Boynton, Manalapan like drawbridge idea, but old doubts persist
Enlarging the inlet and installing a drawbridge would improve boat access to the ocean and possibly improve Intracoastal water quality. ISTOCK photo BELOW LEFT: In 2007, town representatives from Lantana, Manalapan, Ocean Ridge and Briny Breezes and environmental groups all expressed concerns over the potential of increased flooding if the inlet were widened. Staff map
By John Pacenti
A century ago, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers slashed the Everglades up and down the coast, taming the swamp with a network of canals so Florida could be habitable.
One of the tiniest cuts was the South Lake Worth Inlet, a 130-foot-wide incision between Ocean Ridge and Manalapan designed to flush pollution to the sea from urban runoff and from sugar cane and vegetable fields around Lake Okeechobee.
Now, nearly 20 years after a similar proposal was declared unfeasible, the city of Boynton Beach is resurrecting the idea of widening the inlet — better known as the Boynton Inlet — and replacing its fixed-span bridge on State Road A1A with a drawbridge.
The benefits could be enormous: Sportfishing could thrive, property values would increase and the brown Intracoastal Waterway water could turn blue.
However, the previous study commissioned by Boynton Beach found homes in Ocean Ridge, Briny Breezes, and on Hypoluxo Island — both the Lantana portion and Point Manalapan — would face increased flooding during hurricanes and king tides. Nearby coral reefs would also be damaged and beach erosion exacerbated.
The idea was abandoned, but Manalapan Town Commissioner Orla Imbesi and her husband, Joe, live on Point Manalapan and are in favor of giving the proposal another look.
“We have brown water. Miami, Bal Harbour: The water is crystal blue-green on the Intracoastal as well as outside. This is on Palm Beach County because of all the sludge that has come out from the sugar fields,” Joe Imbesi said. “Consequently, outside of our house, for instance, there’s a foot and a half of sludge — sludge from the sugar cane fields.”
The inlet was a big deal — at least locally — when it opened on March 16, 1927.
Workers used searchlights to guide a clam-shell dredge that made the final cut through the sand, allowing the ocean to mingle with the lagoon for the first time at that location. Residents lined the shores of the new inlet to watch Lake Worth Lagoon further move from a freshwater lake to a brackish mix of Atlantic saltwater.
The inlet was a whopping 130 feet wide and about 5 feet deep. Swimmers could wade across it.
It wasn’t meant to be navigable. Small boats — typically center consoles and skiffs under 25 feet — are the only ones that can physically fit under the fixed A1A bridge that now crosses the inlet. It has a vertical clearance of only 18 feet, so any vessel with a tuna tower or mast is effectively barred.
For Boynton Beach, widening the inlet to 200 feet was seen two decades ago as key to transforming its historic fishing area into a “Gateway to the Gulfstream.” An expanded, safer inlet was seen as a necessary infrastructure upgrade to support an upscale waterfront development that the city was courting during the mid-2000s real estate boom.
An intensive $160,000 study completed by the city in 2007, helped along by local coastal leaders serving as an advisory committee, put an end to that dream.
Boynton Beach’s discussion
Until now.
If there is one thing you can count on in Palm Beach County coastal communities — everything comes back around again.
“Advocating for that to be an unfixed bridge, I think, is a huge opportunity, not just for marine tourism, but also looking at property values,” Boynton Beach Vice Mayor Thomas Turkin said at a March 26 workshop.
Out-of-the-box ideas, whether grounded in reality or not, keep coming from Boynton Beach. The city has tried to barter with Palm Beach County, offering up its fire and water departments, in negotiations over the city’s desire to annex surrounding neighborhoods.
Boynton Beach is currently grappling with a $4.9 million budget shortfall, a fiscal gap that has already triggered executive layoffs and forced departments to freeze non-essential spending. The City Commission is looking for new revenue, and monetizing the inlet is an attractive option.
“How do we look at widening that because it’s supposed to be not navigable, but we use it, and what can we do to enhance it?” Commissioner Aimee Kelley asked at the March 26 meeting.
Turkin said it was a project for the future and would be multi-jurisdictional and involving multiple levels of government. He advocated for lobbying the Army Corps of Engineers and other bureaucratic agencies that oversee the inlet and its roadways.
Neither Turkin, Kelley, nor City Manager Dan Dugger responded to repeated requests for comment.
Recalling 2007 study
Ocean Ridge Mayor Geoff Pugh, who grew up swimming in the inlet, was on the committee of local coastal leaders that looked at the issue of widening the inlet in 2007.
Pugh was one of roughly a dozen representatives from Palm Beach, Boynton Beach, Manalapan, Ocean Ridge and other neighboring towns that studied various proposals.
Pugh said one option was dead-ending Manalapan and Ocean Ridge at the inlet, sending A1A detouring to the west. He noted that the advocates’ economic pitch at the time was that sportfishing would increase the property values substantially.
For boaters with larger crafts, widening the inlet and adding a drawbridge would be a godsend.
