An hour south of Tallahassee, between pine forests and the Gulf Coast, the Fenholloway River is at a crossroads.

For decades, it was Florida’s most polluted river — choked by chemicals from a pulp mill that blackened the water, fouled drinking wells, mutated fish, killed seagrass at the river’s mouth and stank to high heavens. Six years ago, the mill stopped dumping millions of gallons of wastewater upriver each day and the water began to clear.

But now, at the request of a company owned by one of America’s wealthiest families, state regulators are paving the way for wastewater to flow back into the Fenholloway over the objections of Taylor County residents.

“We shouldn’t go back to where we started at and go back to polluting that river,” Taylor County Board of Commissioners chair Jamie English said during a December meeting. The commission passed a unanimous, but purely symbolic, resolution to express residents’ opposition to the wastewater plan.

The real decision-making power lies with the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (DEP). State regulators issued a draft permit in January that would allow the mill’s owner — Georgia-Pacific, a pulp and paper company owned by Koch Industries — to dump up to 12 million gallons of wastewater per day into the river. The DEP could make a final decision on the plan any day now.

The pulp mill at the center of the controversy shut down in 2023. Although the mill is no longer operating, the site is still full of contaminated equipment, soil and unlined wastewater lagoons that have been collecting chemicals since the mill started in 1954. When it rains, the water picks up pollutants. Georgia-Pacific has to treat the runoff and get rid of it somehow.

Lately, the company had been sending its wastewater down a newly-built 15-mile pipeline to flow out near the mouth of the Fenholloway. There, the water still entered the Gulf — but it spared most of the river. After a legal dispute with a neighbor, the company can no longer use the pipeline. So, it’s asking the state’s permission to dump wastewater upriver again.

DEP data show today’s treated stormwater is “of significantly higher quality than the wastewater previously generated during manufacturing,” department spokesperson Shannon Gore wrote in an email.

Georgia-Pacific plans to discharge up to 12 million gallons a day, down from 50 million gallons a day at its peak. The company says it will demolish and clean up the mill site over the next two to four years, and then it won’t need to treat and dump stormwater anymore.

Georgia-Pacific rejected alternatives like trucking treated runoff to a landfill or building a spray field to spread the wastewater over acres of open land where it would filter through plants and soil before reaching the groundwater. The company says these ideas are too expensive, slow or impractical.

“We believe returning the discharge point to its original location is the best and most expedient alternative to allow us to complete the work we need to do to return the property to productive use with minimal delay,” Georgia-Pacific spokesperson Kelly Ferguson wrote in a Feb. 17 letter to the Taylor County Board of Commissioners, which he shared with the Trib in response to emailed questions.

Florida regulators say they’re keeping an eye on the cleanup and won’t approve Georgia-Pacific’s permit request unless it meets state standards.

“The department will continue to evaluate all comments received and will not issue any permit unless it meets all legal requirements and is fully protective of Florida’s environment,” said Gore, the DEP spokesperson.

Taylor County residents, however, say the DEP should use this moment to end dumping in the Fenholloway once and for all.

“This is our one big opportunity to reassess the past 65-plus years of environmental travesty,” said Tony Murray, founder and director of the Big Bend Coastal Conservancy. “We need to reclaim the Fenholloway as a recreational and safe river.”

A clash of titans

The plan to dump wastewater up the Fenholloway River stems from a dispute between companies owned by two of America’s richest families: the Koch family, the conservative mega-donors who own an industrial empire spanning oil, chemicals, paper, transportation, electronics and agriculture, and Thomas Peterffy, a digital stock trading pioneer who owns a chunk of Florida real estate almost the size of Rhode Island.

In 2020, after years of protest and regulatory scrutiny, Koch-owned Georgia-Pacific finished building a pipeline to send the mill’s wastewater to the mouth of the Fenholloway, bypassing most of the river.

The pipeline crosses land owned by Peterffy’s Four Rivers Land & Timber Company, which owns about half of Taylor County. Four Rivers agreed to let Georgia-Pacific build the pipeline and run wastewater across its timberland as long as the mill was operating.

But in 2023, Georgia-Pacific shut down the mill. So, Four Rivers revoked its permission to use the pipeline.

The two sides couldn’t cut a new deal, and — after losing a legal battle — Georgia-Pacific shut off the pipeline and asked Florida regulators for permission to go back to dumping their wastewater in the river, upstream from local residents’ wells and fishing spots that were just starting to recover from decades of pollution.

The rift between the two companies has plunged Taylor County into turmoil.

“I’d like to see them figure something out,” said Bob Cate, who used to be the plant technology manager at the mill and now runs the Taylor County Development Authority, a county-backed nonprofit that’s trying to recruit businesses to replace the lost mill. “But they thus far have not been successful in those kinds of negotiations.”

Paradise lost

The Fenholloway, a 36-mile ribbon of naturally dark water, runs from the inland swamps of San Pedro Bay through forests, marshes and a brackish estuary on the Gulf Coast, feeding springs along the way.

It was once a natural wonder that attracted glamorous visitors. Half a mile from the river lie the ruins of the Hampton Springs Hotel, a resort built in 1908 with a spring so famous it bottled and sold its healing waters around the country and had a guest list that reportedly included celebrity singers and Al Capone.

