That is very true. The lagoon was sliding down hill pretty bad in the 70s and 80s. None of the original big developments had any meaningful stormwater storage capacity. Look at aerials of all the pre-1990 developments and notice that it is just ditches and no storage ponds; especially the shitty developments like Port Malabar and Port St. Lucie. Huge amounts of St. Johns water was diverted to the lagoon and that diverted water was ag waste and suburban runoff from places like most of Palm Bay via Melbourne-Tillman. But the new developments had tighter and tighter rules on how much rain was supposed to hold back; had to install X-acre feet of storage for every so-many square feet of impervious surface. There we a lot of targeted septic to sewer conversions that had a good effect. My neighborhood got sewer in 1980 since we are on a sand dune that leeches easily to the lagoon. The water in the lagoon wasn't looking too bad in the mid-2000s.

-------------------------
...