Posted on September 12, 2018
Elizabeth Hathaway and her neighbors look out over their backyards near Flagler Beach and see a thriving series of waterways with birds, fish and manatees, frequented by fishermen and kayakers.
Coastal restoration scientists look at that same area and see a habitat in need of restoration, a network of ditches dug along tidal creeks in the 1950s for mosquito control that destroyed acres of salt marsh.
Now a project to fill in those old ditches and restore 40 acres of coastal marsh among the series of creeks along the Intracoastal Waterway behind Hathaway and her neighbors has pitted those perspectives against each other and ignited a growing controversy. If approved at a meeting Tuesday in Palatka, the project is expected to start in late September and take about a year.
The project, on state-owned land across the Intracoastal from Gamble Rogers State Park, calls for leveling old spoil piles created by the ditching, and scraping that dirt into more than 100 miles of narrow ditches to make them shallower and more marsh-like. The work will improve the habitat, protect juvenile fish from larger predators and make the wetlands more resilient to sea level rise, said scientists with the St. Johns River Water Management District, the lead agency among several planning the work.
But the proposal has infuriated Hathaway, her neighbors and local fishermen. They look across their backyards and favorite fishing grounds and see something worth keeping.
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A map of the mosquito ditches planned for restoration in the Tomoka Marsh Aquatic Preserve.
Ricker Alford steers his motorized canoe through the waterways behind his home on John Anderson Highway in Flagler Beach, where the St. Johns River Water Management District plans a project to level spoil piles along old mosquito control ditches by pushing the dirt into the ditches to restore 40 acres of coastal marsh. [News-Journal/Jim Tiller]
Elizabeth Hathaway points out the wetlands behind her home on John Anderson Highway in Flagler Beach where the St. Johns River Water Management plans to restore a series of dragline ditches dug in the 1950?s for mosquito control. Hathaway and her husband, their neighbors and others in the community hope to convince the water district to delay or cancel the planned marsh restoration fearing irreparable harm to wildlife and the scenic vista. [News-Journal/Jim Tiller]
Ricker Alford steers his motorized canoe through the waterways behind his home on John Anderson Highway in Flagler Beach, where the St. Johns River Water Management District plans a project to level spoil piles along old mosquito control ditches by pushing the dirt into the ditches to restore 40 acres of coastal marsh. [News-Journal/Jim Tiller]
Elizabeth Hathaway points out the wetlands behind her home on John Anderson Highway in Flagler Beach where the St. Johns River Water Management plans to restore a series of dragline ditches dug in the 1950?s for mosquito control. Hathaway and her husband, their neighbors and others in the community hope to convince the water district to delay or cancel the planned marsh restoration fearing irreparable harm to wildlife and the scenic vista. [News-Journal/Jim Tiller]
On Tuesday, they’ll make their case to the district’s governing board, set to approve the planned restoration at its regular monthly meeting in Palatka. In the meantime, members of the Flagler Sportfishing Club, nearby property owners and others have mounted a letter writing campaign. The opponents want to either delay the work until it can be better investigated and publicized, or try to stop it all together. They fear the planned leveling of the old spoil piles could cause irreparable harm.
From the dock of their home, Hathaway and her husband, Matt, can look across the more than 100 acres where the work is planned. It’s that view and the abundant wildlife that attracted them to the home more than four years ago.
“We’re very much lovers of the environment, it’s the reason we left Palm Coast,” she said. “We specifically came here because of what this area has to offer.”
Flagler marsh restoration.
