Town of Dundee Facing Building Moratorium Due to Water Shortage

Skyrocketing development pressures are colliding with dwindling supplies of water across Florida. Those same forces are now causing angst for elected officials along the Ridge, who are wrestling with increased costs and possible building moratoriums, even as the collapse of the citrus industry along the Ridge in eastern Polk has caused many former citrus growers to offer their huge tracts of land to developers.

Courtesy Town of Dundee

Dundee town commissioners are considering the area's first building moratorium, which would impact several projects planned for the growing community on the Florida Ridge.

The Town of Dundee, which has grown to 6,000 residents in recent years, is now faced with a crisis of supply. Water Use Permits issued by the Southwest Florida Water Management District provide the once-sleepy community with only 917,500 gallons of water per day, with current consumption reaching more than 800,000 gallons.

Against that tight supply background, more than 5,700 new houses and apartments are in the permitting process in the town. They are expected to more than double the demand for water.

SWFWMD is issuing no further withdrawal permits from the stressed Floridan Aquifer. In response, the town council is considering an unprecedented temporary moratorium.

As development pressures have been spilling southward from sprawling Orlando, the Florida Legislature has passed a series of laws encouraging development and restricting local efforts to rein in growth. Governor Ron DeSantis has been outspoken in support of those changes.

Building moratoriums have long been a controversial subject in Polk County, pitting the concerns of local residents against development interests and landowners. Now water may be emerging as the decisive factor in the tug of war.

Dundee is not alone among Ridge-area cities and towns in its suffering from water anxieties. Town leaders are hoping for future supplies from the huge Polk Regional Water Cooperative project, which will draw and treat brackish water from the sub-Floridan Aquifer. The required desalination process is costly and unprecedented for an area once considered blessed with abundant supplies.

The Town of Zephyrhills in adjoining Pasco County is famous primarily due to the sale of eponymously-branded water by a private company, but the town declared a building moratorium in June of 2023 due to a lack of municipal water capacity. The former small agricultural town has ballooned to become the most-populous municipality in the county.

Florida's multi-layered aquifers, ranging through surficial, intermediate, and Floridan, are distinctly different from the sub-Floridan, which lies more than 3,000 feet below the surface and contains salty brine. Officials believe that water drawn from that depth will be replaced through "lateral flow" and reduce demand on the fresh-water supplies. The wellfield is already under construction southeast of Lake Wales, just south of Lake Walk-in-the-Water.

Courtesy PRWC

An ambitious and expensive answer to increasing demand for a shrinking resource, the Polk Regional Water Cooperative is constructing a network of pipelines, along with a large wellfield, to pump water to customers across Polk County. The brackish water from the sub-Floridan aquifer will be treated at a desalination plant in Lake Wales before being distributed to municipal water systems, where it will have to undergo secondary treatment before being piped to consumers.

Ridge area residents have watched in recent years as thousands of acres of former citrus lands in the Davenport area have been converted to dense developments of homes and apartments. The steady consumption of desirable development sites on the well-drained soils of the Ridge has motivated developers to continue moving southward through Haines City, Lake Hamilton, and Dundee.

A near-frenzied pace of land-buying arose in Lake Wales during 2021, leading to the more than 40 development proposals for approximately 20,000 residences which are now on drawing boards or already under construction. Those numbers are causing worries for city officials and rising opposition from current residents worried about the loss of the area's "small town feel."

Although Lake Wales has adequate capacity and permits to supply most of that growth, demand is projected to rise from the current 2.8 million gallons a day (MGD) to exceed supply by 2035, prompting the city commission to consider joining the PRWC to reserve desalinized water to augment what it currently obtains from the sweet-water Floridan Aquifer. An initial reserve of 500,000 MGD would augment the 3.9 million gallons currently permitted to the city.

New development on former citrus lands often contain wells, and area municipalities are requiring that owners seeking annexation transfer ownership of the well and capacity to the communities to offset demand, but there is no guarantee that SWFWMD will grant those volumes, according to officials.