But, in a bid to create jobs, Taylor County lobbied Florida officials in 1947 to designate the Fenholloway a Class 5 “industrial river,” giving it the lowest water quality standards allowed under state law. Procter & Gamble opened a pulp mill in 1954 and started dumping waste from the chemical process that turns tons of timber into cellulose fibers for products like diapers, tires and rayon fabric.

The river darkened from the color of sweet tea to a Guinness Stout, and it took on a burning, sulfurous scent. Some days, a light brown foam burbled up from the water like mountains of foul bubble bath. Female mosquitofish developed hormonal imbalances that caused them to grow male fins, earning them the nickname “bearded lady fish.” A miles-wide swath of seagrass at the mouth of the river died. Scientists found cancer-causing dioxins and other concerning chemicals in the mill’s wastewater.

Sean McGlynn dove in the Fenholloway to take water quality readings as a student and staff member at Florida State University’s Center for Aquatic Research and Resource Management from 2003 to 2007. Now he runs his own environmental testing lab and has made a career swimming in polluted water — but he says the Fenholloway is still one of the scariest places he’s dived.

“If it was much dirtier than that, I wouldn’t dive in it,” McGlynn said.

Taylor County native Joy Towles Ezell remembers pouring herself a glass of well water from the tap at her grandmother’s house in 1981.

“It was this ugly yellow color,” Ezell said. “It tasted like the mill smelled. I said, ‘Mama, you can’t drink this mess. I’m going to town to get some bottled water.’”

Ezell has been drinking bottled water — and protesting the mill’s pollution — ever since. She took out ads in the local paper, filed a class action lawsuit and even smuggled Fenholloway fish dinners into a shareholders’ meeting to offer them to Procter & Gamble executives.

That earned her a bad reputation around town when the mill was Taylor County’s main employer. But local attitudes shifted after Georgia-Pacific bought the plant and later shut it down, laying off hundreds of workers shortly after Hurricane Idalia rocked the region in 2023.

“When they closed that mill, they lost the right to pollute anything here,” Ezell said. “They’re not providing anything for anybody in this county…so I don’t think they deserve any leeway.”

A fork in the river

The Fenholloway looks different today. State regulators officially upgraded the Fenholloway to a Class 3 river suitable for fishing and swimming in 1998 — although they allowed the mill to keep dumping its wastewater in the river for more than two decades after that.

Over the years, the mill phased out some dangerous chemicals and improved its water treatment process. The pipeline started diverting wastewater downstream in 2020 and the mill pulped its last log in 2023.

The water cleared up. The smell has gone away. Seagrass is starting to grow at the river’s mouth.

“We’re seeing more juvenile fish because it has become a spawning area, and we’re starting to see more resident tarpon and manatees,” said Kenny Mullins, a fishing guide who has been angling in the area for 20 years.

Mullins, a former mill worker, started his fishing business as a backup plan when the mill shut down. Now he sees a chance to make a living from the recovering river. And he thinks a restored Fenholloway could become an eco-tourism destination and an economic engine to replace the lost mill.

“But now we’re going backward,” said Mullins. If the mill starts putting wastewater back in the river, he doubts many people will want to fish there.

The same goes for kayakers or anyone who wants to spend time near the water, according to Cate, the Taylor County Development Authority director, who has paddled much of the river himself. During dry winter months when the Fenholloway shrinks to a trickle, most of its flow may come from mill wastewater.

“Effluent that goes in there is the river,” Cate said, adding that if he’s kayaking, “it’s kind of nice knowing I’m in the pristine river, not in the treated effluent discharge of a mill.”

Taylor County residents are split on the region’s economic future. Some, like Cate, would like to see new industries move into the old mill site and bring back jobs and tax revenue. Others, like Murray of the Big Bend Coastal Conservancy, would like to shift from industry to ecotourism. But seemingly everyone agrees that dumping wastewater upriver is bad for business.

“The community is trying to sell itself for redevelopment, and going back to the old discharge point creates a negative perception,” said Chet Thompson, who worked for decades as the mill’s environmental manager but now consults for Taylor County to monitor Georgia-Pacific’s mill closure plan.

Residents submitted 752 pages of public comments mostly opposing Georgia-Pacific’s permit application and attended an April 23 public meeting in Perry to voice their concerns.

“It felt like they were just going through the motions because they have to, and it didn’t feel like there was really any concern about how the public felt,” said Mullins.

“I have strong concerns that DEP is working closer with Georgia-Pacific than with the Taylor County Commission,” said Thompson. “Georgia-Pacific and DEP really haven’t shown a lot of concern for what the commission has thought.”

The DEP disputes that characterization.

“Public input is an important and valued part of DEP’s decision-making and permitting process,” Gore, the agency spokesperson, wrote in an email. “DEP will review all public comments and carefully consider them prior to taking final agency action on the draft industrial wastewater permit renewal.”

For now, clean water from San Pedro Bay is slowly starting to flush out decades of soiled sediments caught in the bends of the Fenholloway. And lifelong locals like Ezell say they’re committed to seeing the river restored one day.

“It goes on and on,” said Ezell, who is now 78. “It won’t be cleaned up in my lifetime. But at least maybe we’ve gotten started.”

Nicolás Rivero is an environmental accountability reporter at The Florida Trib. He can be reached at nicolas.rivero@floridatrib.org.