Newly elected Congressman Francis Rooney gathered with local officials and environmental leaders on Sanibel Thursday to take part in an update on Southwest Florida’s ongoing water quality crisis.

“A lot of people don’t really understand what we have here,” the District 19 congressman said at a panel discussion held at the Sanibel- Captiva Conservation Foundation’s Bailey Homestead Preserve.

Since Rooney has taken office, his goal has been to shed light and garner interest in the community about water quality challenges.

“It’s a complex issue that requires time to explain, which is difficult,” he said. “Complex issues are harder to explain than simple ones, we only have so much time and people’s attention. I’ve been taking my little bag of tricks around, my pictures and some of the components of the Everglades projects. I did a letter to the president and got the delegation behind it, which is a good first step. I’m going to do some hearings here soon and then we’ll probably see if we can get someone like Rae Ann or James (Evans) to come up and testify that’s an expert in it. I’m trying to build this consensus of these people that have interest here, whether they have homes here, to take a direct interest (in water quality).”

Southwest Florida has been particularly hard-hit, officials said.

“2016 brought, as we all experienced, not only ecological challenges from the large discharges of dark water, but also economic ones,” said Rae Ann Wessel, natural resources policy director at SCCF. “They are the kinds of things both ecologically and economically have multi-year impacts if we don’t get the water right. Our water plays a huge part in our quality of life and our economics here and we have about as much water as we’ve ever had since the dinosaurs roamed. The problems is, we don’t have the capacity anymore to hold or manage or store and move that water. The unique opportunity that we have before us today is opportunities coming from the federal side and from the state to look at new ways of doing restoration that are part of the schedule and that we haven’t gotten around to yet.”

One of those opportunities includes getting the green light for the passage of State Senate Bill 10. The bill, which was filed by Sen. Rob Bradley, allots the South Florida Water Management District the chance to purchase 60,000 acres of farmland from sellers south of Lake Okeechobee to build a reservoir. The catch is, the land must be purchased by December 2018. If they can’t find willing sellers before the time is up, there will be an opportunity to purchase over 100,000 acres from U.S. Sugar.

Rooney said his goal is to get the funds owed from the federal government for the completion of CERP and projects that were authorized in 2007 and 2014. In regards to water quality issues, he told the audience during the panel that networking is key.

“People need to think of it like a spider web. Everybody’s got all these different points of contacts and linking together. Any time you hear of somebody that has influence in Washington D.C., – talk about water, talk about (Sanibel) Mayor (Kevin) Ruane’s study, talk about Rae Ann, get them out there to see her and let me know so we can get them on our list. We just need to be alert for any connection that we can use to draw somebody into our spider web,” Rooney said.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to delete a comment incorrectly attributed to Congressman Francis Rooney.