was hanging out my friends that were Polish, you know, my friends, parents, and their kids that were Polish. I think we did a road trip or something, and my parents saw California, and then that was it. That’s where they wanted to go. Because they just really wanted to get away from the cold and everything that could have, that I don’t know the details on as far as the legality of staying there. But I was an American citizen. So since I was born here, I was able to kind of root them a little bit more. But I do know that they ended up just realizing they want to be outside because Poland was very similar to Chicago area, as far as like the climate and everything. I think they were just ready for a completely new place. And to start a life for the family in an area that’s absolutely gorgeous. So that’s where I was in California for about 12 years, actually. Yeah, we’re in California was all in one spot. Santa Barbara. So it was there the majority of the time. We did bop around a little bit in the vicinity of Santa Barbara. But yeah, basically, they’re absolutely gorgeous water on your western side mountains on the Pacific Ocean and then the Sierra Nevadas. So lots of just beautiful areas to be around. And I think that’s where I started to really fall in love with water, because I’d seen the Great Lakes when I was in the Chicago area as a small child. And then as a starting to grow up and realizing like, this is amazing. I just loved all the beautiful natural areas around. Yeah, talk about yourself a little bit as as a kid, because I know you said you you moved to Florida when you’re I think like 12. Is that right? 12, 13, 14, somewhere in there? 14. I was almost 14. Okay.(…) Oh, so good. So a good long while that you spent in California. So that’s a good spot to hit then. Yeah, you like the kid, you must have loved the outdoors.(…) You know, the way you describe it, how could you avoid it? Talk about that. Yeah, I was I loved water from super early age, like I mentioned, you know, when I was swimming in the lakes in Chicago, and then when I moved to California, I was like, this is amazing. Look at this ocean. I could just be out here every single day. So we were outside all day, every day, anytime that we could during the summers, and especially on the weekends, I went probably to the beach every weekend and hiking every weekend. So just dependent on the weather and everything that was going on and who was going where. I’d say that I’m definitely an outdoorsy person. I was then my parents, sort of my dad, essentially, he always wanted to be outside. So we were constantly camping and hiking and doing all the fun things outside that sort of drew me into swimming and whatnot. So I kind of became a jock, like a nerdy jock. I did obviously love school and I was reading books every minute, possibly read a student learn how to read English. That was my favorite thing. So I started to read and was at the library constantly. If I wasn’t at the library, I was in the pool or the ocean. How long did the competitive swimming stick with you? All the way through school? Yeah, all the way through high school because I went to University of South Florida at Tampa for college. So I didn’t really go in. There wasn’t like a competitive swimming program there. And at that point, I was basically focusing on academia. And so you said you moved to Florida when you were almost 15 years old. That’s a tough age to pick up a move. Why did your parents move across the country at that point? My brother had bought a house that he wanted to renovate. And this is actually a year of Hurricane Andrew.(…) And they moved, I was already in Florida for vacation to spend with my brother. And they said, you just go ahead and stay there. So he had bought the house as a very large home. And my dad is very handy. So they decided to move to Florida to help him. Plus, California was very difficult for an immigrant family. Very expensive to live in Santa Barbara. Basically like living in down in Beverly Hills cost-wise, it was just a little bit unattainable for them. So they thought it was time to try something different. And we moved to Florida at that time. It was very difficult transitioning for me, for sure. Because it’s South Florida versus Southern California are two completely different areas. But I adapted.(…) I mean, it’s gotta be different culture as well, I assume.(…) Absolutely. It was so different. It was a struggle. I had some periods of time where I was very much missing my friends and everything. So I had been there basically, I feel like I grew up in California. And then now having to start my life as a junior in high school in Florida was tough. So for context, where in Florida did y’all end up? That was in Hollywood, Florida. So Southern Florida, which is between Fort Lauderdale and Miami. What was your outlook like at that point? Beyond being obviously a little homesick for California. Did you stick with the swimming? Did you stick with the reading? Oh, yeah, I was definitely a swimmer still. The nice thing about in California, I was a small fish in a big pond. And it kind of reversed when I came to Florida. So I was one of the bigger fish in the smaller pond, there weren’t as many people doing like being competitive swimmers. And there weren’t as many swim teams and there weren’t as many highly competitive people there. So I did pretty well. It was fun. I enjoyed it. I got right into it swam in a US team, essentially, not not like I want to get well, not like that, just the regular age group stuff, and started going to swim meets and meeting a lot of people, made a lot of friends that way. And a lot of us were very nerdy jocks. We swam whenever we could. And then we were studying the rest of the time. When y’all moved there, it was, was it just before or during or after Hurricane Andrew? So I was here physically. I got to Florida July of 92. And the hurricane happened in August of 92. My parents were still in California packing up a big U-Haul. So I was with my brother, and we were in Hollywood. It was supposed to hit Hollywood. And then he sent me down to basically south of Miami area with his girlfriend, which her family didn’t speak English. So I was in the house with them. They were thinking that I was safe, but it actually had turned and hit that exact area, Miami lakes, and Hialeah. Yeah. So that was a lot of fun because I couldn’t, I only luckily she