Elizabeth Hathaway points out the wetlands behind her home on John Anderson Highway in Flagler Beach where the St. Johns River Water Management plans to restore a series of dragline ditches dug in the 1950?s for mosquito control. Hathaway and her husband, their neighbors and others in the community hope to convince the water district to delay or cancel the planned marsh restoration fearing irreparable harm to wildlife and the scenic vista. [News-Journal/Jim Tiller]
Elizabeth Hathaway points out the wetlands behind her home on John Anderson Highway in Flagler Beach where the St. Johns River Water Management plans to restore a series of dragline ditches dug in the 1950?s for mosquito control. Hathaway and her husband, their neighbors and others in the community hope to convince the water district to delay or cancel the planned marsh restoration fearing irreparable harm to wildlife and the scenic vista. [News-Journal/Jim Tiller]
Ricker Alford steers his motorized canoe through the waterways behind his home on John Anderson Highway in Flagler Beach, where the St. Johns River Water Management District plans a project to level spoil piles along old mosquito control ditches by pushing the spoil into the ditches to restore coastal marsh. [News-Journal/Jim Tiller]
Matt Hathaway rides through the waterways behind his home, where the St. Johns River Water Management District plans a marsh restoration that has become very controversial. [News-Journal/Jim Tiller]
Matt Hathaway rides through the waterways behind his home, where the St. Johns River Water Management District plans a marsh restoration that has become very controversial. [News-Journal/Jim Tiller]
Elizabeth Hathaway points out the wetlands behind her home on John Anderson Highway in Flagler Beach where the St. Johns River Water Management plans to restore a series of dragline ditches dug in the 1950?s for mosquito control. Hathaway and her husband, their neighbors and others in the community hope to convince the water district to delay or cancel the planned marsh restoration fearing irreparable harm to wildlife and the scenic vista. [News-Journal/Jim Tiller]
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“After 70 years nature has come in and healed itself and it has this whole ecosystem going,” she said. “That would be our biggest concern. It’s thriving, it’s flourishing.”
The proposed restoration mirrors similar work that has taken place elsewhere along the Intracoastal in Volusia and Flagler counties, at North Peninsula, Gamble Rogers Memorial and Tomoka state parks, Canaveral National Seashore and Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge.
Permitted by DEP and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the work will take place in the man-made ditches and spoil areas, not in the natural creeks that wind through the area, said Ron Brockmeyer, an environmental scientist with the district. Most of the areas nearest to homes are intact wetlands that won’t be touched, he said.
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Flagler marsh restoration
Fishing guide Rob Ottlein, who can see the project area from his neighbor’s backyard, can’t believe the district and other agencies want to come in “and level it all.”
Ottlein, who heard about the project from a state employee, was one of the first to begin sounding the alarm about the project.
“They want to bring it back to what it was 75 years ago,” he said. “You’ve got all this marine life now, crabs and minnows and mullet, just all kinds of stuff in these ditches now,” he said. “They say they’re going to make it better. How are you going to make it better if you’re going to destroy what’s there?”
Since hearing about the proposed restoration, Hathaway said she has worked to learn more. She said she and other property owners should have been notified in advance.
“Nobody knew about it,” she said. “This literally would have been a situation where the equipment was just in our back yard one morning and there would be nothing we could do about it.”
Mapping restorations
The project will take place across roughly 100 acres of state owned land within the Tomoka Marsh Aquatic Preserve, with the goal of restoring as much of the wetlands as possible based on historical aerial maps, said Erich Marzolf, director of the district’s division of water and land resources.
They hope to create better plant and wildlife habitat, including for important recreational sport fish species such as redfish and shrimp, he said. The district’s partners on the project are the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, the Department of Environmental Protection and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
“There’s a whole food web out there that is in part reliant on the reproduction that occurs in those wetlands,” Marzolf said. Increasing coastal wetlands provides filters for the water, absorbing nutrients, pollution and even carbon.
The district mapped all of the disturbed wetlands between Ponce Inlet and Jacksonville 10 years ago, with an eye to restoring them, said Brockmeyer. Even the aquatic preserve’s management plan calls for restoring the salt marsh communities.
Over more than 18 years, the district has worked with other partners, such as the state, Volusia County and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to restore mosquito ditches. District documents show more than 600 acres have been restored, with about 250 acres returned to wetland elevation.
Similar projects have occurred in Tampa Bay and along the East Coast as far north as New England.
When the district began looking for an area to work in to extend its grant with the Wildlife Service, the Flagler Beach spot was the logical choice, Brockmeyer said.
To map the project, they studied sets of maps available from 1943 to 2014. Over time, the amount of open water has been increasing there, while the wetland areas have been decreasing, he said. Without a restoration, he said, that trend would continue.
But the opponents have visited other local marsh restoration sites and aren’t happy with what they found.
Opposition grows
Chuck Gleichmann, a licensed guide and president of the Flagler Sportfishing Club, lives about two miles south of Highbridge Road and has seen firsthand the various ditch and marsh restoration projects along the Intracoastal.
