The Healthy Pond Collaborative-Sarasota is pleased to announce that it just completed its second year with a healthy pond program in Sarasota County that advised forty local communities how to maintain a healthy stormwater pond and provided $40,000 in grants to qualified participants that created over six miles of newly planted pond shoreline that will help improve the quality of our waterways.
The Healthy Pond Collaborative-Sarasota (HPC) is funded by the Charles and Margery Barancik Foundation and is a partnership with START (Solutions To Avoid Red Tide), the Sarasota County NEST Program, the University of Florida IFAS Sarasota Extension, the Science and Environment Council of Southwest Florida and the Suncoast Waterkeeper.
If your stormwater ponds are plagued with unsightly algae or threatened with costly bank erosion, you should contact Lonnie Ready at START at laready@earthlink.net for a consultation. For communities just starting out with a healthy pond maintenance program, you should ask for a screening of the Healthy Ponds PowerPoint presentation that outlines the cost advantages of keeping your ponds healthy to avoid costly restoration repairs.