spoke English, but I was just in this house with total strangers by myself at age 14. No parents, my brother stayed back with the house trying to take care of it, but it was, it was a very tragic kind of intense situation. I don’t ever want to go through again. My very first hurricane and the most powerful one I’ve ever endured that was basically directed. Yeah. One most powerful lover. I was actually in the National Guard at the time. I remember doing everything from guarding water to delivering diapers and formula to some of those stranded places. It’s, there had to have been a huge shock to the system. You just showed up from one of the most beautiful places in the country. You have this intensely powerful hurricane land. How did you feel after that? Where you’re like, I want to go home. Well, at that point it was weeks. I’d say at least a week I was stuck down there because we couldn’t go back and forth yet. My brother, I couldn’t even communicate. So I was literally just trapped in this family’s home and we walked outside and everything. I mean, there was just things flipped over. There was just screens all missing and pieces of house missing and stuff everywhere on the roads. I just remember thinking this is Armageddon. What happened? I’d gone through two earthquakes in California that were minor for me because of the location that I was in. It was nothing like that. Like this was just unbelievable destruction that I’d never seen anything like before. And I actually was really worried for my brother thinking it was just that here, what could have happened? We didn’t have any communication. We didn’t know. And especially since the radio was on a language I didn’t understand. I didn’t know it was happening the whole entire time. So it was crazy. I was shocked and I think I was in shock for a while. I told my parents I didn’t want to stay in Florida because I thought goodness, this could happen again. But they came in and brought everything and all the tools and my dad kind of helped my brother rebuild the home that they had already started renovating essentially. But yeah, definitely a lot of work had to happen after that. And that whole region was just really hurt bad that it was really sad actually.(…) Well, let’s get forward to a little happier time I am trusting. So you chose to study pre-med entering college. What influences your parents have on that? Talk about the decision to do that biology, that pre-med. Yeah, I definitely, I thought I wanted to be a pediatrician because since I was a kid I wanted to have fun games like Atari’s and different fun things to do in the doctor’s office lobby while you’re waiting.(…) And on the flip side of that, I know my parents wanted me to have the best life possible. So they did kind of push a little bit as immigrant parents typically do, where they’re pushing you toward like a doctor lawyer, higher status type job. So I just kind of followed that path to sort of appease them. I did love science. I knew I wanted to do something that was relevant to science and things like that. So and wanting to help people was a big thing for me as well. So I was ready to kind of do something that was impactful and I sort of stayed in that path through the entire time I was in college, essentially from a bachelor’s degree.(…) All right, let’s pause for a moment to talk about my friends at Sea and Shoreline. As we in Florida wonder what the future holds when we face the storm season ahead, Sea and Shoreline is working to protect our coastline communities against severe storms by installing a variety of green and gray infrastructure solutions to make our cities and counties more resilient. These solutions include seagrass restoration, mangroves, oyster reefs, riprap, oyster breakwaters, and something called a WOD, which stands for wave attenuation device.(…) By installing their patented WODs, Sea and Shoreline can help protect our communities against sea level rise and storm surges by diffusing wave energy, stopping shoreline erosion, and even rebuilding shorelines through sand accretion.(…) To learn more about how Sea and Shoreline can protect your community, visit seaandshoreline.com. All right, let’s get back to the conversation.(…) You even took a few jobs. I think you told me before that you actually, I don’t know if it was like during the summers or while you were in school, actually took some jobs that were kind of leading toward practicing medicine. When did that change for you to something that’s quite a bit different, right?(…) Yeah, so I actually each summer I was working in different hospitals and medical clinics, depending on where I was living, and like in high school and then during college. And I just kept doing these sort of side jobs. I work in the HIV blood clinic where I kind of ran samples there, just anything that relevant to the medical field that I could do to sort of feel out whether or not I liked it or not. So I did take some of those jobs. And then when I was actually done with college, sort of getting ready to prepare to take the test and everything to start either doing medical degree type work or a physician’s assistant, which is kind of similar to that. So I was like, okay, where am I going to apply? What am I going to do? So(…) in the meantime, I had went to a music festival over in Live Oak, which is essentially a bluegrass festival that you camp at and whatnot. And I met a whole new bunch of people there, a lot of fun people. And one of the women that I met was actually an environmental engineer that worked at the Florida Department of Environmental Protection.