How Vero Beach Makes Its Water and Treats Its Sewage

The City of Vero Beach Water and Sewer Department runs the utility, from the wells and treatment plant to the pipes, the sewage plant and the reclaimed water system.

According to the Water and Sewer Administration page, Robert J. Bolton is Director of Water and Sewer, and the administration division handles policy, personnel actions, purchasing, payroll and citizen complaints for the department, with a main office line of (772) 978-5220. The department's other units each publish a page on covb.org: Water Treatment, Water Distribution, Meter Maintenance, Gravity Sewer, Lift Station, Wastewater Treatment, Wastewater Reuse and Process Engineering, plus the Lead and Copper Program. Those division pages are the most direct public record of how large the Vero Beach system is.

Billing runs through a separate office. The Customer Service page places the payment counter at 1036 20th Street, open Monday through Friday from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., and lists 772-978-5100 both for account questions and for reporting water and sewer problems. The same page links a lookup titled Am I On City Or County Water and Sewer Systems, since some addresses around Vero Beach are customers of Indian River County rather than of the city utility, and it warns that city customer service never calls customers to solicit payments by phone.

All of the city's drinking water comes from 27 wells: 21 in the shallow Surficial Aquifer and 6 in the deep Floridan Aquifer.

The 2025 Water Quality Report, which covers monitoring from January 1 to December 31, 2025, says the City of Vero Beach obtains its water from 21 Surficial Aquifer wells that are 80 to 140 feet deep and 6 Floridan Aquifer wells that are 570 to 680 feet deep. The Meter Maintenance Division counts 36 wellfield meters on the supply side.

The shallow and deep Vero Beach well water take different routes. Five of the Surficial Aquifer wells are part of a groundwater remediation program, and their water is treated by an aeration process that removes contaminants before it is blended with water from the remaining Surficial Aquifer wells. That blend goes to the city's lime softening water treatment plant, where it is treated to reduce color and hardness, then coagulated and filtered to remove suspended materials, and finally disinfected with chloramines.

Two of the Floridan Aquifer wells serve as auxiliary sources for the lime softening plant. Water from the other Floridan wells is treated by reverse osmosis, a process that removes salts and hardness causing minerals, and it is also disinfected with chloramines. The report describes the last stage as blending the lime softened water with the reverse osmosis water to produce the drinking water sent to homes and businesses on the Vero Beach system.

Chloramines, a combination of chlorine and ammonia, are the normal disinfectant in Vero Beach mains, and the city switches to free chlorine for a few weeks each year.

The Water and Sewer Administration page gives notice that from November 1 through November 20, 2026, as part of annual maintenance, the City of Vero Beach will disinfect its drinking water with free chlorine, with up to 3.5 ppm (mg/l) of free chlorine at times. The city will resume feeding ammonia to form chloramines on November 21, 2026, and for about one week after that, water in different parts of the distribution system may contain both free and combined chlorine. The notice is addressed to dialysis operations, which have to account for the change.

The 2025 Water Quality Report gives the Vero Beach disinfectant results for the year. Chloramines and chlorine sampled from January through December 2025 averaged 3.13 ppm as a running annual average, with results ranging from 1.00 to 4.00 ppm against a maximum residual disinfectant level of 4 ppm, and the report marks no violation.

Lead is handled under a separate federal rule. The Lead and Copper Program page states that Vero Beach is building an inventory of its entire distribution network, which includes over 17,000 residential and commercial service lines, using historical records and small test pits beside meters where records are missing. The page says lead pipes were banned in the city in 1976 and that city service lines are mainly plastic with a few copper pipes. The city owns the section from the main to the meter in the public right of way; the property owner is responsible for the section from the meter to the building.

The Vero Beach utility maintains 274 miles of water mains, 123 miles of gravity sewer lines and 48 miles of force mains, according to its division pages.

The Vero Beach counts do not all line up. The Water Distribution Division lists 11,967 service lines, while the Lead and Copper Program describes an inventory of over 17,000 residential and commercial service lines; the pages do not explain the difference. The Gravity Sewer Division states its goal as limiting infiltration and inflow, meaning outside water that leaks into sewer pipes, and the Lift Station Division maintains the pumping equipment on the wastewater transmission system where gravity is not enough.

Vero Beach sewage goes to the city's 4.5 MGD wastewater treatment facility, which serves the city, the Town of Indian River Shores and limited parts of unincorporated Indian River County.

That description comes from the Vero Beach Wastewater Treatment Facility Relocation Study, finalized in May 2019, which calls the plant a complete mix activated sludge facility followed by a water reclamation system and says it sits on the Intracoastal, near the heart of the city. The study traces the plant to 1958, when the city's first wastewater treatment system was built as a trickling filter plant rated at 2.20 MGD. It was upgraded in 1977 to activated sludge, and improvements in 1996 added mechanical bar screens, a grit collector, effluent dechlorination and a 5.0 MG reclaimed water storage tank.

The lagoon discharges ended with a 2009 project. In 2009, the study says, the city built a deep injection well system, including a Class I underground injection well, a 3.0 MG storage tank and a 24-inch pipeline from the sewage plant to the deep injection well site at the water treatment plant, replacing a surface water discharge point used during wet weather or process upsets. As a result, all effluent discharges to the Indian River Lagoon from the wastewater treatment plant ceased. A biosolids processing facility followed in 2018.

The Wastewater Treatment Division describes its job as purifying and reclaiming wastewater from its service territory and complying with permits from the Florida Department of Environmental Protection and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The planned move of the plant is covered on a separate Digital Towns page about the Vero Beach sewer plant relocation.

Treated Vero Beach wastewater that meets reuse standards goes out through a separate pipe network for irrigation instead of drinking water.

The Vero Beach Wastewater Reuse Division produces and distributes reclaimed water for irrigation to conserve potable water, under permits from the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, the St. Johns River Water Management District and the U.S. EPA. The Water Distribution Division keeps 13 miles of reuse mains, and the Meter Maintenance Division counts 154 reuse meters.

The 2019 relocation study lists two effluent disposal methods for the Vero Beach plant. R-001 is a public access reuse system for unrestricted irrigation with a permitted capacity of 4.5 MGD on an annual average daily flow basis, and U-001 is the Class I underground injection well, permitted for 9.72 MGD at peak hourly flow. The 5.0 MG reclaimed water storage tank from 1996 and a former potable water ground storage tank converted for reclaimed water in 2009 hold reuse water before it is pumped out.

Water and sewer customers in Vero Beach pay a monthly base facility charge plus tiered usage charges under a rate sheet effective October 1, 2026.

The Vero Beach water rate sheet, effective October 1, 2026, sets a water base facility charge of $15.98 a month for 5/8 inch and 3/4 inch meters, rising with meter size to $349.74 for a 6 inch meter. Residential water use is billed per 1,000 gallons in four tiers.

The same sheet adds a Wastewater Readiness-to-Serve Charge for developed lots that already receive city water, use a septic tank and can connect to the public sewer; the monthly charge equals the wastewater base facility charge. The Water and Sewer Administration page posted notice that these rate revisions and the new charge would go before the City Council on August 25, 2026. Last verified: October 15, 2026, for this Vero Beach utility guide, against the city's Water and Sewer Administration, Customer Service and division pages, the 2025 Water Quality Report, the 2019 relocation study and the October 1, 2026 rate sheet.