The water in Ann Jones’s kitchen in Whitted, Florida runs clear some days and the color of iced tea on others, and at 81 she is still buying her drinking water by the jug. She and her husband have it delivered, two five-gallon jugs and three 24-packs every two weeks, and she estimates the bill at about $150 a month.
Whitted is a community of 52 people in Osceola County, east of St. Cloud. Its homes have never been on city water. They draw from private wells, and 18 of those wells sit within a quarter mile of a site that was used as a landfill from about 1964 until 1975. The Florida Department of Health sampled 10 of them in 2022.
The land under the landfill was Whitted’s own. In 1964, James Whitted, a relative of the community’s founders, leased three acres to the county for a dollar a year. Jones says he did not understand what he had signed. “I didn’t designate that as a landfill. I wanted that for the kids for a park,” she remembers him saying. She was a child then, and she remembers what the children were told it would be. “This was a way into what we thought would be a heavenly life, a fun life,” she said.
The cost of the water falls on the households. Jessica Paul, 42, who grew up in Whitted and has a 12-year-old son, spends nearly $100 a month on bottled water. “All we want is just clean water,” she said. “We shouldn’t even be fighting for that. It should be free.” Her aunt, DeAnna Paul, 64, says she thinks twice about having people over. “What danger am I putting them in if they come here and drink some of the water?”
A fix is funded. A $2.3 million project will connect Whitted to City of St. Cloud water, paid for with a $1.45 million state appropriation and $850,000 in federal money, both secured in 2024. The completion date has moved from 2027 to December 2028. County Commissioner Ricky Booth, who represents Whitted, says the new subdivisions nearby got service because growth paid for it. “Those new developments pay for those services to come in,” he said, and he rejects the idea that race is the reason Whitted waited: “The county doesn’t care about what color that community is.”
Jones has heard the comparison before and has her own version of it. “We’re not begging or asking for something that no one else has, that is sacred to the white people,” she said. “We deserve to have clean water. It doesn’t matter what race you are.” Sixty and seventy years in the same houses, she said, and “they built north, south, east and west and left us with nothing but dirty water and no sewage.”