(…) So her and I started talking and I told her I was struggling and not really sure why what I wanted to do, she could tell that I wasn’t into the whole medical thing. So told her I don’t like being trapped inside. This isn’t really my thing. But I feel like I have to go through it. She’s like, well, why don’t you try the environmental field? And I looked at her like she had three heads. I didn’t even know what that was. What do you mean? What is this? What is this thing? I don’t even know what this is. So at my at university South Florida, there really wasn’t like an environmental engineering program. There’s a civil one. And they didn’t really have like an environmental science and policy program yet. That was that’s showing my age, obviously. But basically, they had studied that much after I graduated. Biology was the only option. And most people were premed and if they were anything. So I talked to her a little bit more. And she said, I just got promoted, why don’t you apply for this position? And there’s two others available. So I applied for all of them. And I basically got two of them was offered two jobs. One was biologist, one was a chemist with the state of Florida in Tampa. This is a super similar track to your previous guest, Julie SP, because we took the biologist position like she did, and essentially went down the same track as looking at doing a lot of different types of aquatic biology type work, water quality collection, biological sampling for stream streams assessments, lake assessments. I did all the taxonomic identifications of the macro invertebrates that show water is clean or not vegetation. So basically just started my career similarly to Julie and think it’s a really good place to start, to be honest, when when I didn’t have any experience. And I didn’t learn any of that during my training under my bachelor program, I kind of learned genetics and all of the animal physiology and things like that. But I didn’t have any kind of background in environmental fields. I had to essentially learn that from the fresh go, you know, essentially at the DEP. So I was very thankful for that. Yeah, I mean, I think that speaks well of the department in that regard, they could take someone who’s obviously bright, who knows some of the basics, but doesn’t know how to do this job and to be able to teach you how to get there. I think that sounds pretty cool to me, actually. Oh, yeah, it was amazing. I had there are people there that were probably 15, 20 years into their careers that I was able to learn from. And the fact that I was able to get paid to be on a boat, and get in the water and be in the water all the time, even if there was gators around, it wasn’t a big deal to me, I just was super excited to be outside constantly. What year did you end up? I’m trying not to age you all the way through this, but it just comes, it comes with the territory with these.(…) You end up at SWFWMD, which is I think we overlap like a bare bit, I was out in Bartow, though. When did you go to SWFWMD? So I went to SWFWMD in 2006, I had gotten a job offer, and to be something a little bit out of my comfort zone, because here at DEP, I was essentially a sampler, I was doing monitoring, I had learned analyses, I started learning about how to take that data and interpret it. I wasn’t managing anything, I was just sort of doing the work, like collecting the samples, doing the analysis and understanding where the issues were, doing a lot of the total maximum daily load work. I was there in the infancy of that, essentially, when the TMDLs are being developed, and then the basin management act like I was there when they were being developed, really cutting my teeth on water quality at that time heavily. So when I got the job at SWFWMD to be a project manager, it was for the surface water improvement and management program. So SWIM, the SWIM program, and they, I knew, I absolutely wanted to do water quality restoration. I started to realize, okay, I get how to figure out where the issues are, but now I need to understand and learn how to fix them, and you know, how to address the water quality problems that we’re having everywhere, not only in the region that I was in. So I felt like it was a natural progression. I had a bunch of opportunities to, my other options were to go into permitting, in different types of permitting jobs at SWFWMD, I know. I had like three or four, but this was the one that I just felt like was the perfect track for me, and I needed to take that step to go into restoration.(…) Nice. And tell me a little bit about the timeline. Was it while you’re at DEP or SWFWMD that you got a master’s degree in something that is very much not biology, right? Yeah. So that was actually pretty funny. So I was new at SWFWMD as a project manager, and basically the first task I had was to review engineering plans for a constructed treatment wetland project that I had no idea what that even was. And I never had seen a set of plans in my entire life. And I was expected to learn how to understand that and review those and then actually monitor the construction. So doing the construction inspections of this massive three million dollar project. And I was just feeling completely out of my comfort zone. And at that time I realized, and of course I had a mentor, I had training, but it just when somebody says, “Hey Mary, here you go. You’re going to start doing this. And even though you’ve never done this in your entire life.” So I had realized that I probably should learn some engineering to know what I’m doing and why I’m even being involved in this and how I can just make sure that I’m looking at it from the right perspective. Because my science background at the time just didn’t seem to cut it. I realized at that moment, so that was a year after I got to SwiftMUD, I immediately enrolled in the Environmental Engineering Sciences Master’s program at University of Florida, which is incredible. And it was great because I could do some of it online and some of it was in person. And I took some courses at USF and transferred them in as well. So I just started working on engineering and learning everything I could about it. It took me about three years to complete while I was working full time at SwiftMUD actually. It was tough. It was not an easy thing to do, to be honest. I wouldn’t recommend it, but I managed to get through. But I will say I did get to learn everything I was wanting. So I was yearning how do you do design and treatment, well, and design and all these things. So then I knew how to actually evaluate and review plans and how to know whether or not the consulting firms that are submitting products and deliverables to me, I knew how to actually review them and help them sort of improve them if they needed to. Nice.