Director’s Note: Busy start to the week – Midnight Pass and Water Quality Consortium

It’s only Tuesday, but already a busy start to this week. This past Sunday, I attended a meeting of the Midnight Pass Society, along with about a hundred local residents. There is a lot of passion involved in this topic, and I was fortunate to be given an opportunity to speak to the group and give them a summary of the SBEP’s work, and to give them an update on our recently approved Comprehensive Conservation and Management Plan (CCMP). Then yesterday, we had our second meeting of the Water Quality Consortium, which is meant to be a “bridge” of sorts between the Technical Advisory Committee (TAC) and the Management and Policy Boards.

Midnight Pass

At the Sunday meeting, there were quite a people wondering what was the SBEP’s view on the re-opening of Midnight Pass. I informed them that we aren’t a regulatory agency, and we also don’t tell people what they need to do. But we do act to make sure that such decisions are made on the basis of the most accurate information. To that end, I let them know that if the community – not just a group of 100 people – decides that they wish to revisit this topic, we will be there with them as a technical sounding board. This is not an easy problem to address, but the project that they are looking to implement is actually a fairly common one. In my private sector experience (roughly half of my career) I was involved with three projects that sought to reestablish lost historical tidal connections between two waterbodies. The first of the projects I worked on was in Key Largo’s Lake Surprise, where a 100-year old causeway that was laid down by Henry Flagler’s railroad was removed in 2008 to reestablish historical tidal flows and reduce crocodile mortality on A1A.

aerial of Midnight Pass open in 1970s

Midnight Pass in the 1970s

aerial of a closed Midnight Pass today

Midnight Pass today

The second was a project in Puerto Rico, where I helped to develop the ecological uplift estimate associated with the establishment of the lost tidal connection between San Jose Lagoon and San Juan Bay. That project has been permitted and funding secured. The third project was in Tampa Bay, where an 80-year old causeway across the northeastern portion of Old Tampa Bay was recently replaced with a 200-foot bridge. That project went from inception to completion in about 5 years.

The desire to reestablish the historical connection between Little Sarasota Bay (LSB) and the Gulf of Mexico (Gulf) will not be easier if proponents refer to the bay as “dead” or the water quality as “grossly polluted”. Both of those are incorrect. For example, there are over 600 acres of seagrass in LSB, and the number of fish captured by sampling crews from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FFWCC) was second only to Palma Sola Bay in 2020 and was first out of five bay segments in 2021. Based on prior work done in Sarasota Bay, there are likely well over 10 million fish in LSB. There are certainly oysters and shrimp in LSB, even in the areas closest to the old Midnight Pass, contrary to the public statements made by some proponents of opening the pass. And while the water quality in LSB in 2018 was indeed the worst of any segment of our bay over the past 20 years, the water quality in LSB last year was the best it’s been at any time over the past decade.

Hydrologic restoration projects are not a new concept. There are over a dozen projects that I cited as prior examples in the work I was involved with in Key Largo, Puerto Rico and Old Tampa Bay. Such projects have been done for decades in Delaware, Rhode Island, Connecticut and Massachusetts. In those states, it was not uncommon in the past for folks to close off tidal connections to waterbodies to turn them into freshwater systems for agricultural irrigation and duck hunting. Both in New England and the mid-Atlantic states, there has been a push to restore these lost tidal connections, and typically the recovery of water quality, vegetation and fish populations to prior conditions is quite rapid. So, if the community decides to revisit this issue, we’re there to help them move beyond overly simplistic rhetoric – on both sides – so that a truly informed decision can be made. Because even if a decision to reopen the pass is made, the Devil is in the details, because it’s not as if you’d be altering a muck-filled biological desert. There are plenty of issues to deal with in the permitting process, such as the existing healthy seagrass meadows, for one thing. Or the impacts of jetties on sand migration along shorelines, for another.

Water Quality Consortium 

Shifting to another project, we reconvened our Water Quality Consortium yesterday, and laid out our proposed approach to develop the Reasonable Assurance Plan (RAP) for Sarasota Bay. We had attendees from the cities of Bradenton and Sarasota, both counties, the Town of Longboat Key, the Florida Department of Environmenta Protection (FDEP) staff in Tallahassee and Ft Myers, as well as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Region 4, the Florida Department of Agriculture & Consumer Services (FDACS) and the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT). We presented our strategy and approach and asked if anyone had any concerns. There were some questions asked about the details of our approach that we discussed, but none of the regulators or the regulated community (the local governments) expressed any concerns about the logic of the approach, or the implications of where a RAP might lead. So…it’s full speed ahead on getting to a detailed project by project approach on how to reduce our nutrient loads to Sarasota Bay to meet our proposed reference period loading target, and then to come up with the projects that will then “hold the line” on expectations of population growth and sea level rise over the next 30 years.

There’s a lot going on around here, and we want to keep you up to speed on the most important steps being taken to restore and/or protect the water quality and natural resources of our beautiful bay.

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