Tampa Bay Water's Master Water Plan Goals

Environmental Stewardship: Tampa Bay Water’s vision is to deliver sufficient high-quality water in an environmentally-sustainable manner. The Partnership Plan and Interlocal Agreement that drove the creation of Tampa Bay Water had environmental stewardship as a core motivation. Tampa Bay Water continues to spend millions of dollars per year to monitor and optimize its operations to ensure that its water production operations effect environmental protection. Environmental stewardship is furthered by having a diversified water supply portfolio that includes conservation. Environmental stewardship also incorporates the responsibility to develop and implement sustainable water supplies, reducing electrical power consumption, greenhouse gas production, chemical usage, and other factors involving environmental consequences to the greatest extent practicable.

Cost: Providing fiscal responsibility along with environmental stewardship is a cornerstone of Tampa Bay Water’s water supply approach. Minimizing the cost of all operations, from source to tap, helps minimize rate impacts, consistent with meeting reliability and environmental stewardship goals. This focus on efficiency helps fulfill Tampa Bay Water’s mission of public service, ensuring the region’s water needs are met in an effective economical manner.

Reliability: Tampa Bay Water is unequivocally committed to meeting the needs of its Member Governments and their citizens. Reliability of the supply sources is of primary importance and it is both a public health and safety necessity and essential to environmental sustainability. Without a reliable water supply, the environmental stewardship objective could not be met, as public health and safety would take precedence over environmental protection should water supply sufficiency be at risk. Water supply source reliability must also address the need for source water protection; assuring that water supply quality is protected at the source is the best way to assure a reliable supply quantity and provide for the public health. Reliability covers the important tasks that Tampa Bay Water faces in accomplishing its mission, including source water protection; drought resistance; adequate supply; source optimization; supply, storage, and transmission flexibility; as well as addressing potential future climate affects, including increased climatic variability which can impact source water quantity and quality.