(…) And you’re a big fan of mentorships and is part because you had such a good one at SwiftMUD? You talked about that a little bit already with me. Yeah. So I will say I have to tell Janie Hagberg, she is currently the chief engineer at SwiftMUD at the moment. At the time when I first started a very, very green non-engineer, just a scientist, she took me under her wing and really trained me. And she was the most amazing mentor I’ve ever had. She’s really the reason I went back to school for engineering because I wanted to be like her. And I just her ability to manage things and nothing ever seemed to phase her. Even when we had some pretty big issues arise during some of the project construction, she was handling everything with grace. And I was like, that’s who I want to be. That’s what I want to do. I want to be able to be an incredible engineer. So she’s amazing. We still collaborate from time to time on different projects. And it’s great to have her in my, she kind of was there to help me grow. Talk about your relationship also in the SWIM program at SwiftMUD. One of my absolute favorite people there. Now Jeanette Silverman, but back then the last name was Seacrest. Yeah. So Jeanette actually hired me at the district. She gave me the path forward to get down to restoration.(…) And so she was an amazing manager and she saw a kind of potential and saw that I can actually do things outside of my comfort zone. And she helped me achieve things that I would never have done actually. Pushed me pretty hard and gave me lots of great projects to work on and kind of let me do what I wanted to do. At the time, the SWIM program was heavily embedded on habitat restoration. They had some incredible scientists, Brent Henningsen and a couple others, Chris Kaufman and Stephanie Powers, all these people that just have been doing this. They’re really good at it and they do a lot of habitat related stuff. And I had noticed that there was a lack of water quality focused restoration.(…) And so sort of pushing that a little bit harder. So Jeanette really let me explore that and let me move our program and expand it into that to really focus on water quality restoration as well. Jeanette is obviously great, but she also ended up being the one that encouraged you to get your PhD, didn’t she? Yes, she definitely did. She was a big driver and that was a life-changing decision for me. She knew I had high aspirations in terms of wanting to learn all I could about what was causing water quality issues and the best way of addressing them. And she had a knack for the power of suggestion where she basically told me if I wanted to be the expert and then I needed a PhD in that. And I’m not saying that everybody needs a PhD, but for myself, to what I wanted to get to where I could actually lead the development of projects, she sort of just coached me into that and really had a lot of faith and supported me into it. So I decided to go after it. I’m really glad I did. It almost sounds like your approach is that you and I talked before and you said, “I hate not knowing.” Is that kind of the idea behind starting something, expanding, continuing, expanding on that and so on and so forth? Is that an app description of your approach to your career at that point? I would say so. I mean, I am definitely, I would say I’m curious to a fault. We’re deep down. I’m a researcher at heart. I don’t like leaving rocks unturned. I want to make sure that I’ve evaluated everything that I can before I move forward, especially when I’m proposing something that’s a little bit new and innovative, that it’s only been potentially applied in a research forum type thing. So it is, that’s difficult because you want to make sure that it works before you do propose it to a client essentially.(…) So I would say that just because something’s already been done, it doesn’t mean it’s been done correctly. And it’s not been, I’ll be all. And we definitely are able to improve upon our scientific understanding and the way that we actually approach the solution. So I feel like that’s been something, that’s a track for me. So I basically have seen things that are proposed and then attempted and they may not work at that moment the way that they were actually implemented, but if we modify something there and we monitor and look at it from the, you know, kind of a technical manner and see if it can work somewhere else, that there’s always an opportunity, I feel like, to really improve the way that something’s been proposed and actually implemented. Yeah, I guess maybe I chose an inartful way of describing it. It seems like with all of the different angles at which you’ve found yourself either studying in the university level or on the job, there’s almost nothing that you don’t have some expertise in or ability to know the different angles on a project, even things that are maybe not necessarily in your normal wheelhouse, right? Well, I appreciate that. This is very, very kind of you to say, I feel like if I don’t know something, I’m going to figure it out. I’ve been asked, I think a lot of it has to do with the three letters after my name. People expect me to know what spider is crawling on the wall because I’m a PhD. They think I know every single plant out there and all these things. I’m like, I don’t know what that is, but sometimes there’s things that I feel like it’s my duty to figure it out. And if it’s related to water quality or anything, ecological engineering style, I’m going to go out there. I’m going to read a paper. I’m going to find some, I just, I enjoy and I’m very resourceful. So I’d like to find out what it is. Before I say, I don’t know what this is. I’ll say, I’ll figure it out. If I can’t, I’ll let you know. But I’m not going to just stand there and say, I don’t know. I mean, normally I don’t think I do. Well, eventually you leave the district and the private sector. Why did you leave the district? When you are in a government entity or two of them, and I’ve made a lot of contacts all over the Southwest district in Florida. So I’ve made a lot of relationships at this point. And now if you pair a PhD to that with a technical ability, I’m now someone that a lot of people were recruiting. So I was immediately recorded as soon as my degree was in hand. I had a bunch of companies that were coming after me. And that was actually, I felt really good because I appreciated being finally recognized and respected as someone in the field that has a technical capability. And that I didn’t have that earlier on. And I kind of at that point realized I just need to try this out. And Jeanette maybe pushed me a little bit. She said, you should do this. You’ll be a great consultant. I was like, okay, well, let me see if I can put my teeth on this and see if I can actually cut it in consulting. Because I knew I was going from a 40 hour work week