A state water agency has agreed to spend $23.2 million filtering color and chemicals from water it will pipe from Clay County’s Black Creek to replenish aquifers beneath Keystone Heights’ shrunken lakes.

But before the water starts moving, a grassroots group that spent years advocating to replenish the area’s lakes is spotlighting a challenge that might undermine the expensive filtering’s benefits.

“There’s a forest in the lakebed now. A literal forest,” Vivian Katz-James, president of the Save Our Lakes Organization, told St. Johns River Water Management District board members at a recent meeting.

Read the rest of this story at the Florida Times-Union, a Jacksonville Today news partner.