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PORT MANATEE - The deal was simple: To win approval of the biggest dredging project to hit the Tampa Bay area in 30 years, Port Manatee agreed that no ship would dock at new berths it wanted to build until it replaced the 12 acres of sea grass being wiped out.
Six years later, the $35-million berths are nearly finished, but the port still hasn't made up for the lost sea grass. And the dredging contractor accidentally destroyed more sea grass, an apparent violation of its permit.
Finishing the sea grass replacement will take a year or more. But port officials wanted to change the deal and put ships in the new berths right away.
To the consternation of environmental activists, the state Department of Environmental Protection is considering approving the change.
Forcing the port to wait would be "a hardship," said its executive director, David McDonald. "We need these new facilities to take care of our expanded business, and the companies we have contracts with are ready to move in."
DEP officials were sympathetic.
"I hope you can see that the department and the (port) are attempting to reach the same goals of environmental protection and continuation of commerce," DEP Beaches and Coastal Systems Bureau chief Mike Barnett wrote port officials in February.
Last month, one of Barnett's employees, Martin Seeling, wrote that the DEP staff is recommending giving the port a new deal because there is "no real advantage in keeping the berths closed."
Hogwash, environmental activists said.
ManaSota-88 leaders called the proposal "a violation of the public trust." Longtime environmental consultant Robin Lewis told DEP officials that "Tampa Bay will only be worse off if the department does not hold a firm line on what the port has done."
Lewis' complaints carried weight with DEP officials because he designed the port's sea grass plan, then quit over how it was being carried out. If the port gets to use its new berths now, he warned DEP officials in an e-mail, the port "has NO incentive to ever finish the required mitigation, and likely will never do so."
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Sea grass beds provide a habitat for small fish, shrimp and crabs. They feed manatees, filter impurities in the water and stabilize the bay bottom's shifting sands.
In the 1950s and '60s, dredging created land for development around the bay but wiped out much of its sea grass, hurting commercial and recreational fishing. Polluted runoff killed even more sea grass. By the early '90s, the bay had lost 80 percent of its sea grass, more than anywhere else in Florida. Restoration efforts have had only mixed success.
The last major dredging project in the bay created Port Manatee, squeezed between two environmentally sensitive aquatic preserve, Cockroach Bay and Terra Ceia, near the south end of the Sunshine Skyway. By the late 1990s, port officials estimated they were losing $3-million a year because their small berths could not accommodate larger ships.
In 1998, port officials proposed plans to blast away limestone and dredge bay bottom to add a 40-foot-deep turning basin to the 400-foot-wide channel connected to the bay's main shipping channel. They also wanted to widen the spot where the channels connect and create two berths for big ships.
Dredging 88 acres of bay bottom would wipe out about 12 acres of sea grass, port officials said. So they offered to scoop up those sea grass beds and transplant them to areas of the bay where sea grass was nonexistent.
State scientists questioned whether that would work because sea grass was not growing there naturally. Still, DEP officials said there was controversy even within their own agency over approving the project, but what won them over was the port's promise to fix the sea grass first.
"This project has to be completed, and it has to be deemed successful by our scientists before we will move forward," Kirby Green, then the DEP's deputy secretary, told Gov. Jeb Bush and the Cabinet in 1999. "They still have some hurdles they've got to jump."
And then-state Rep. Mark Ogles, R-Bradenton, leader of the Manatee County legislative delegation, told the Cabinet that "when the project is complete, every other Florida port will refer to this, I believe, as a template for success."
So Bush and the Cabinet approved the port expansion as a way to encourage Latin American trade. Bush said the plan provided "proper environmental safeguards."
Two years later, after the port project had run into trouble, a state sea grass expert with the Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission wrote in an e-mail to Lewis that the whole project had been "a bad idea" but the state approved it because of "a process run by wishful thinking, money and politics."
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McDonald, the port director, now described the promise not to use the berths until the transplant was successful as an afterthought, something the port offered as a gesture of good faith.
"The important thing is we put the environment first," he said.
The port's promise was risky because sea grass experts say transplanting often fails. And it tends to be expensive because it's done by hand.
The Manatee County Commission, which runs the port, hired a Ruskin sod farmer, Jim Anderson, who had invented a mechanical planter that he said could plant in a few hours what would normally take days.
Lewis, who was supposed to oversee the transplant, objected. He warned port officials that Anderson's experimental machine was dumping sea grass upside down or sideways.
In 2002, port officials prepared a report to the DEP boasting of Anderson's success. Lewis said the report was a lie and refused to sign it, then quit.
Last year, DEP declared Anderson's "megatransplants" a failure (Anderson blamed Lewis' plan, not his machine). McDonald said the port has learned that the only workable method of transplanting sea grass is moving it a shovelful at a time.
Meanwhile, the dredging contractor accidentally dumped clay and silt over 7 acres of bay bottom, wiping out 2 acres of sea grass. DEP officials have threatened to fine the port $10,000 a day.
In March, port officials contended that enough sea grass was growing to claim more than 10 transplant "credits" of the 12.7 they needed to open the berths. But after inspecting the site and reviewing the port's records, DEP officials in September granted the port only 6.1 credits.
Although that's less than half of what's needed, Seeling of the DEP said the project was "clearly trending toward success." He said state officials "anticipate that nearly all the remaining credits will be achieved within the next year." (Lewis predicted it could be three times that long.)
To clear the way for using the new berths, Seeling wrote, the DEP asked the port for "some alternate form of assurance" that port officials would finish the transplant. So the Manatee commissioners passed a resolution promising to "continue all necessary efforts" to make the sea grass transplant work - though without setting a deadline.
That new promise ought to be sufficient to assuage everyone's concerns, McDonald said.
"You've got a very high level of credibility when you have these people saying they're going to do it," the port director said.
--Times staff researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.