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Residents: Dredge minor channels, too

The Hudson Channel will be dredged for sure. The county is working on a plan for two small waterways to the south. But up north? They're still stuck.

By BRIDGET HALL GRUMET
Published January 16, 2005

HUDSON - David Dunbar was stuck.

A small motor and an oar had gotten him this far - past the exposed oyster bed, around the jagged rocks and halfway through the sandy shallow at the mouth of Cow Creek. In the distance he could see the markers for the Hudson Channel, the nautical highway leading to the Gulf of Mexico. But his canoe was hopelessly lodged in the mucky on-ramp.

"They're telling us we can do this," Dunbar said, chuckling as he lugged the canoe through the sticky mud. The 53-year-old computer engineer paused, took a deep breath and gave the boat another hearty pull.

"This is where your pleasure boating turns into work."

A thousand feet away, crews set up dredging machines to clear out the Hudson Channel, providing a deeper path for boats heading in and out of the gulf. But some residents have complained the $2.6-million project does not include the minor waterways many boaters use to reach the Hudson Channel.

There's good news for boaters to the south: County officials are working on a plan to dredge the shallow ends of two minor channels used by boaters from Sea Ranch, Pleasure Isles and Signal Cove.

It appears both channels have been dredged before, county engineer Jim Widman said. So county officials are optimistic about getting the state Department of Environmental Protection's blessing for a "maintenance dredge" to scoop away 1 foot of silt from the shallow northern edges of both channels.

The proposed extra dredging areas total about 1,000 feet. If approved, county officials could dip into contingency funds to cover the $108,000 tab.

"It looks like it would be very easy to do," said County Commissioner Jack Mariano, whose district includes the area.

But it appears boaters from the north - like Dunbar - will remain stuck.

Folks from Driftwood Isles, Sea Pines and other north Hudson neighborhoods rely on a makeshift channel that runs from the mouth of Cow Creek to the Hudson Channel. In some parts, the propeller-scarred pathway has less than a foot of water at low tide.

Dunbar said that should make it a no-brainer for dredging. But officials doubt they could get the necessary permits any time soon, as it appears the path has never been officially permitted or dredged, Widman said.

Even if they could get the permits, dredging that stretch would easily top $1-million, Widman said, because the crews would have to remove 4 or 5 feet of silt from a channel stretching a couple thousand feet.

Mariano said he wants to look into the possibility of dredging that path sometime in the future.

"But right now," the commissioner said, "I don't think we can accomplish that."

The Hudson Channel dredging has been more than two decades in the making, in part because it hit so many snags along the way.

The dredging will uproot 7.7 acres of sea grass, a vital part of the aquatic food chain, so the county had to come up with an elaborate mitigation plan. Crews removed a berm at Belcher Mine, which will allow new sea grass to take root in the formerly enclosed area; officials will put up markers around sea grass protection zones along the Hudson Channel, making nearly 218 acres off limits to boaters.

The mitigation drove up the cost of the project, which initially would have been covered by a $1.08-million DEP grant, Widman said. So the county had to pick up the rest of the $2.6-million tab.

Widman said he would breathe a sigh of relief once the project finally got started, but even then there was a problem: DEP slapped the county this month with a $1,250 fine.

The crews that removed the berm at Belcher Mine stirred up a giant underwater cloud of dirt and muck. The material should have been contained by a large screen, but a gaping hole allowed the debris to spill into the surrounding waters, DEP environmental specialist Jeff Glas said.

That's an environmental no-no, he said, because the floating debris can clog up the feeding membranes of some sea creatures and block the sunlight needed by underwater plants.

DEP also discovered the crews had failed to file weekly monitoring reports on the berm removal project.

County engineers said they will require contractor Subaqueous Services to pay the fine. And they have arranged for a county inspector to visit the dredging site every day, even on weekends and holidays, said Mauricio Guerrero, the county engineer overseeing the project.

"We cannot screw up again because that will be very serious," Guerrero said.

To many of the neighbors, however, the biggest snag has been the failure to include the minor channels in the dredging.

Long-time dredging proponent Al Meyer said it wasn't an oversight. Officials decided not to include the minor channels for fear it would make it harder to get the dredging permit for the Hudson Channel, he said.

"The more (work) you go after for a permit, the more sea grass you're disturbing, the more difficult it is to do it," Meyer said. "By getting those north and south side channels, that would have made it so much more difficult."

When it appeared last month the project would come in $200,000 under budget, engineers started looking at the possibility of dredging a couple of the minor channels. But Widman later discovered the surveyor had made a mistake, and there would be no $200,000 savings.

He still thinks a portion of two minor channels on the south side of the Hudson Channel can be dredged using contingency funds. The county just needs DEP's blessing for the extra work before the dredging crews leave in a month or so.

It could be a close call: DEP normally takes 30 days to review requests, and the county is still gathering the soil borings and topography maps needed to make its case.

"They would have to provide information that would indicate that the dredging would be true maintenance, meaning that they're only restoring what was previously dredged," said Ted Murray, a permitting manager for DEP.

That standard is the holdup for the boaters who rely on the other minor channel to the north.

Dunbar, a Tampa native who moved to Driftwood Isles last year, said the path from Cow Creek to the Hudson Channel must have been dredged at some point. But county and state officials have no record of it, Widman said.

Meyer, the 81-year-old community elder who knows Hudson's waters as well as its history, stated definitively: "It's never been dredged."

Getting a permit to dredge a new channel could take at least a year, Murray said. As with the Hudson Channel project, the county would have to make up for any destruction of sea grass.

That's a sore point with some boaters on the north side of the Hudson Channel. Their old path to the channel cut through an area now labeled a sea grass protection zone. Guerrero told the boaters they will have to sail along the outside edge of the zone to the opening of the channel.

"We have (aerial) pictures where you can see the prop scars (through the sea grass beds), and that is exactly what we're trying to avoid," Guerrero said.

But Dunbar said the detour will take boaters through an even shallower, nondredged area.

"They're not giving us anything and telling us we can make it," Dunbar said. "I want them to bring their boat out here with their brand-new stainless steel prop and show me they can make it."

The manatees face a similar problem, Dunbar said. During low tide, he said, the endangered creatures can't get through the shallow minor channel to the warmer waters in the spring-fed Cow Creek.

County officials say they will look at that minor path after the main Hudson Channel project is over. But they aren't making any promises that could prove too expensive or difficult to keep.

"He wants access to that channel, and I don't blame him," Widman said. "But that wouldn't be the first place along the coast that didn't have access to the gulf."

Bridget Hall Grumet covers Pasco County government. She can be reached in west Pasco at 869-6244 or toll-free at 1-800-333-7505, ext. 6244. Her e-mail address is bhall@sptimes.com

[Last modified January 16, 2005, 00:33:22]