VENICE – The pathway to clean water and a healthy Sarasota Bay ecosystem may be found in a water quality playbook released online Thursday morning by the Gulf Coast Community Foundation.
But what authors David and Jennifer Shafer of Shafer Consulting and Steve Suau, principal of Progressive Water Resources, offered up in 10 chapters, David Tomasko – the new executive director of the Sarasota Bay Estuary Program – summarized in a sentence.
“Basically, the bay needs to go on a nutrient diet,” Tomasko said, as he took time for a phone interview between dive sites Wednesday morning in Sarasota Bay. “We’ve loaded the bay with too much nutrients, we have too much algae in the bay and we’re losing our important seagrass habitat.