“We’re mounting every effort we can to have (this project) delayed or stopped,” said Gleichmann. “The fishery in that particular area is quite healthy. You can take a boat ride and you can see shrimp, mullet, small fish and big fish.”
“From a fisherman’s perspective, we are all for salt marsh restoration,” he said. “Anything we can do to improve the water quality in our water, we will support.”
A salt marsh restoration at North Peninsula State Park is “doing what it was supposed to do,” he said. “It’s creating a habitat for the small fry, fish, the crustaceans and the snails, which is good.”
But a similar project in the Tomoka basin “totally destroyed the fishery that lived in that habitat,” he said. “We used to catch redfish, snook, trout and flounder in the mosquito control ditches, but once they filled those in, there’s no predator fish.”
Ultimately, that is one point of the work, said Brockmeyer and Marzolf. Having deep ditches that allow big fish to get back there upsets the natural balance, the scientists said. Young fish need a place to get away from predators to grow into big fish.
“We can’t promise all of the fishing spots would be the same,” said Brockmeyer. “Our goal would be to increase the productivity of the whole system, so that over time there would be more support for those large sport fish.”
Opponents to the Flagler Beach project have attended two meetings with district staff to discuss the project, but left both times feeling frustrated and unsatisfied.
The feeling they have as a community is “one of total confusion,” Hathaway said. “All these things they say they want, we have. It’s here.”
Restoration controversy
Habitat restorations are often controversial.
Mosquito ditch restoration in particular has been opposed by nearby residents, shellfish farmers, fishermen and others. They question the loss of mangroves in the spoil piles, as well as sediments and old contaminants that could be stirred up by the project.
But similar opposition occurs locally when state and county parks knock down big trees to restore scrub habitat or conduct prescribed burns.
Although Hathaway concedes there are spoil piles that look like they could be restored, she doesn’t want to see the entire area degraded by the work.
“What if this doesn’t work,” she said. “Then we’ll be the ones with red tide and algae blooms like they have in the rest of Florida.”
Brockmeyer and Chad Truxall, executive director of the Marine Discovery Center in New Smyrna Beach, said there’s no evidence that mosquito ditch restoration projects have contributed to algae blooms.
In Volusia County, shellfish farmer, Mike Sullivan sued the district and the county over work in Mosquito Lagoon, arguing in part that nutrients and soil disturbed by ditch restoration destroyed his clam beds. But ultimately the judge ruled in favor of the government agencies. Sullivan and others who protested projects in Volusia County have been comparing notes and working with the opponents in Flagler Beach.
Marzolf said the ditch restorations reduce the amount of nutrients reaching the river by letting the nutrients settle out into sediments.
Truxall said he has not witnessed any negative impacts or decreased water quality from mosquito ditch restoration in the Indian River Lagoon system.
“Those restorations are working very well,” he said.
But ditch restoration projects do require silt screening, proper maintenance of machines, biodegradable fuel and other precautions, he said.
There have been issues in the past with improperly maintained silt fencing in Mosquito Lagoon.
For the Flagler Beach project, the contractor, who has previously done dozens of projects for the district, will use a special piece of amphibious equipment to do the work. Marzolf said the project will be accomplished in small phases and silt fencing will be required “around the places where we think that stirred up water might escape that area and get into the waterway.”
A subcontractor will oversee the work to ensure the project’s precautions and requirements are being followed, district officials said.
Truxall compared the opposition to the controversies that erupt over prescribed burns.
“When a fire happens, it looks scary at first and it’s very abrupt, but as things start to recover, as nature does, it works. It’s restored and we see the results in increased habitat and increased diversity.”
In a study by Melinda Donnelly at the University of Central Florida, the recolonization by marsh plants began happening within a few months on a project at Merritt Island. After 18 months, the marsh areas had 50 to 80 percent cover, Donnelly wrote in her dissertation. Donnelly and others also studied how fiddler crabs and other invertebrates come back and how birds use the restored wetlands.
On Friday, in an email, she said she was “sorry to hear there is opposition to this type of restoration.”
“The sites I have personally observed are in Mosquito Lagoon,” she said, “and it has been highly successful in both restoring salt marsh and increasing habitat for a diverse community of estuarine species.”
Source: News-Journal
