September 8, 2026
Lake Eva, Haines City: Sixty Years of Piped Stormwater
For roughly sixty years the centerpiece of Haines City's signature park was fed the runoff of city streets — and it took a chemical pump and a state grant to start pulling it back
The lake at the center of Haines City's most-used park spent about sixty years taking in whatever ran off the streets when it rained. The city's storm drains discharged directly into Lake Eva — the same water that families picnic beside, that anglers work from the dock for bass and bream. A 2014 Ledger editorial said the lake had been used as something of a cesspool for six decades.
Lake Eva Park ranks among the top attractions in Haines City, and the lake is the reason the park sits where it does. There is a dock and a boat ramp on the water. The park hosts the city's annual Iron Man event, the American Cancer Society's Relay for Life, and two of Habitat for Humanity of East Polk's biggest gatherings — 5K in the Park and Chili in the Park.
Stormwater runoff carries phosphorus. In a shallow Central Florida lake, phosphorus feeds algae, and algae turns clear water green and chokes off the fish. Lake Eva sits in the Peace Creek Canal watershed, WBID 15101, and by the time the city began planning a cleanup, the accumulated load from all those pipes was the problem to solve.
In March 2017, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection awarded Haines City a $197,000 Total Maximum Daily Load grant. The money paid to build a chemical treatment system that pumps alum — aluminum sulfate — into the water. Alum binds with phosphorus and drops it out of the water column, where it can no longer feed algae blooms.
Addie Javed, then the city's public works director, put it in plain terms when the grant came through: the treatment would add to the overall water quality, and it was beneficial to everything the city did on the lake.
The lake's size is recorded by the CHNEP Water Atlas at 151 acres, though a 2008 Ledger story put it at 171. That 2008 reporting was headlined around wildlife thriving at the lake, and rated the water quality good that year. People fish the dock and pier for bass, catfish, bream, and sunfish, and the boat ramp gets used.
The alum treatment is not a one-time fix. It is a system that keeps running, pulling out the phosphorus that still arrives with every storm, in a lake that was plumbed decades ago to receive exactly that. The state's Total Maximum Daily Load grants fund the hardware that brings a water body's pollutant load under its established limit. At Lake Eva, the system is projected to remove about 108 pounds of phosphorus a year.
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