Manatee rules crimp Super Bowl plans

U.S. wildlife officials delay waterfront development along the St. Johns River because of manatee deaths.

By CRAIG PITTMAN, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published July 14, 2002

With fewer than 1,000 days until the kickoff of Super Bowl XXXIX, Jacksonville officials are working with developers to transform the rundown riverfront around Alltel Stadium into a shimmering downtown skyline they have dubbed the "Billion-Dollar Mile."

But their plans for the big game have run into some major interference: manatees.

Crucial waterfront development permits have been on hold for months because the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service does not believe enough is being done to protect the manatees that frequent the St. Johns River.

City officials, racing to remake their riverfront by game time in February 2005, have grown frustrated with the delays.

"It should not be this contentious to protect the manatee," the city's assistant general counsel, Greg Radlinski, said last week.

Manatees, protected under federal endangered species laws, frequent the St. Johns year-round. Enough were killed by boats in the 1980s that Duval County was classified as a hot spot for manatee deaths and local officials were required to figure out how to improve the situation.

Throughout the 1990s, the stretch of river that twists through downtown Jacksonville was designated as a slow speed zone for boaters, with a speed limit of 25 mph in the channel between Reddie Point and the Fuller Warren Bridge.

Last year, Duval County adopted a new plan, approved by state officials. The plan created a shifting boundary of slow speed zones ranging from 600 feet from the shoreline in some places to 300 feet from the end of docks jutting into the river.

Patti Thompson of the Save the Manatee Club contends the new zones were adopted to provide weaker rules for the boaters who are sure to flock the river during the Super Bowl.

But Quinton White, who designed the zones, said they were based on his decade of studies on what parts of the river the manatees use.

"We tried to keep it simple, so people wouldn't get confused," said White, dean of the college of arts and sciences at Jacksonville University.

Federal officials do not think it is simple at all. They believe the new zones fluctuate so much they may be nearly impossible to enforce.

"We have said from the get-go that the zones in Duval leave a lot to be desired," said Chuck Underwood, a spokesman for the federal wildlife agency's Jacksonville office.

So the federal agency has refused to approve any new waterfront development permits. That has hurt the city's efforts to assist the developers of a pair of multimillion-dollar projects designed as the centerpieces of Jacksonville's downtown renaissance, the 66-story Berkman Plaza and the Shipyards. Berkman's developers want a 50-slip marina while the Shipyards project next door calls for 66 slips in its first phase.

Without the permits those projects are "twisting in the wind," Radlinski said.

Even the city's own boat ramp at a St. Johns tributary called Goodby's Creek has been hamstrung. Although the new boat ramp was approved by Gov. Jeb Bush and the Cabinet -- over the objections of the Save the Manatee Club -- federal wildlife officials have refused to allow it to open for business, further irritating city officials.

The only way Duval's boat speed zones might work, federal wildlife officials say, is if there were enough signs scattered along the river to ensure boaters know where the zones shift back and forth. They have proposed the city and developers put in about 80 of them, spaced a quarter-mile apart.

That's too many, say city officials and developers.

"The wildlife service says we have to have this picket fence, and we're saying that's excessive," said White, who said that so many signs could be a hazard to boaters. "Our concern is that somebody is going to hit it, and somebody is going to die."

There is also the question of the cost. Developers' attorney Richard Maguire estimated that each warning sign would cost $1,000, in part because each would be anchored to the river bottom by steel chains, and the river is 40 feet deep in some areas. City officials and developers have made a counterproposal with far fewer signs, and those spaced farther apart. Federal officials say they are studying the counteroffer and have not decided whether to accept it.

While the two sides have been negotiating, manatees have been dying in record numbers in Duval County's waterways. Through the first week of July, eight have been killed by boats, according to Tom Pitchford of the Florida Marine Research Institute, which maintains those statistics for the state. That's only one fewer than the county's all-time yearly high of nine, set in 1991.

Duval's manatee protection plan says that if more than five are killed by boats in a year, that will trigger a review and reconsideration of the plan. But White said local officials have already reviewed it to see whether they can come up with improvements and so far, they can't think of anything.

-- Times researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.

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