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Letter to the editor

Action is good, but our preserves need more

Pinellas County's environmental lands have been suffering under a triple whammy. Some people regard these precious natural areas as their own personal dumping grounds for trash. Nonnative plants such as air potato and Brazilian pepper have invaded the preserves, choking out native plants. And the county's environmental lands maintenance staff simply is too small to maintain so many thousands of acres.

Thanks to one caring individual with a creative idea, and a refreshing collaboration between two county departments, there is a flicker of hope for the county's preserves and land management areas.

Reggie Hall, 56, lives beside the county's smallest nature preserve, the 8.3-acre Ozona Preserve in North Pinellas. It was Hall who nearly 20 years ago persuaded county officials to start buying the land that now makes up that preserve.

Like many native Floridians, Hall feels a deep connection to the natural environment, and he was fiercely protective of the acres of trees and marshes behind his home. Nearly every day, and often alone, he could be found in the preserve doing the hot, dirty work of hacking down Brazilian peppers, removing debris and maintaining trails.

It was a discouraging task not only because Hall alone couldn't pick up all the trash and conquer all the invasives, but because he knew that conditions were just as bad in the county's bigger preserves, such as Brooker Creek Preserve and Weedon Island.

He feared the day when they would become so overrun with trash and nonnative plants that they lost their environmental value and the passionate protection of the public.

So Hall hatched a plan. He knew that while the environmental lands division's maintenance staff was tiny, the maintenance staff for the county park system was big. So he asked if the parks maintenance staff could be shared with the environmental lands division, thereby putting more hands to work on the county's thousands of acres of preserves and land management areas.

Last week, Hall watched the first park crew troop into the Ozona Preserve, armed with tools, machinery and know-how to beat back the nonnative plants and maintain the tree canopy.

Hall found an ally in Paul Cozzie, the county's bureau director of culture, education and leisure, whose appreciation for the county's natural areas led him to offer the help of his maintenance crews when they are not tied up in the parks. In exchange, the environmental lands division will help the parks department with management plans and controlled burns.

One person can make a difference, as Hall has demonstrated.

But why was there such an imbalance in the distribution of labor in the first place? With so few full-time maintenance workers in the environmental lands division, there is no hope of properly maintaining the county's natural lands, much less restoring areas that have been negatively affected by man.

The county has an outstanding system of developed parks that need to be maintained, but county residents have made clear in the last couple of years that preserves also are precious and should be protected.

Using parks crews to work in the preserves is a good first step and a praiseworthy demonstration of outside-the-box thinking, but county officials need to figure out a more effective and permanent approach.

Pinellas County's environmental lands are treasures that must be preserved for future generations that will live in increasingly crowded conditions. Those public lands will not survive, much less thrive, without attention and hard work by both volunteers and government.

[Last modified January 26, 2008, 21:08:19]