to potentially 60, 80, get this becomes, it’s a whole nother life. The reason I was primed for that was because I just finished working full time and getting a master’s and a PhD. So I was used to working 60, 80 hour week. Okay, this next transition, next step, next phase. And the main reason to be honest, I love working for the government. I think it’s incredibly important. We have to have smart technical people that work in the government. But for me, I was ready to actually implement the projects and to develop and conceptualize. So when I was at the government, I just had to take a project deliverable that a consultant gave me, I look at it review say, okay, I think this looks good. And then we move on. And then the next one comes in, I don’t get to actually develop anything. So at that point in my life, I was ready to lead and I wanted to create teams, I wanted to develop staff, I wanted to become in a senior level professional, sort of understand a lot more about everything and wanted to actually see if I could do this consulting gig where it is definitely a lot faster paced. And a lot is involved. So you’re not only doing your job, you’re doing many, many different levels of work. So I had to basically do business development, project management of a lot of 30 plus projects, sometimes developing staff, and then, you know, continuing to grow the whole entire product lines or whatnot, or whatever we were working on at the time. So it was difficult, but I absolutely enjoyed it because I kind of do fuel on a lot more activity and enjoy kind of a fast paced environment. That experience that you developed at DEP in the district had to have made you more dangerous in terms of, you know, what folks are looking for, in terms of how do I implement this project, you know, the angles from the other side of the table in terms of what they want, right? Oh, absolutely. That was so helpful for me. Yeah, whenever I would talk to clients, so essentially, the client, the people that were my cooperators when I was at SWFWMD,(…) which were cooperative projects, funded projects, those immediately became my clients, because we had projects that I was able to assist with, because I already knew what their issues were, I already knew what they needed. And we’ve been working on that for eight years. So at that point, I was like, let’s start doing work together. And that was very helpful, because then they really trusted me into kind of leading them down different paths. So I had a couple very progressive clients that were previous cooperators and stakeholders where we just jumped right in and were able to move forward with doing some really cool projects, actually. You do that for eight years in one spot right out. You end up joining Res, a name that ought to be really familiar to listeners, Resource Environmental Solutions. What drew you to Res away from a place that you’d been for eight years?(…) Well, I think everything did line up pretty well, where I learned the assessment part in the government, and then I was able to apply solutions that weren’t really done on a regular basis at the company that I was with before that. And then Res just really had this outstanding program where I felt like I was ready to apply what I learned at the other places at a grander scale. So instead of doing these smaller 50 to 100 acre projects, which do, you know, they’re important, they have to happen. And most of those are limited to working on public lands. I just knew that we had to do something bigger with the way that we’re developing and have developed already the lands for urban and agricultural use and everything that still has to maintain and continue. We need a new structure. We need a structure that allows for larger projects and they have to be regionalized. And on the scale of hundreds to thousands of acres, not just smaller ones.(…) And you can’t do that on a public piece of land. Typically, some of them, yes, there’s some in the northern part of Florida that still exists. But then you look at urbanized areas like Pinellas County, Sarasota, Manatee, down in South Florida, there’s not a lot of space left, but there are in terms of public lands, but there are private lands that can still be utilized and brought into a project. So I was really excited when I met with Res to be able to do these larger regionalized projects where we can actually move the needle on improving water quality. Because a lot of these projects have been done for habitat restoration or ecological restoration, which is important, but they’re not focused and designed for water quality restoration. So the turnkey approach that Res can actually deliver through a public-private partnership, that is, in my opinion, the way to achieve those kind of really lofty goals of meeting TMDLs and all the BMAP allocations and basically the amount of nutrient load that needs to be removed from a water body through these types of larger type projects. Yeah, I think that’s what it’s a thing that probably people miss. If you’re not dealing with everglades level projects or nearby geographically, I don’t think a lot of folks get the lift that’s necessary for the nutrient reduction to meet these water quality goals. Therein lies bigger projects that you get involved in, but there’s an actual difference, like in Res’s approach to that environmental restoration as well. I would say it’s in the engineering, but I think it’s almost in the not engineering or not over engineering. Is that right? Well, I think that the approach is different because the company is different. They’re not a consulting firm. They have consulting capabilities, but they’re basically what is so different and unique is that they’re a fully integrated operating company. They’re capable of financing and bringing money and investments and invest stores to do big projects and that are fully dedicated to doing environmental restoration.