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The Fish and Wildlife Service's interim guidelines include dropping permit fees for waterside projects in manatee areas.
Compiled from Times wires
© St. Petersburg Times, published August 14, 2001
WASHINGTON -- Crediting state and local law enforcement for increased efforts to prevent boat collisions with manatees, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has decided to drop permit fees for building boat slips, marinas and other waterside projects in manatee areas.
The fees, averaging $524 per boat slip, have been used as one option to help fund protection of the endangered Florida manatees.
Monday's announcement came in the unveiling of new interim conservation guidelines aimed at protecting the manatee from new watercraft access projects.
Florida manatees are a federally protected species under both the Endangered Species Act and the Marine Mammal Protection Act. Collisions with speeding boats are the most significant human-related cause of manatee deaths and injuries.
Projects that could affect the manatee will now be evaluated on a case-by-case basis under the new guidelines, which local, state and federal authorities are expected to observe.
Among the most important considerations: speed zones in manatee areas with visible speed limit signs and strong law enforcement.
A permanent strategy for evaluating watercraft access projects will not be completed for one or two years, according to Sam Hamilton, southeast regional director for the Fish and Wildlife Service, but he said he believes that new waterside projects should go forward as long as they are designed in ways that prevent harm and injury to the manatees.
Last January, the Fish and Wildlife Service agreed to design stronger manatee regulations after environmental organizations filed suit against the service and the Army Corps of Engineers, charging that the federal agencies failed to adequately protect the manatee.
Under the terms of the settlement, the service agreed to bolster manatee conservation efforts. These actions include revising the recovery plan for the manatee and establishing additional protected habitats. In addition, new procedures for reviewing permit applications of proposed boating facilities in manatee habitat must be adopted.
Hamilton also praised Florida for beefed-up law enforcement that now regularly patrols manatee areas to enforce speed limits on the water.
Meanwhile, the Fish and Wildlife Service continues to evaluate more than 2,800 public comments made since it proposed a plan that would eventually remove the Florida manatee from the Endangered Species list.
The proposals made last month would expand manatee refuges and sanctuaries in the state and take measures to reduce current threats to manatee habitats, but would also downgrade the manatee from endangered to threatened by 2003.
The bulk of letter writers have opposed the plan, saying the service's criteria to take the manatee off the endangered list were not sufficient and did not rely enough on existing scientific data.
Citing statistics that the manatee population has more than quadrupled from 800 to 3,276 since 1989, boaters and members of the boating industry said the Fish and Wildlife Service had no scientific basis for proposing new restrictions on the waterways to further protect the marine mammal's habitat.
Environmentalists, on the other hand, are angered that the recovery criteria in the proposed plan ignore more stringent requirements offered by a group of experts the Fish and Wildlife Service consulted.
The Manatee Population Status Working Group said manatees could be removed from the endangered list only if adults showed an average annual survival rate of 94 percent over at least 10 years and the combined adult and juvenile population grew at least 4 percent each year during that period.
The Fish and Wildlife Service said the legal requirements for down-listing manatees need not be that extensive. It proposed an annual adult survival rate of only 90 percent, with the combined adult and juvenile growth only exceeding zero percent.