Posted on August 28, 2017
By Kevin Wadlow, FLKeysNews
Backers of a proposal to allow maintenance dredging in Duck Key’s canals scaled back a draft ordinance going to Monroe County planners next Wednesday.
A revised Aug. 11 application from Duck Key Benefit Inc., a residents’ organization, drops language that could have allowed dredging in an access channel beyond Duck Key’s internal canal system, and allowed dredging in an enclosed basin.
“We’re doing what we can for now and that’s to maintain the canal system,” project consultant Owen Trepanier said Tuesday.
Changing the proposed language “isn’t what we think is best,” Trepanier said, “but it’s the only way [county planning] staff would support it.”
The Monroe County Planning Commission will consider the proposed ordinance-language change for Duck Key at a 10 a.m. Aug. 30 meeting at the Marathon Government Center.
In June, Monroe County Planning and Environmental Resources Department staff objected to a Duck Key proposal that could have led to dredging in an open-water channel that leads from the south shore of Duck Key to the Atlantic Ocean. Parts of the channel have become too shallow, boaters contend.
Dredging in a marina basin at the mile marker 61 island also was included in the ordinance wording. Any dredging would require more detailed plan submissions.
At a January 2016 discussion with Monroe County commissioners, the elected board members told Duck Key residents that they were not willing to approve maintenance dredging “in areas with benthic [marine bottom life] resources in channels, even if at the mouth of a canal — areas where both edges are under water,” a staff summary describes.
Commissioners did sympathize with requests to dredge Duck Key’s interior canals, which have silted in. Since grass and other bottom life had taken hold in the free-flowing canals, current laws on dredging would have banned removing the marine life. The proposed dredging would be limited to about 6 feet deep.
When the June proposal included the open-water and basin dredging, planning staff noted those items appear to be “directly in conflict” with commissioners’ stated intent from the 2016 meeting. That led to the pending language changes.
County staff did not raise objections to the newly revised proposal limiting maintenance work to “interior canals.”
“These [Duck Key canals] are immensely important to the community, to Marathon and to the entire county,” Trepanier said. “People live here because of the water and we have a set of rules that eventually could cut off water access for everybody.”
“We were trying to make it so we would never have to go back for maintenance dredging,” he said. “It’s an unbelievably long, laborious and expensive process.”
“Hopefully we’ll be able to get it done in the future,” Trepanier said. “Maybe the people who oppose maintenance dredging will see that when done properly, it’s not so scary.”
Marine conservationists and other environmental groups have urged the county to support strong regulations on dredging in Florida Keys waters.
In April 2013, commissioners unanimously rejected a proposal that sought approval to dredge a channel through a lush seagrass flat leading to Walker’s Island, not far from Duck Key. A narrow waterway dug decades ago has filled in to where it is only about a foot deep at some points.
Source: FLKeysNews