Right now, they must either head to Riviera Beach or Boca Raton to reach the ocean from the Intracoastal Waterway. “It’s a pain in the ass, because you go through three different drawbridges and it’s all like no wake going north,” Pugh said. “It’s a hell of a drive.”
Pugh also pointed to related complications — including potential encroachment on the Ocean Inlet Park and longer-term sand-management issues.
For Pugh, it came down to one question: Would the local drainage system — never mind the Intracoastal — handle the increased water volume without flooding the town?
“And the engineer could not give me that answer,” he said.
There were also concerns about the reef system offshore. Nutrient-rich runoff from agricultural areas and septic tanks is the death knell for reefs, triggering bleaching events that kill corals.
“Widening the inlet will increase the amount of pollution entering the coastal zone, beaches and coral reefs,” Ed Tichenor of Palm Beach County Reef Rescue pointed out in a letter to The Coastal Star in July 2009.
A 2007 study by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration found “high levels of fecal indicator bacteria exiting the inlet, but nutrient pollution capable of causing harmful algal blooms in the coral reef ecosystem were also detected,” he said.
At the time, State Administrative Law Judge Robert E. Meale issued a ruling, recommending that the Florida Department of Environmental Protection deny the town of Palm Beach a beach renourishment permit because it would damage the Florida reef tract.
Pugh said the advisory group vacillated between recommending dead-ending A1A or building a drawbridge when he offered another option: “Status quo. Leave it as it is.’’
Environmental risks
Finding the study that Boynton Beach commissioned in 2007 isn’t an easy task. There is an abstract available online, but it’s practically indiscernible for the layman.
A public records request to the city for the study came back with an email telling The Coastal Star to ask Palm Beach County for it. The county had nothing to do with the study, which was spearheaded by Boynton Beach with $160,000 of state money and facilitated by the South Florida Water Management District.
Luckily, former Ocean Ridge Commissioner Kristine de Haseth — now heading the Florida Coalition for Preservation — had a copy. The study found that widening and deepening the inlet would improve water quality on the Intracoastal (or lagoon) side, and “there would be significant economic benefits.”
However, it found that “improvement to the lagoon may come at a greater cost to increases in nutrient loads and nearshore reefs.” Channel improvements would increase the potential for several million cubic yards of sand to be impacted, and the cost of the project would be enormous, with limited funding sources available.
Michael Jenkins is the coastal engineering team leader for Applied Technology & Management, Inc., which conducted the study. He told The Coastal Star in an April interview the increased flooding of properties along the Intracoastal is a real barrier to widening the inlet. Properties specifically at risk are those on Hypoloxo Island, including Point Manalapan, and the three islands in Ocean Ridge.
“More water is coming in and out. That means issues regarding flooding are going to increase in the area of the influence of the inlet,” Jenkins said.
In effect, king tides are going to get higher, as well as the flooding potential during hurricanes, he said.
Andy Studt is an environmental program supervisor for Palm Beach County’s Department of Environmental Resources Management. He specializes in coastal management. He said widening the inlet would increase beach erosion.
“It generates erosional impacts for Ocean Ridge, for the city of Boynton Beach’s Oceanfront Park,” he said. “Right now we have a very carefully balanced system.”
Exploratory waters
The resurfaced idea of widening the inlet got a bullish reaction at Manalapan’s April 14 Town Commission meeting.
“It’s in the infant stage of discussion. We’re just revisiting the topic,” Town Manager Eric Marmer told the commission.
“There’s a lot of positives that are pointed out in there, but there’s also some concerns, obviously, if you open that up, what other environmental impacts does that have?”
He said it remains to be seen if widening the inlet would solve the town’s concerns with the sand transfer plant that operates at the inlet. Manalapan is challenging Palm Beach County’s findings that the sand transfer plant doesn’t rob sand from Manalapan’s beachfront properties.
Vice Mayor Simone Bonutti suggested asking billionaire Larry Ellison for his thoughts. He owns Bird Island near the inlet as part of his $173 million estate in Manalapan.
She also said the widening is feasible since the county owns the park on the inlet.
“I don’t think there’s any harm in looking at it,” Marmer said.
Marmer, in a separate interview, expressed another concern.
“I get a drowning call maybe once every three or four weeks,” he said. “Having gone out in that inlet myself, everybody knows this inlet is extremely dangerous.”
Joe Imbesi has given a lot of thought to the widening of the inlet. He said the rock jetty that curves out from the north side of the inlet could be reconfigured to solve some of the environmental concerns. “So all this water that’s coming down will go south and then east,” he said.
Orla Imbesi said flood concerns about widening the inlet may have been overstated in the previous study. The couple says Manalapan is in a situation unlike other nearby coastal communities that have inlets flowing under A1A bridges — like Boca Raton, Jupiter and Lighthouse Point — a situation they say needs to be remedied.
“Every city has a drawbridge, except the Boynton Inlet,” Joe Imbesi said.
Comments