The Water Still Leaves Trulieve’s Jefferson County Farm

The Suwannee River Water Management District cited Trulieve’s Jefferson County cannabis farm in April after inspectors found standing water, extra pavement, and unreported pumping at the stormwater pond.

The same week, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection warned the Waukeenah campus it might be running wastewater work without a permit, with civil penalties of up to $15,000 a day per violation.

Standing Water, Extra Pavement, Unreported Pumping

District staff inspected the grow at 1948 Capps Highway on April 10 and 15, then sent an April 17 notice of non-compliance to Eric Powers, Trulieve’s chief legal officer. The letter followed complaints from the adjoining landowner and video of water leaving the pond. Inspectors listed four problems with the Environmental Resource Permit that governs the site’s runoff.

WHAT THE APRIL 17 NOTICE CITED

• Extra hard surface: Paved or roofed areas that were not on the approved plans, and so were not in the runoff math.
• Standing water: The stormwater pond held water during both April visits.
• Long discharge: Neighbor video showed water leaving the pond for more than 30 days after the last rain.
• Pumping and load: Samples taken during a pumping event showed excessive pollutants, and the pumped water was not shown to stay on Trulieve land.

The letter told the company to update its operations and maintenance plan and to keep pumped water on its own property, or else prove the flow meets statewide water-quality standards, does not raise post-development discharge rates, and does not harm land next door. The district set an April 24 deadline for that plan. It did not name a dollar fine in the letter.

Leroy Marshall, the district’s chief professional engineer, later told Jefferson County residents the first complaint landed in October 2023, with more after that. The latest one, from February 2026, came from a neighbor whose land backs up to the campus and who reported pumping, erosion, and water quality. Marshall said Trulieve was supposed to report that pumping under its stormwater permit and did not. Staff had been working with the company since March, he said, on top of the formal notice.

FDEP Put Daily Fines on the Table

DEP Northwest District Director Elizabeth Mullins Orr signed a separate April 20 letter after an industrial wastewater inspection on April 15. That file is not the same as the water district’s pond case. Orr’s letter said possible violations included operating a wastewater system without a valid permit, and it put the company on a clock to answer or face civil penalties of up to $15,000 a day for each violation.

Trulieve has said it is taking the district’s notice seriously and looking at corrective work. A company presenter told Jefferson County commissioners on April 28 that blocked sand filters had left the basin holding more water than it was built to hold, and that crews were replacing the filters and resetting the basin. The same presenter said the permit allows periodic stormwater discharges and that company samples had not shown a breach of water-quality standards. Commissioners pressed whether any permit lets the campus send water onto a neighbor’s land.

By May, the two agencies were still in different lanes. The water district runs the stormwater and water-use permits. FDEP is the agency that would have to decide if indoor irrigation reject, condensate, and wash water need an industrial wastewater permit. That split is why a company can be out of its pond permit and still say government labs found no harmful chemicals in the creek and wells they sampled.

A Quarter-Mile Scar on the Lamb Farm

Felicia Lamb and her husband, James, own the land that receives the overflow. Her family has been on the same Waukeenah ground for nearly 200 years, she wrote in June, seven generations of cattle and watermelon before the grow arrived next door in 2019. The campus went live in 2020. She says her father first noticed the water while he was still alive, and that the cut has gotten worse since.

The plant is an 80-acre indoor complex with 11 buildings totaling more than 1 million square feet, its own electric substation, and round-the-clock equipment. Trulieve staff have called the campus Megatron. Lamb says she wanted the jobs and was not ready for a factory next to a pine farm.

I also was not expecting a torrent of water rushing onto our property, cutting an erosion scar a quarter mile long, nearly 6 feet deep, and in places 20 feet wide, while carrying fluorescent green algae that contained who knew what and threatening to pollute nearby creeks and waterways all the way down to St. Marks.

Felicia Lamb, Jefferson County landowner, June 28 column

She traces the flow down a hill into Lane Branch Creek, then Lloyd Creek, and on toward St. Marks. Local surveyor talk puts the same drainage in the Miccosukee Lake basin, which feeds the aquifer. James Lamb hired a lab after green water showed up in a spring video a relative posted. When the couple put up a camera to watch the flow, Lamb wrote, Trulieve’s lawyer sent a cease-and-desist letter demanding they take it down, behind an eight-foot wall the company had just built.

The hydrology argument some defenders reach for, that water always ran downhill here, misses what the roofs and pavement did. Rain that once soaked cattle pasture now hits hard surface and has to go somewhere. The scar Lamb describes is the somewhere.

Trulieve Calls the Site a Nursery

Trulieve holds two district permits, Marshall told residents, a water-use permit and a stormwater permit. Company counsel told FDEP on May 5 that the Jefferson County campus is an agricultural operation, not an industrial one, and that no wastewater-discharge permit is required. County officials have heard the same claim, that the grow is a nursery and so sits outside some industrial wastewater rules.

That label is the whole fight. Florida’s definition of a stormwater system is a works built to control discharges caused by rainfall. Irrigation reject, fertigation return, condensate, and wash water are not rain. If those streams mix into the pond and then leave the property, the file is no longer just a clogged sand filter. It is a question of whether a medical-cannabis factory can keep using farm paperwork.

