1 month ago Share The Gulf Coast Community Foundation created a playbook that highlights 43 activities that could keep Sarasota’s waterways clean and healthy.
It’s no secret that one of the biggest attractors to Sarasota County is the waterways that surround and weave their way throughout the area.
That’s why the Gulf Coast Community Foundation launched a new initiative The Community Playbook for Healthy Waterways to help residents and county leaders focus on keeping those waterways clean and healthy.
Jon Thaxton, Gulf Coast Community Foundation senior vice president, said at a Siesta Key Association meeting that the organization first got the idea for a playbook when the county was experiencing red tide outbreaks in 2019.
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.