The Legal Floor Under Lake Wailes Has Never Been Met, and the District Proposes Lowering It to 102.1 Feet

Since 2015, the minimum level for Lake Wailes has been 104.8 feet above the National Geodetic Vertical Datum of 1929, written into the Southwest Florida Water Management District's Water Levels and Rates of Flow rules. To count as met, that elevation has to be equaled or exceeded fifty percent of the time on a long-term basis. The status assessment the District completed in 2015 found it was not met. The annual assessments through 2025 found it had continued not to be met. The 2015 levels had themselves replaced levels adopted for the lake in 2007, when the Minimum Lake Level was 106.6 feet.

On September 14, 2026, the District opened a public comment period on a draft report that would take 104.8 feet out of the rule and put 102.1 feet in its place.

The draft, dated September 15 and written by District staff TJ Venning, Jordan Miller and Jason Patterson, recommends removing the lake's minimum levels from Chapter 40D-8, Florida Administrative Code, and replacing them with a Minimum Lake Level of 102.1 feet NGVD29 and a High Minimum Lake Level of 106.3 feet, down from 107.7.

Both the 2015 analysis and this one work the same way: reconstruct the lake's levels as they would have been without groundwater withdrawals, then subtract a fixed offset to find where further withdrawal would begin doing significant harm. In 2015 that offset was 0.8 feet, a figure developed for mesic wetlands. The reevaluation calls it a poor fit for the Lake Wailes basin — a xeric landscape with limited groundwater connectivity — and applies the District's Xeric Wetland Offset Standard instead, built from hydrologic data and stress-status determinations at xeric wetland sites on the Lake Wales Ridge and in the northern Tampa Bay area. That standard rests on the finding that significant harm is likely at a xeric wetland when the long-term historic median is lowered by more than 2.2 feet. The reconstructed long-term historic median for Lake Wailes is 104.3 feet. Two and two-tenths feet below that is 102.1.

Lake Wailes covers about 300 acres east of downtown Lake Wales in Polk County, and it is a closed basin: no surface inflow, no outflow, replenished by rainfall, runoff and surficial aquifer flow, draining a watershed of roughly 698 acres in the Tiger Creek sub-basin of the Kissimmee River watershed.

A second standard, keyed to the number of bird species a lake of a given surface area can be expected to support, pointed to 99.0 feet; the xeric offset sat higher, and as the more protective of the two it set the number. Field reconnaissance in 2025 found that under the adopted levels the lake would stand well above the littoral vegetation limits staff observed on the ground.

Water level data collection at Lake Wailes began in September 1965, when the U.S. Geological Survey started measuring daily with a recorder at what the District now lists as station No. 25351. The draft plots the lake's stage observations from December 1951 through December 31, 2024. Collection was daily through September 1971 and has been monthly since early 1991. The highest elevation in that record is 111.66 feet NGVD29, on December 21, 2005. The lowest is 97.58 feet, on May 22, 1990.

Measured against the proposed numbers, the District puts the lake's current median at 102.3 feet, two-tenths of a foot above the proposed Minimum Lake Level, and its current tenth exceedance percentile at 107.1 feet, seven-tenths of a foot above the proposed High Minimum Lake Level. Both proposed levels are met and projected to stay met through 2045, so the report finds that no water-body specific recovery strategy would be required on adoption, though the lake sits inside the Southern Water Use Caution Area, where a regional recovery strategy is already being implemented. The District's September 21 news release says the lake is currently meeting its Minimum Lake Level.

Online comments closed October 9, 2026, the same date set for written comments mailed to 2379 Broad Street in Brooksville or emailed to Jason Patterson, the District's lead scientific modeler on the project. District staff presented the draft at the Lake Wales Public Library on September 30 at 5 p.m. The recommendation to initiate rulemaking goes to the Governing Board on October 27, 2026 at 9 a.m. in Brooksville, a livestreamed meeting that permits brief oral comments on agenda items, with rulemaking scheduled to begin the next day.

Regional groundwater modeling in the draft expects upper Floridan aquifer levels beneath Lake Wailes to fall 0.6 feet by 2045 as public water supply grows in Polk County, and puts the lake's median under that scenario at 102.1 feet — the proposed minimum itself.