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THE SUNCOAST NEWS

Published: November 15, 2008

Just as the price of a gallon of regular gasoline is sinking below the $2 mark, we on the Suncoast are getting another lesson in the law of supply and demand.

The commodity in question now is drinking water but the iron rule still applies.

At the request of regional wholesaler Tampa Bay Water, the Southwest Florida Water Management District is calling for a crackdown on landscape watering restrictions to preserve increasingly scarce drinking water. Much of the state is in the grips of yet another drought, according to the Florida Division of Forestry.

Tampa Bay Water, the main drinking water supplier in most of Pasco, Pinellas and Hillsborough, is struggling with another infrastructure problem. After taking years to get its desalination plant on Tampa Bay working, it now has to keep its 16-billion-gallon reservoir in southern Hillsborough County 60 percent empty while it tries to find a fix for the many cracks that have developed in its soil-cement embankments.

Tampa Bay Water is suing the firms that designed or built the reservoir, just as it sued the consortium that designed and built the desalination plant.

We could use the water the reservoir can't hold at the moment. So Tampa Bay Water shouldn't take as long resolving the reservoir problem as it did getting the desalination plant operating as designed.

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