The Healthy Pond Collaborative is delighted to announce the availability of The Healthy Ponds Guide, a homeowners guide to establishing and maintaining healthy stormwater ponds in Southwest Florida. The Guide was written by members of the University of Florida IFAS Sarasota, Manatee and Polk County Extensions, the Sarasota County Public Works, Environmental Stormwater Utility and [...]
If you live in Sarasota or Manatee County and your community’s stormwater ponds are suffering from unsightly algal blooms or costly eroding banks, you should contact us for a free assessment and a chance for a grant to help fund the cost of the native aquatic plants shown above that will improve the health of [...]
Like most organizations along the Suncoast, START has experienced some setbacks from Ian’s devastating winds and storm surge. As a result, this October’s edition of our monthly E-Newsletter will be limited to an overview of the current status of our facilities and various field operations. With the shift of the projected path of the storm [...]
At the end of this month, the Healthy Pond Collaborative Sarasota will complete its fist year of a three-year grant from the Charles and Margery Barancik Foundation. As many of our regular readers will recall from previous articles in our Monthly E-Newsletter, this program grew out of a 2021 pond enhancement program initiated by START [...]
Kenwood Glen, a community in the Plantation in Venice, has sixty seven homes that were constructed in 2014. They began their enhanced pond program with a 300 foot test area last year with funding from the START-Sarasota County NEST Program funded by the Gulf Coast Community Foundation. This year their expanded pond plan was selected [...]
It didn’t take long after last month’s announcement of the Healthy Pond Collaborative moving to Manatee County for a number of communities to contact us about help with their ponds. One of the first to reach out to the HPC Manatee was Fresh Meadows, a community in Palmetto built back in 1990-1993 consisting of 156 [...]
Due to the exceptional expansion of START’s Healthy Pond Collaborative as outlined above and the growing popularity of our Microforest Program, we are reorganizing our Board of Directors to make the following changes: 1. Dr. Charles Reith is now Vice President of Operations 2. The new Executive Committee will consist of: A. Sandy Gilbert, CEO [...]