(…) So, Res in my opinion is completely advancing all these different techniques and project approaches. That is what they call alternative delivery. So, that’s the soup to nuts turnkey project approach that I kind of mentioned already. You can incorporate land acquisition into that as well. They also are able to, which is incredibly unique in my opinion, to provide that financial assurance to really support a project and the performance metrics. We all know that there’s been projects out there that we know were designed on a perception and on a perceived modeled approach, but not a lot of people and agencies and companies and all the basically project providers are not able to demonstrate that this project outcome is actually doing what we all said it was going to do. So, how many of those have you heard of? I don’t really, that’s where I wanted to be. I wanted to be with somebody that says, if I’m telling you this is going to reduce X pounds of nutrients or pollutants of any kind and I’m just modeling it and then never proving it, how do I know that’s actually going to happen? And normally it isn’t. Unfortunately, the fact of the reality is the majority of the projects are not actually achieving those outcomes and that’s why I came to Res. I want to show, I want to prove that we’re doing it and that we are demonstrating that actual project outcome and proving it with performance metrics that are actually part of the actual project. So, the way that we do that is that we’re able to institute that Florida statute, if anyone’s interested 255.065.(…) Florida’s incredibly lucky to have it because I also work outside of Florida in the Midwest and California and other states and different Carolinas. They don’t have that type of a public-private partnership statute that allows private and public to work together to do massive projects in a partnership. That’s how Res. is able to basically own and restore massive amounts. I’m hundreds of thousands of acres of restoration of floodplains for wetlands, hydrologic functions. They’re providing regional water quality improvements and conserving lands at the same time. It’s quite incredible. In Florida alone, I think Res. owns like 6,000 acres that they’re restoring. Huge amounts of property. We’re an owner, we’re a stakeholder, we’re a steward in land. The reason we’re able to do that is because we can do a full delivery project by acquiring the land in the place that the project needs to happen and not really where the public land is available, maybe not going to provide us the best outcome.(…) That also requires a lot of the technical needs such as the assessment analysis, modeling, design permitting, all of that. We also provide the maintenance operation and monitoring after we do the construction. We’re like a full package thing, which I think is quite unique. Then we’re backing everything with financial surety, which doesn’t exist really. There’s a few other people that can do that. You named a handful of things that don’t exist, Mary. I’ve been on that proverbial other side of the table where you know this thing that you’re supposed to get. You have a project you’re going to do. You pay engineers to design and construct the thing that you believe that you need.(…) You don’t know what’s going to happen when it’s done.(…) It doesn’t matter. The folks that you work with are on to the next project. I understand that.(…) That’s what I mean, that you’ve turned it on its head. You’re not just building something, but you’re literally managing that same project for years and years even.(…) Oh my gosh, we have projects that we are committed to maintaining and operating and monitoring to prove that they are still functioning the way we said they were for 25-30 years.(…) Some of these are in the 10-20,000 acres and 600 miles of stream restoration. It’s not just a small little dip in the bucket. We’re managing a lot of area and have the technical staff in-house and also our partners. We have a lot of firms that we work with. We don’t do all this in-house. It’s a team structure. I really appreciate that as well. I think that the monitoring end, the accountability end, is a thing that my mind goes to when you look at the TMDLs throughout the state of Florida. These B-MAPs that are in effect. House Bill 1379 that has just been enacted by the legislature. All of them are pointing at very specific targets. When I think of the position that DEP is in, the water management districts are in, in terms of meeting these goals when they’re supposed to be met,(…) knowing that something works has got to be an enormous relief for them. I know it would be for me. It’s like if I was fixing and I was in charge(…) or being a part of that team, as you describe it, for cleaning what we call a spring and getting it below its total maximum daily load.(…) To know that you’re going to hit a target would have been a great relief to me to know when that was going to take place exactly and not just theoretically. So that’s really cool. We haven’t talked about any specific projects. Give me something that you’re working on right now. Okay, so specifically I’m not really able to tell you that because right now we’re working under the P-3 format, which is the turnkey. It’s basically where we provide an unsolicited proposal. So I can’t specify where and who and whatnot, but I will tell you I’ve got a bunch of stokes in the fire at the moment and they’re ranging from spring, lake and stream restoration all the way to groundwater recharge because some areas in the Suwanee River water management district, even the northwest, we’ve got a long way to go to meet minimum flows and levels, especially the levels in the aquifer.(…) So there’s many varieties of projects. They’re not only water quality, but they all sort of stem from that. There’s also flooding attenuation projects that I’m kind of tying in the water quality as well through constructive treatment wetlands, kind of taking the stream restoration format that’s been done in Florida by several amazing practitioners and furthering that in the larger concept level. So in terms of water quality restoration, right? So a lot of this has been done like in the Chesapeake Bay area already and we’re trying to apply something similar and so that it’s Florida specific and making sure that we’re addressing the issues here and fitting projects into the spaces that we have left. Mostly the projects I’m working on are still in conceptual phase. I’ve only been at REZ for now, I think it’s seven or eight months, but we’re already in conceptual phase. So that’s pretty quick. We’re able to move very quickly because we have the ability to work at risk essentially. And so we’ve already cited projects. I’ve already found the problems, found the locations, put them and provided the conceptual kind of ideas. And now we’re moving into the point where we’re going to provide these proposals that people are looking at and then we can actually move forward with kind of doing the projects. So the funding component is also a big one there, which we’re able to assist with and help different clients get the funding. Since I’m working all over Florida, I’m sort of all over the place. Like I mentioned, I’m also doing stuff in other areas in the United States, trying to apply similar type techniques and whatnot. Some areas aren’t as keen on water quality, but we’re sort of trying to flip the script on that. But there are definitely other areas that are very, very keen on it. So we’re making big strides and definitely these areas, they all need help. And it’s not only urban areas. This is urban, this is remote areas.