Lake Conine, Winter Haven: The Wetland That Took Fifteen Years to Come Back

The city of Winter Haven bought roughly 32 acres south of Lake Conine in 2010 and then held the ground for fifteen years. The plan was to take drained, altered land and turn it back into wetland. On May 13, 2025, the ribbon was cut on Lake Conine Nature Park.

Lake Conine sits on the northern chain of Winter Haven's Chain of Lakes — 211 acres of natural freshwater on the north side of town, connected by canals to Lake Smart, Lake Rochelle, and Lake Hartridge. It drains toward the Peace River Basin. Whatever runs off the surrounding neighborhoods and roads on its way to Conine ends up moving through the rest of that system.

The lake's water quality was poor enough to land it on Florida's Verified List of impaired waters. In 2016, Winter Haven pulled a $750,000 grant from the Florida Department of Environmental Protection to improve the water at Conine. The wetland acreage was the mechanism. Green Horizon Land Trust records show roughly 20 acres added to the city's wetland area slated to become the nature park. Restored marsh slows runoff, drops sediment, and takes up nutrients before they reach open water — the same nutrients that feed the algae blooms in shallow Florida lakes.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency documented Lake Conine in its Nonpoint Source Success Story file for Florida. That designation is what the EPA and DEP use when a water body that landed on the Clean Water Act impaired list improves. The research behind this piece does not confirm whether Conine has formally come off Florida's Verified List.

The lake is almost as often called Lake Connie as it is called Lake Conine — a spoken shorthand that stuck locally and never entirely gave way to the name on the maps. It also sits in a jurisdictional in-between. The lake itself is outside Winter Haven's city limits, though the city surrounds it almost entirely, and the surrounding land, including the wetlands, falls inside the limits. Polk County Natural Resources stayed involved through the restoration. The park exists because two governments and a land trust spent a decade and a half on a lake that belongs cleanly to neither one.

In April 2024 the City Commission approved a contract of more than $3.7 million with Whitehead Construction, a local family-owned firm, to build the park on the 32-acre parcel south of the lake. A year and a month later it opened, as public wetland and recreation space, after fourteen years of holding the ground for exactly that.