Posted on September 2, 2026
By Sarah Perkel
A dredging project in Broward County has been paused after environmental groups said the work may have been doing more harm to threatened staghorn coral than initially anticipated.
The Corps paused authorization for Broward County’s Sand Bypass Project until an updated environmental consultation is concluded, according to Miami Waterkeeper, after it was determined the project might have exceeded acceptable “incidental take” of staghorn coral — the “unintentional, but not unexpected,” harming or killing of a protected species, according to NOAA.
The Sand Bypass Project purports to excavate “a 10.8-acre pit to trap sand for beach renourishment.”
Another nearby dredging project, the Port Everglades Expansion, was already paused after the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers withdrew its state permit application in April of this year, according to the Center for Biological Diversity and Miami Waterkeeper.
An August lawsuit was filed against the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) regarding the sand bypass dredging by a series of conservation organizations, including Miami Waterkeeper, the Center for Biological Diversity, Florida Wildlife Federation and the Diving Equipment & Marketing Association, according to a press release by the Center for Biological Diversity.
“Because staghorn coral has critical habitat that is already designated, the consultation process required that the National Marine Fisheries Service consider whether the project will destroy or adversely modify the staghorn coral’s critical habitat,” Alex Muir, a Florida-based attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, told the USA TODAY Network.
“What the service found was that it would take some staghorn coral, but the level of take that would occur would not jeopardize the future of the species,” she added.
According to Muir, the initial biological opinion on which permitting was based was provided by the NMFS in 2020. Determinations of acceptable “incidental take” for staghorn coral were made based off that opinion, she said. Since, Muir added, there has been “new information” that warrants a new consultation for the “staghorn coral and impacts to its habitat.”
In particular, Muir said, the determinations for acceptable incidental take were made “before the 2023 heat wave that took out a lot of coral in Florida.”
The Sand Bypass Project had already been paused for summer due to coral spawning season, according to Muir, but was authorized to start back up in October.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for the National Marine Fisheries Service said it was “unable to comment on matters of litigation.”
Possible dredging threat to Queen Conch in Broward County
The Center for Biological Diversity, a nonprofit conservation organization, previously filed a lawsuit against the NMFS in July, alleging that the organization failed to designate critical habitat for the threatened species by the required deadline.
That means the two major dredging projects in Broward County could also disturb nearby populations of queen conch, Muir told the USA TODAY Network.
Without critical habitat designation, Muir added, “some of the analyses that were undertaken for the permitting of both of those projects” were not as “thorough” as they might have been.
Though the Port Everglades Expansion is currently paused after the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers withdrew its state permit application for the “dredging project” in April of this year, according to the Center for Biological Diversity and Miami Waterkeeper, Muir says it remains a concern, along with the temporarily halted Sand Bypass Project.
“The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the National Marine Fisheries Service were not required to look at whether the project the Army Corps is permitting — in this case, the Broward County Sand Bypass Project — will destroy or adversely modify critical habitat for the queen conch, even though we know this project is happening in an area that is critical to the recovery of the species, because it is in the area adjacent to Port Everglades,” Muir said.
A spokesperson for the National Marine Fisheries Service said the organization was “unable to comment on matters of litigation” in response to a request for comment regarding the July lawsuit by the USA TODAY Network.
