Flagler marsh restoration project stirs debate

A three month-delay to search for a compromise over plans to restore coastal marsh near Gamble Rogers State Park in Flagler Beach by leveling old spoil piles hasn’t produced that desired result.

As the clock ticks down to a vote of the St. Johns River Water Management District's governing board in Palatka on Tuesday, residents of a few properties that border the proposed restoration area still hope to achieve more concessions.

The project aims to restore an area of state-owned land where a network of ditches were dug in the 1960s and 1970s to try to control mosquitoes.

The plans call for using a long-reach excavator to push old spoil piles, mangrove trees, Brazilian pepper and other plants into the ditches to restore a more natural elevation and water flow to an estimated 40 acres of marsh. The project is a joint collaboration among the water district, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

But property owners who live next to the proposed restoration area and some fishermen have raised a host of concerns about potential impact to water quality, habitat destruction, flooding and the scenic view. One group of adjoining property owners recently hired environment and land use attorney Jane West of St. Augustine to represent them.

"What we’re hoping to accomplish is to reach some consensus with the district on how they can move forward with this project to accomplish their restoration objectives without completely disrupting the local ecosystem and my clients' quality of life," West said last week. 

The partners first pitched the plan for the marsh restoration to the district’s board in September. Board members approved accepting the $300,000 federal grant from the wildlife service to do the work, but in the face of opposition from dozens of residents and area fishermen, asked the staff to meet with residents to try to find ways to address the concerns.

[READ MORE: District to try compromise]

The resulting effort included two public town hall-style meetings in Flagler Beach. This week, West and a group of property owners met privately with the district’s executive director, Ann Shortelle, and its chairman, John Miklos.

As a result of all the meetings, the district will adjust the western boundary of the project area, reducing the size of the overall area from about 100 acres to 92 acres, said Erich Marzolf, director of the district’s division of water and land resources. Additionally, the district is working to provide additional monitoring data, Marzolf said, including talking with the wildlife commission about fish monitoring.

"The partners still firmly think this is the right thing to do for this project area," Marzolf said last week. Agency scientists say the work will create more healthy fish nurseries and wildlife habitat, provide a more natural environment to filter water and create marshes that can absorb wave energy and act as a buffer against rising sea levels. No work is planned in the natural waterways, such as the creeks or the Intracoastal Waterway.

Although the district has said it will leave buffers between the waterfront homes and the restoration area, West said the nine individuals she represents are still waiting for specifics regarding those buffers.

"It’s been tossed around, but no one has come out with a definitive plan for where it should be," she said. "We're in the process of working with the district now to establish exactly where that would go."

The property owners are concerned the removal of the spoil piles closest to their homes could allow their property to be flooded by storm surge, West said. "If you remove the spoil islands, you're going to be removing what is now a natural barrier to storm surge that they depend on," she said.

The owners also have concerns about potential water quality impact, and impact to oyster beds, as a result of the construction activities, she said. "We don't have any baseline data of what the water quality is so we feel it's really important to establish what that baseline data is before the project starts; otherwise, how do you define whether the project is successful?"

Also, at the public meetings, the district worked with attendees to note some of the ditches boaters use for navigation and agreed not to work on those particular ditches, Marzolf said. They've flagged and will continue to flag areas noted as oyster reefs before each restoration of each site begins, and the contractor will survey for oyster beds to avoid damaging them, he said. The district agreed to use more turbidity barriers to prevent silt and sediment than were used in similar projects over the past 20 years to the south in Volusia County.

[LEARN MORE: Water district answers questions]

District records show 22 property owners abut the proposed restoration area, 15 on the west side and seven on the east side. Some of the property owners support the restoration, Marzolf said. It's also supported by Audubon Florida, The Nature Conservancy, the Atlantic Coast Fish Habitat Partnership and some members of the Friends of Gamble Rogers State Park.

A recent critique by an independent restoration scientist Andre Clewell, contacted by some of the opposing property owners, has further fueled their concerns, but the project partners disputed those findings in a joint letter to Clewell last week.

Clewell's findings — detailed in a six-page summary report — “were pretty shocking” to residents because it supported and underscored much of what the residents already had been saying, said Elizabeth Hathaway, whose home overlooks the project area. 

“I’m hoping still, and it may be wishful thinking, that they (the district) will postpone the item until January,” Hathaway said this week.

The report by Clewell, who helped found the Society of Ecological Restoration in 1988 and is a published author on restoration of wetlands, called the proposal “a degradation project."

“It lacks fundamental aspects of restoration, such as baseline documentation, a reference model, implementation plans, monitoring, and even a clear statement of project goals,” the report stated. He concluded the partners should document baseline conditions that determine the need for restoration, provide an implementation plan for the work and a benchmark that could be used to measure the project’s eventual success.

Clewell concluded the original ditching landscape could not be recovered and that the plan to rake spoil piles into the ditches could cloud the water with sediment for decades to come, degrading the fishery. “The Tomoka estuary currently represents a sustainable, resilient, complex, and self-organizing ecological landscape,” he wrote. “Proposed project activities will degrade this landscape without returning any benefits.”

He also noted sea level rise already occurring in the area is eroding the spoil piles and might accomplish the district’s stated goals within about the same time frame as the plan to use the excavator.

In their eight-page response, the government agency partners said their previous work and research refutes Clewell's observations, and provided supporting information from some of Clewell's own published work.

The joint response stated "a limited group of stakeholders have asserted that the restoration process will lead to a variety of detrimental effects, but they have not provided any tangible evidence of such effects." It continued: "We respectfully find your assessment to be too limited in scope and too heavily based on unsubstantiated assertions."

The area is being degraded by erosion of the spoil piles, but the property won't restore itself to the original salt marsh without the restoration project, Marzolf said. "We see this as an opportunity to go in and re-level the spoil piles, put it into the ditches, increase the areas that will be marshes and then let the area heal itself," he said. "Right now this area is not sustainable."