Posted on September 6, 2016
By C.T. Bowen, Tampa Bay Times
Pasco County is preparing again to try its hand at dredging clean channels to the Gulf of Mexico.
Its past efforts haven’t met with smooth sailing.
A long-pursued dredging of Hudson Channel, completed more than a decade ago, never did stimulate a hoped-for redevelopment bonanza. Commissioners said it also failed to eliminate the wait by commercial fishing boats timing their voyages to high tides.
“It wasn’t done very good,” County Commissioner Mike Wells Jr., a licensed boat captain, said about dredge.
Meanwhile, the county and a neighboring development partner, Sun West Acquisition, have been unable to persuade the federal government to allow a dredging of the channel separating SunWest Park and the privately planned SunWest Harbourtowne resort and residential development.
The idea this time is to begin a series of dredges on the county-maintained channels leading from west Pasco’s densely populated coastal communities to the gulf. The channels are at Gulf Harbors, Anclote, Hudson, Sea Pines and Signal Cove.
Last week, commissioners hired Dewberry Consultants for $38,000 to begin the task of figuring out how much work will be needed, at what cost and how it might be financed. The project could be eligible for financial aid tied to mitigation from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the gulf. It also could come with proposed assessment districts requiring affected property owners to contribute to the tab.
Some of the canals, serving the dredge-and-fill residential developments west of U.S. 19, date back more than 50 years. Bailee’s Bluff, for instance, hasn’t been dredged since 1962, said Curtis Franklin, the county’s Restore Act program coordinator.
“We’re already on a shallow coast,” Franklin said. “It’s challenging to get a boat out to begin with.”
Just ask Greg Myers, vice commodore of the Gulf Winds Sailing Club and a resident of the Sea Forest community within Gulf Harbors. Between the first and second channel markers near Gulf Landing, silt has diminished the depth from 5 feet to 3 feet at low tide.
It means people like Myers, who owns a 36-foot Catalina sailboat, have to time their departures with the tide or end up having to hang around and wait in the channel for an hour or so if they don’t correctly time their sailings.
“As a result, you can’t get out to the gulf,” said Myers. “If you can’t get out to the gulf, it affects the property values for all 250 houses here.”
Allen Rose of Hudson, a member of the Gulf Harbors Yacht Club, told commissioners he envisions wider and deeper channels at Gulf Harbors, Port Richey and Hudson as the centerpiece of a making Pasco’s coast a tourist-friendly destination with trolley connections among county parks and a boating or beachgoing public eagerly filling westside hotel rooms.
Myers, however, worries about smaller projects being delayed while Pasco devises a countywide waterfront dredge plan.
“The problem is, by the time they put all those parts together for a consolidated vision, we’re going to have boats sitting out there with no water behind the house,” Myers said in an interview. “Let’s find the areas that can be very quickly addressed, very cheaply, that have the highest impact possible to as many residents as possible. That should be a primary concern for their big visionary thing.”
Dewberry, the consultant, is scheduled to report back to the county within 90 working days.
Source: Tampa Bay Times