A Trulieve shareholder pressed FDEP in May on where irrigation reject actually goes, what is in it, and whether trucking, infiltration, or offsite discharge needs its own review. Neighbors made the same point in a June letter to Gov. Ron DeSantis: they do not care which agency wins the naming contest if the water is still crossing the fence. Marshall said the newest permit request, filed in mid-May, aims to separate operational water from stormwater so the two no longer share one pond.

What the Water Tests Showed

Ackuritlabs, a private lab the Lambs hired, reported 14.9 for total nitrogen and 14.5 for nitrate in the water they had tested in April. Florida treats nitrate in drinking water as unsafe above 10 milligrams per liter, a threshold written to protect infants from blue-baby syndrome. The Lambs’ sample was creek and discharge water, not a household well, so it does not by itself prove a well is poisoned. It does put the nitrate number they published above Florida’s 10 milligrams per liter nitrate limit for drinking water.

WHO TESTED THE WATER

State Rep. Allison Tant, whose district includes the area, said months of testing found no contamination tied to the grow and that the health department found no contaminants in local well water. The department handed out free well-test kits at the local Dollar General after the video spread. Tant also said Trulieve told the county it would pay for ongoing water testing.

Kyle Landrum, a Trulieve executive, wrote in July that FDEP had tested water coming from the property and found no harmful contaminants, that health inspectors had been on site more than three dozen times without finding problems, and that water had always crossed the adjoining land because of the slope. Spokesman Steve Vancore put it more sharply, saying no independent agency had shown harmful contaminants.

Those government results and the Lambs’ lab report can both be on the table. They are not the same sample. People following the video have pointed out that a creek grab taken away from the overflow is a different glass of water from the stream cutting the Lambs’ pine rows. FDEP still described its review as open in August. A clean well does not close a stormwater permit that, on April 17, already listed offsite discharge and unreported pumping.

Jefferson County Split Over Jobs and Odor

Jefferson County commissioners packed a special meeting on April 28, then picked the file back up on May 21. Trulieve staff skipped the May session. Residents came with the green-water video, with skunk-smell complaints, and with a reminder that the plant is one of the few large private payrolls in a rural county. Dorothy Pulliam, 74, who volunteers at a Monticello thrift store, put the bind in one line: “Where else are you going to work here?”

Lamb says the noise is like aircraft on a runway and that the smell is sometimes worse than cannabis, “a field of skunks that never leave.” Other neighbors have told the board the campus should stay, that it brought work, and that state labs have not shown the water is toxic. The county’s own posture, laid out in April, is that runoff and air quality sit with FDEP, the water district, and the health department, and that the county forwards complaints to those agencies.

Landrum listed the odor and light work the company says it has already done after neighbors complained.

WHAT TRULIEVE SAYS IT CHANGED

• Light: Staff say they adjusted outdoor lighting after neighbors objected.
• Air cleaning: New bipolar ionization systems, odor-control sprayers, extra doorway drapes, new filters on every air handler, and added carbon filtration.
• Water testing: A pledge, through the county, to fund ongoing tests around the campus.

That does not answer the fence-line question the water district put in writing: pumped water is supposed to stay on Trulieve property, or be proven safe and no heavier than the land shed before the buildings went up.

The District Is Still Rewriting the Pond Permit

Marshall told the May 21 crowd the non-compliance case will end in a compliance agreement that lists what Trulieve must fix, and that the company will face penalties, with the amount still unknown. He also said a new permit application had arrived about a week earlier to pull operational water out of the stormwater pond. Residents later said staff told them any extra water issues had to be on file by June 13 or the district would move ahead with that approval. A grassroots group wrote DeSantis in early June asking the state not to rewrite the permit until the overflow stopped.

THE WATER FILE, IN ORDER

1. October 2023: District logs its first complaint about the Trulieve stormwater site.
2. February 2026: An adjoining owner reports pumping, erosion, and water quality; pumping was not reported as the stormwater permit required.
3. April 10 and 15, 2026: SRWMD inspects. FDEP runs an industrial wastewater inspection on April 15.
4. April 17 and 20, 2026: The district issues its notice of non-compliance. FDEP warns of possible unpermitted wastewater work and daily civil penalties.
5. April 28, 2026: Trulieve presents to a packed Jefferson County commission and says filters are being replaced.
6. May 13, 2026: The district receives a permit application to decouple the stormwater pond from the sediment sump, lower the pond, and separate process water from rainwater.
7. Late July 2026: District review of that pond rewrite is still underway. In August, FDEP still calls its own review open.

Florida has also updated statewide stormwater design rules that now put nitrogen and phosphorus loading, not just pond volume, at the center of new Environmental Resource Permits. The Waukeenah campus was built under older paper. The rewrite in front of the Suwannee River district is the first chance in years to make the pond match the campus that actually stands there.

By late July the district was still reading Trulieve’s plan to split the pond. In August, FDEP still called its review open. On the Lambs’ side of the fence, the cut in the clay was already there.