The Dover/Plant City area is one of the largest strawberry production areas in the country. When a frost/freeze event occurs strawberry and other similar commodity farmers and aquaculture operations pump large quantities of water to protect their crops. Due to the pumping, the Floridan aquifer level drops, sinkholes occur and some local residents’ wells stop working. Depending on the freeze event numerous sinkholes occur and up to 250 dry wells have been reported. From January 3-13, 2010, temperatures in eastern Hillsborough County dropped below 34 degrees for 11 consecutive days. As a result, area farmers again pumped large quantities of groundwater to protect their crops. During this event, this combined pumping dropped the aquifer level 60 feet and caused more than 750 temporarily dry wells for neighboring homeowners. Although pumping groundwater for freeze protection is a best management practice for strawberry, citrus and other industries and was authorized by their water use permits, pursuant to their permits farmers were responsible for fixing hundreds of dry wells. However, problems with the current permit requirements became evident during the January 2010 freeze. The problems included that the permit requirements did not require well mitigation for many of the residents’ dry wells leading many residents to be without water for extended periods or to pay themselves the costs necessary to restore their wells to service. Additionally, some farmers were required to mitigate many wells, some over 100 wells, while other farmers did not have to mitigate any wells. The District had to address provision of water service to some of the residents through an emergency order. A year later the District is still working to resolve complaints and issues resulting from the January 2010 freeze event. To address these frost/freeze issues for future freeze events, and the District held numerous public and stakeholder meetings and a series of technical work sessions to receive feedback from key stakeholders. The information gathered at these meetings helped staff develop recommendations to prevent a similar situation from happening in the future. These recommendations included amendments to District rules, including changes to farmers water use permit conditions. The District’s objective was to have the rule amendments in effect before the first freeze event might occur in the winter of 2010/2011. Due to the desire of the District to allow extended public input on the rules, the rules will not be in effect until late in the winter, at the earliest. Frost/freeze events have now already occurred in December 2010 in the Dover/Plant City area and the District is receiving dry well complaints. The weather forecast is for additional freezing temperatures in the Dover/Plant City area and yet to come are the weeks and months with the statistically most frequent freeze events. Imminent freeze events pose an immediate danger to the public welfare due to the likely interruption of water service for residents in the area and the potential for sinkholes. The proposed emergency rules will protect the public interest by ensuring that within the Dover/Plant City area everyone with a dry well complaint and those responsible for mitigation of freeze impacts will be subject to a comprehensive, orderly, expeditious and equitable process for addressing impacts and restoring water service.