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Letter to the editor

Rays' land request for stadium may be hard to fill

Permits to dredge, alter sea grass beds take time.

By CRAIG PITTMAN, Times Staff Writer
Published December 1, 2007

[C. Gary | Times illustration] Filling the bay for the Rays To turn the site of Al Lang Field, left, into a new 34,000-seat waterfront ballpark, right, the Tampa Bay Rays want to dump fill dirt into six-tenths of an acre of Tampa Bay and reroute Bayshore Drive. But getting state and federal permits for filling in the bay, particularly in a spot with sea grasses vital to the bay's health, could be a tough hurdle for the project. [Sources: HOK Sport architects, Google Earth]

ST. PETERSBURG -- The Tampa Bay Rays' plans for a waterfront ballpark will face a major environmental hurdle because of regulations designed to protect the bay.

Stadium plans call for dumping fill dirt over six-tenths of an acre of Tampa Bay to create about 26,000 square feet of new land, the rough equivalent of three house lots.

The Rays then want the city to reroute Bayshore Drive across the new land, making the road bow out into the bay where it now bends in next to the stadium site, currently occupied by Al Lang Field.

Planners and biologists familiar with Tampa Bay predict that getting state and federal permits to fill in that much of the bay -- and in a spot that state records show contains several patches of sea grass beds vital to the health of the bay -- could be more difficult than the Rays expect.

"There's a lot of things lined up there that are going to make it difficult," predicted Suzanne Cooper of the Agency on Bay Management, an arm of the Tampa Bay Regional Planning Council. "They've got a lot of hurdles."

Not only are such dredge-and-fill projects rarely requested, but for the past 30 years that area has been part of a state aquatic preserve, said Holly Greening, chief scientist of the Tampa Bay Estuary Program.

The preserve status legally protects its "aesthetic, biological and scientific values" for "the enjoyment of future generations."

But without filling in the bay and relocating the road, "you're just out of room" for the stadium on that particular site, said Joseph Spear, the principal architect with HOK Sport, which designed the proposed new stadium.

Under the current alignment, Spear said, the distance between home plate and the right field fence would be a mere 270 feet -- more suited to Little League than the majors.

"The site is very tight," agreed Michael Kalt, the Rays' project manager. "It would be very difficult to accommodate a major league field on that site."

Many of Florida's waterfront developments were built using just such dredge-and-fill techniques -- Miami Beach, for instance.

But by the 1960s the consequences of turning water into land were becoming starkly apparent. When the owner of a South Pasadena mobile home park proposed filling in nearly 12 acres of Boca Ciega Bay to expand his property, more than 100 opponents turned out at a public hearing to complain that previous dredging projects had turned the bay muddy and foul, producing a stench at low tide.

In 1967, in what became a landmark decision, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers turned down the permit application because of the environmental consequences, putting public interest ahead of private profit. The U.S. Supreme Court ultimately upheld that decision.

These days dredge-and-fill projects in open water are fairly rare, Cooper and Greening said, and the permitting process can drag on.

Sea grass quandary

For instance, in August 2001 the Florida Department of Transportation sought a permit to dredge and fill part of Tampa Bay to expand the Courtney Campbell Parkway. The permit was approved 15 months later.

Complicating that permitting process, DOT officials said, was that the fill displaced sea grass beds. The head of the corps' regulatory division in Florida, David Hobbie, said that's always going to slow things down.

"Any time you get sea grass beds, that always gets a little stickier," Hobbie said. Normally in such cases, sea grass beds must be transplanted or replaced in some way.

He also noted that the presence of manatees, an endangered species, could add another complication to the permitting. Since no docks are being proposed, however, the corps is unlikely to reject the permit application because of that.

Hobbie and the head of the corps' office in Tampa, Chuck Schnepel, said no one from the Rays or its consultant, Nebraska-based HDR, has contacted federal regulators about getting the dredge-and-fill permits. State Department of Environmental Protection officials said they, too, have not been contacted by the Rays or HDR.

To longtime environmental consultant and sea grass expert Roy "Robin" Lewis, the Rays need to get moving fast on figuring out how they will convince the state and federal regulators that they can make up for the loss of sea grasses in that area, because that's likely to be the key.

"If there are proposed sea grass impacts," Lewis wrote in an e-mail to the St. Petersburg Times, "whomever is handling the permitting had better get the process started NOW."

The Rays are confident that the permitting issues, "while certainly a challenge, are not by any means insurmountable," Kalt said. He defended the team's prediction that all the permits could be obtained by October, with ground-breaking in May 2009, as "manageable."

When Cooper of the Agency on Bay Management heard that schedule, though, she chuckled and said, "Well, if you're going to dream, dream big."

Times staff writer Aaron Sharockman and researcher Angie Drobnic Holan contributed to this report.

A look into future?
For a comparison of the Rays' proposed new ballpark with what they currently have at Tropicana Field, visit www.majorleaguedowntown.com/playball/ballparkcomparison.aspx.

[Last modified December 1, 2007, 00:22:02]