The Brevard County Commission is asking for $200 million to help clean up the Indian River Lagoon after an algae bloom killed thousands of fish.

Commissioners had talked Tuesday about asking the governor to declare a state of emergency, but instead are sending the letter asking for the money.

"It's not just Brevard County. If you look along the lagoon, it's 50 cities, five counties, state, federal, we all need to be working together on this," said Duane De Freese of the Indian River Lagoon National Estuary Program.

De Freese told the commission the direction of the Indian River Lagoon is slowly changing, but needs to get into high gear.

"So we are all working towards a common endpoint, and that endpoint is a healthy lagoon," he said.

Concerned residents filled nearly every seat at Tuesday's lengthy commission meeting.

People like Captain Alex Gorichky, whose charter fishing business is in jeopardy due to the state of the lagoon and brown tide killing fish.

"Our main fight is the brown algae. Algaes come and go. This is not a come and go. This is a different beast," he told commissioners.

Brevard County Natural Resource workers briefed the public on the reason for the kill -- the algae dying on the river bottom and turning into muck.

That spread nitrogen into the waters, which deprived it of oxygen and killed all the fish.

We followed along Tuesday as workers from the St John's Water Management District continued to clean up fish in the lagoon, this time near Patrick Air Force Base.

Leaders are trying to come up with ways to stop it from happening again -- including more dredging and fertilizer bans.

"That muck is our (sick) gallbladder, and we need to get that muck out of the river. And we are looking at like $200 million," said Brevard District 4 Commissioner Curt Smith.

De Freese also suggested a collaborative effort to get more funding to help the lagoon -- which has a $3 billion economic impact to the area.

He says investing even a billion dollars is worth it in the long run.

"If we can return the true value of this system, that's a good return on investment," he said.

Meantime FWC is taking 8-10 weekly water samples from the lagoon and they are still getting calls on the FWC hotline about dead fish.