(…) Every district has something that they were basically touching at this point.(…) How does Florida shape up in terms of its approach to water quality issues, you know, writ large? I know there are other issues mixed in the flooding, resilience sorts of things, but how does it shape up when you’re looking at it compared to those other places? Okay, so I want to commend all of the previous, the people before me that started like the T&D process, the numeric nutrient criteria, BMAPs, because it’s something that’s leading towards improvement in water quality. When you look at other states and examples like California, you would imagine everyone thinks when I talk to them that they’re so far along with water quality. Well, they are in some regards, but they’re not for nutrients. And Florida is super advanced in that regard. And it’s actually helped me quite a bit when I’m working in other areas like the Midwest and California, where people in those regions are actually very focused on flooding attenuation. That’s like the number one issue, and especially Midwest, for example, last weekend, Chicago got several inches of rains that caused major issues there that then led to flooding and then water quality issues. So they’re starting to realize there’s a connection, but the ultimate funding and everything goes to flooding. And I understand that, but there’s definitely other issues and benefits that could be gained from working like a multi benefit structured project. In California, a lot of the entities there are very hyper focused on metals, so selenium and zinc and things like that, because it’s impacting the biota in the bays. However, they’re not looking on all the nutrient issues that are already there. They kind of don’t realize that they’re there yet. So when I was there recently, I was meeting with quite a few people and we’re starting to change that as well. So there’s improvement potential all across the board, even in Florida. But Florida, I think, just like the mid-Atlantic is much more advanced in terms of water quality from a nutrient perspective.(…) So now we’re going to get into your speed round. And so hang on tight, Dr. Szafraniec. Okay. It’s not that bad.(…) What professional accomplishment are you most proud of so far?(…) Oh, that’s a difficult question to answer. I could look at it from many different angles, I guess, but I think honestly, helping to bridge the gender gap in the engineering field, by mentoring women in a field that’s still dominated by mostly men. It was a really tough go 20 years ago, to be recognized and respected as a woman in the environmental engineering field. Hate to say it, but it’s the truth. I think we’ve come a long way, though, and we’ve been able to show a little bit more and there’s a better balance between that. But we need to get to a point where equality shouldn’t just be a thing. We shouldn’t have to continue to pursue it. We should just have it. It should be a basic fact and not just some platform that we’re striving for. But from the technical perspective, I feel like I was able to kind of help advance the field of ecological engineering science so that we can actually get closer to meeting these water quality goals. But we have to look at it from an ecological perspective. There’s a lot of ways to look at engineering and there’s civil and all these other things. But if we can kind of blend the science and the engineering, which I feel now I’m a hybrid engineer. I’m not just a scientist. I’m not an engineer only. I’m an ecological engineer. And I think that is definitely one way if we can sort of adopt that practice a little bit more into the way that we implement projects, then that discipline is really going to help shape the future for water quality restoration. Okay. When it came to your time inside government, is there something you feel that you left undone or something you would have approached differently if you had to do it over again? Yeah, we did touch on this already. I absolutely would have loved to be able to do more performance efficiency monitoring for projects. I think executives cringe at the thought of that because they want to just put things in the ground. Right. And I know you as an EV, I don’t know if you’re in monitoring, but if you had a certain amount of money, you wanted to probably put something in the ground. And then maybe monitor if you had the extra cash on hand later on. However,(…) sometimes if we would have put the monitoring in, we maybe would have been able to preempt some issues down the road. Because I know we’ve spent millions of dollars constructing projects that have a perceived impact, right? And then like I already talked about, are they meeting those goals? We don’t really know because we’re not monitoring them. And we would have learned from our mistakes if we just would have spent some money figuring out if those things actually worked. That’s something I really wish I would have screamed even louder about wanting to monitor more when I was, you know, my younger days.