Brevard County will ask the Florida Department of Environmental Protection for a public hearing on the commercial space company Blue Origin’s request to keep sending nearly half a million gallons of wastewater daily into the Indian River Lagoon.
The company seeks to extend its existing permit to discharge that wastewater. County commissioners voted unanimously Tuesday night to take the only action they could by asking FDEP to hold a hearing.
Blue Origin sends the wastewater from an industrial facility on Merritt Island to a ditch on Ransom Road that feeds directly into the lagoon. FDEP issued the company a permit in July 2020 to build and operate the “test facility with an industrial wastewater discharge.”
At Tuesday’s commission meeting, residents and even some commissioners — for whom the lagoon is a top concern — said they felt blindsided by Blue Origin’s request and weren’t aware the discharges had already been happening.
Residents urged commissioners to seek the public hearing, a request FDEP could decide not to grant. The agency will accept public feedback on the draft proposal until mid-December.
As of Tuesday night, an online petition against Blue Origin’s discharges had more than 6,300 signatures.
“When I heard about this, it felt like a ‘Twilight Zone’ episode,” said Julio Torres, who told commissioners he’s been a county resident for 25 years. “If Brevard County is investing millions to keep our Indian River clean, this idea will fight that investment. It would not make any sense.”
The county’s Save Our Indian River Lagoon program funds lagoon restoration projects with a half-penny sales tax, approved by voters in 2016. The program will expire after next year, unless it’s renewed.
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Across SOIRL’s 10-year lifespan, the sales tax is projected to yield some $586 million for lagoon restoration projects, or an average of $58.6 million a year. Those projects range in size and scope but are all ultimately designed to help the lagoon, usually by either removing existing pollution from the water or trying to stop new pollutants from getting in.
The Indian River Lagoon had a relatively good year in 2024, improving “in many ways” from 2023, according to an annual lagoon health report from the nonprofit Marine Resources Council. Still, some pockets of the lagoon system struggled more with certain issues, like poor water quality and very poor seagrass coverage in the Central Indian River Lagoon.
Between August 2023 and August 2024, there were 168 wastewater spills in areas feeding into the lagoon, with spills ranging in size from five to more than 1 million gallons. “The work is far from done,” according to MRC’s report.
For many county residents who love the Indian River Lagoon, allowing companies like Blue Origin to keep sending effluent to its waters defeats the purpose of investing so much time and energy into helping it.
“I'm not voting for the half-cent (tax) again, not doing that. No way,” Merritt Island resident Elizabeth Michelman told commissioners. “You are ruining the value of my home. You are ruining my quality of life.”
Most, not all, of Blue Origin’s wastewater receives treatment before being discharged to the lagoon. But even sending large volumes of pure, clean freshwater there could be devastating for the delicate estuary ecosystem, according to lagoon advocates.
Laurilee Thompson is the longest-serving member of the citizen oversight committee for the county’s SOIRL program. She is also a founding member of the Indian River Lagoon Roundtable, a group that meets weekly to discuss lagoon health.
“Even if it’s highly filtered, and most of the pollutants are out of it …. The point is that too much fresh water is damaging to a healthy estuary,” Thompson said in an interview ahead of Tuesday’s meeting. “And we've already caused immense damage to the Indian River Lagoon.”
Thompson’s family has lived in Brevard County for generations, since before spaceships and cruise ships replaced citrus and fishing as the area’s top industries. Over time, Thompson said, she’s seen conditions in the lagoon change and deteriorate.
“We’re changing the salinity regime of the Indian River Lagoon. The lagoon is not as salty today as it was when I was a kid, growing up in the 1950s and 1960s,” Thompson said.
Thompson and other residents also raised concerns about what they see as the lack of a holistic approach to planning for the space industry’s continued growth.
“The community has asked for this for years,” said environmental advocate Stel Bailey, “and we still don't have a single body looking at the overall long term impacts of the space port: only piecemeal approvals, one project at a time, as if each facility dumps into its own separate universe.”
The concern isn’t about just one permit, Bailey said. “This is one piece of a very large, very connected system. When you stack all these permits on top of each other, 10 years down the road, we're not talking about a trickle.”
Public records show FDEP has cited the facility for violating the permit several times, including in November, when the agency notified Blue Origin it had failed to properly collect required water samples. For that violation, the state wants Blue Origin to pay $5,450 by Dec. 5.
Before sending that notice, in late October, FDEP sent Blue Origin a rundown of penalty fines owed by the company for other violations, totalling more than $11,000. Originally, Blue Origin was fined $12,000 more than that, for effluent samples failing required levels three separate times. FDEP subtracted that $12,000, because the “facility provided valid explanation” and “the threat/harm to the environment was minimal.”
In a motion to request the public hearing, District 4 Commissioner Rob Feltner said it might be in the county’s best interest to simplify the process for FDEP by finding a local venue.
“If we're going to request them to do a public meeting, I think we should probably remove the barriers necessary for them to do that as much as possible,” he said.
After some discussion, commissioners voted unanimously to request that FDEP hold the public hearing and to copy Gov. Ron DeSantis and the county’s legislative delegation on that request.
Feltner also suggested including a record of all the public comments made at Tuesday’s meeting.
FDEP issued notice on Nov. 18 that it was preparing a draft permit for Blue Origin. The agency will accept public comments on the proposal for 30 days after that notice, which is Dec. 16. If FDEP opts to hold a hearing, the public comment period will extend until after that hearing.
Blue Origin didn’t respond to emailed requests for comment Tuesday.
