State agencies trot out their most experienced scientists and bureaucrats. Paid consultants produce glib justifications of the unjustifiable. But it's not enough, as Lake Worth and Florida Department of Environmental Protection officials learned on Monday, to convince people that dumping waste from a water treatment plant won't harm a treasured reef.

The people gathered at Lake Worth City Hall were polite but firm, and their message was clear: They don't believe the DEP's assertions that the discharge won't hurt the reef. And they don't understand why DEP isn't on their side, fighting to protect the reef, instead of preparing to grant Lake Worth a permit to pollute. "Stop it," one speaker said. "Shame on you," said another.

I agree with them. Floridians vs. the DEP has become the classic case of Us vs. Them.

Lake Worth is trying to do what the South Florida Water Management District has been pushing counties and cities to do: Come up with a new source of water. Lake Worth could have bought water from Palm Beach County or drilled new surface water wells.

Instead, the city decided to drill deep into the salty and mineral-laden Floridan Aquifer. The water, treated by a process known as reverse osmosis to remove the salt and minerals, then becomes drinkable. But the waste, which includes ammonia and other nutrients that act as food for algae, has to be dumped somewhere.

It can be injected into wells deep underground, but that could increase water bills by as much as $7 per month. For an extra $2.50 a month, Lake Worth can send the nutrient-laden waste through a long pipe into the ocean. The pipe, no longer used for sewage, ends near beautiful Horseshoe Reef, home to a 4-foot brain coral.

As government officials took great pains to explain, the discharge is not sewage. Various water district and DEP experts described the waste lyrically, as "a buoyant plume" that would rise to the ocean's surface, keeping the pristine reef safe.

Ed Weinberg, an environmental consultant whom Lake Worth hired, said the plume would be diluted and would drift 30 feet above the reef. Mr. Weinberg tried to refute studies by Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution scientist Brian Lapointe. The studies conclude that nutrients, most from sewage, are feeding algae that kill coral reefs. Mr. Lapointe's studies also indicate that reefs can tolerate only tiny amounts of nutrients.

Michael Risk, a professor emeritus at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, describes himself as a volunteer "who's not being paid." He said Florida's reefs already are stressed by too many nutrients. Algae fed by nutrients, he said, have nearly wiped out coral in the Keys. Mr. Risk defended Mr. Lapointe's conclusions, saying, "He has shown a clear relationship between nutrients and harmful algal blooms."

Mr. Risk, who has dived the state's reefs since 1959 and was a technical adviser for the South Florida Coral Reef Initiative, noted that Florida is where the term "biostitute" - a combination of biologist and prostitute - was coined. "Things generally accepted elsewhere," he said, "have to be proven time and again here." Even if the Lake Worth discharge includes only a small amount of nutrients, Horseshoe Reef and other reefs along the Atlantic coast north to Hobe Sound already are under severe stress from other nutrients. "What you should do is pretty obvious."

Sewage outfalls from southern Palm Beach and counties to the south contribute to the problem. If the DEP hopes to close the remaining six outfall pipes, permitting the Lake Worth project seems even more a bad plan. Also, Lake Worth could consider alternatives, such as routing the waste to feed mangroves in the Lake Worth Lagoon.

That Horseshoe Reef should be protected from even a small discharge of nutrient-laden waste seems clear to divers, environmentalists, Lake Worth residents and others who attended Monday's hearing. Those who disagreed - DEP and water district scientists and paid consultants - all were paid to do so.

And who's paying them? That would be us.