(…) Well, despite some of the old lack of monitoring, are you optimistic about the future of the environment and its natural systems in Florida? I am optimistic. I think I see a lot of these state agencies recently have actually started coming together to make bigger impacts. I’m not going to name them. But before it used to be one state agency only cared about one thing, the other state agency only cared about it. They didn’t really want to talk to each other. And I did quite I thought that was just a little bit silly sometimes, like we could work together and do a lot more together. But I’m still a little reserved, because I know that some of these things are definitely they need to be separated out. But if we could somehow I would be more optimistic, I think if we can somehow move towards a regional type scale for projects that are providing those measurable benefits, because we don’t if we if we start measuring, see if it works, like I mentioned, that we’re not going to do the wash, rinse, repeat over and over again, and still end up with a product, you know, where there’s what somebody would look at and say, that’s dirty water, I can’t see my feet. There’s algae all over me when I’m in the bay, I feel like if we are going to come together with agencies sort of working together, and realizing and not pointing fingers anymore, then then maybe and also, like you mentioned earlier, which is a huge point, having that accountability for these these environmental restoration projects, there’s tons of them going on. And they vary. They’re not just natural systems. They’re like we do at res, everything is very much nature based. However, there’s way slower facilities that need to be updated and all these things, upgrades and whatnot, everything should have some form of a performance criteria so that we can say that what we did actually is working. Yeah. What if anything keeps you up at night regarding Florida’s environment? I think you may have touched on a little bit there. But yeah, I think that resiliency is a huge factor. And I think about that a lot. How do we implement resiliency and making sure that all of our outcomes are resilient and sustainable? That’s always on my mind, because I think back to the days of my earlier career, how I implemented projects that are very localized. So we looked at this small watershed, 200 acres is feeding this area and this this lake. But now I think we have an opportunity to go outside of that and go a little bit bigger. And think about all the things that we can do to improve and think about it from the future perspective, you know, and how things are going to change. So like I mentioned the example in Chicago, I think this area and then places in Florida for sure have the opportunity to not just think of this neighborhood is the issue. We have a bigger watershed that’s always been involved there. And then we also have other resources like groundwater and then things that have already been put in place that we just have to start looking at internally. If we have a lot of different types of stormwater resources that need to be updated, we should start looking at those. I know there’s so many problems that need to be addressed, but it’s like which one do we attack first? You know, can we do them all at the same time somehow? How do we just make sure we’re thinking outside the box, getting everything addressed and not just cover it up with a Band-Aid each time? Because I feel like we’re still in Band-Aid and immediate address mode at the moment, kind of that reactive, but we need to be able to more proactive.(…) What advice would you give young people, maybe a young woman who’s just entering or they’re interested in entering the environmental field, maybe engineering through public service or in the private sector? What would you tell them?(…) Well, you know, that is another tough one because there’s so many things that I would love to tell them, you know, I can talk forever. So I would actually, I would think either a man or woman, you know, just suggesting that they learn how to collaborate and not only internally where they’re at, but also across disciplines. So if a scientist is thinking something, a lot of times you’ll have an engineering scientist kind of not really talking to each other. I think putting those two together is very important. Learning each other’s disciplines to an extent that you can cross training.(…) So when I was mentoring and fostering kind of growth and development with staff, I never just taught them what their discipline was. I wanted to make sure that they knew stuff outside of that.(…) That gives them a lot more perspective to kind of work outside of their little silo. Computer model is only looking at the model that they’re looking at. They don’t even know why there’s a lot, there’s potential for disaster. You know, we have to explain to them, why, why are you learning this? Why are you, why are you looking at this? Why, what else are we going to be able to do here? So I think getting out of that silo mentality is really important. And then flexibility, realizing you’re not the best and the smartest in the room each time. Because some people, you know, they just think this I’m the best, I’m the one, this is, this is the best thing here. And don’t recreate the wheel, just modify it maybe so it doesn’t squeak anymore a little, and then they can improve it each time. So there’s definitely been a lot of work already to date completed. And I always want to build on what others have done. So I think that there’s still a lot of building that has to happen. We have to do it collaboratively. I think there’s some really good nuggets of wisdom in there. And I think that makes it a great place to stop. MarySzafraniec thanks so much for coming on the show. Thank you. Really appreciate it. It was a lot of fun. Well, that’s it for this episode. Thanks for listening to Water for Fighting. This week’s discussion is brought to you by Sea and Shoreline. Don’t forget to check the episode notes to visit their websites and learn more about how they can help you. If you’re enjoying the show, please be sure to subscribe on whatever platform you use. And don’t forget to leave a five star rating and review. You can follow the show on Facebook, LinkedIn,(…) Instagram, probably even Twitter at FL WaterPod. And you can reach me directly at flwaterpod at gmail.com with your comments and suggestions for who and or what you’d like to know more about. Production of this podcast is by Lonely Fox Studios. Thanks to Carl Sworn for making the best of what he had to work with and a Dave Barfield for the amazing graphics and technical assistance. A very special thank you goes out to Bow Spring from the Bow Spring Band for giving permission to use his music for the podcast. The song is called “Doing Work for Free” and you should check out the band live or wherever great music is sold.(…) Join me next time for another amazing conversation with someone who has helped shape water and environmental policy in the Sunshine State. Until then, keep your whiskey close and your water closer.