The Drinking Water Program is primarily responsible for implementing the Florida Safe Drinking Water Act in a 12 county area of the Southwest District. The basic goal of the program is to ensure consumers have a safe drinking water supply meeting all water quality standards.

The District Office is directly responsible for day to day regulation of facilities in seven counties and provides coordination with five county health units that have been delegated authority, via interagency agreement, to implement DEP's drinking water program. The delegated counties in the Southwest District are Hillsborough, Pinellas, Sarasota, Polk, and Manatee.

The district program is organized around two major functions; Compliance/Enforcement activities and Permitting activities.

Major compliance /enforcement functions include inspections of public water systems, review of bacteriological and chemical compliance samples, data entry, complaint investigations, technical assistance to system owners/operators and pursuing enforcement actions against systems in violation of DEP rules that fail to take timely corrective action.

Permitting functions include engineering review of construction permits for new public water systems as well as processing distribution system and domestic waste collection system permits as part of a consolidated review process, meeting with applicants , consultants and general public, inspection of constructed facilities prior to clearance for use, mapping of the wells and treatment plants utilizing the global position system (GPS) and tracking of system's capacity.