News

By Steve Plunkett

    Boca Raton’s environmental advisory board supports moving quickly on getting money from the Florida Inland Navigation District and the county to restore Lake Wyman.
    Steve Alley, chairman of the panel, showed City Council members a map of the Intracoastal Waterway with the estuaries marked in red for areas lost to dredging of the ICW and to urbanization over the decades.
    Green marked the remaining estuaries; most of the map was red.
    “Right now we have an opportunity at Lake Wyman to put some green back on this map. This is really environmentally significant,” Alley said at the council’s June 13 workshop.
    The project, proposed in 2011, was derailed in 2012 by neighborhood concerns. The environmental advisory board said the concerns were largely answered before they were raised.
    The basic plan is to remove four spoil islands in Lake Wyman, clean out canoe trails in Rutherford and Lake Wyman parks, extend a boardwalk and add some amenities.
    Concern that the county’s Environmental Resources Management Department is not up to the task is unnecessary, Alley said. ERM has a long track record of turning spoil islands into seagrass and mangrove habitat, including projects at Fullerton Island in Jupiter and the Ocean Ridge Natural Area.
    “We’re not launching a space shuttle here. We just need to make a good habitat. That’s exactly what this is doing,” Alley said.
    The advisory panel also discounted worries that the end of the new boardwalk will be 1,700 feet from a restroom, noting that the fourth hole of the Red Reef Golf Course is 1,800 feet from the closest facility.
    Alley said the board supports having a launch area for nonmotorized boats but is against moving the proposed seagrass area north to create an upland hammock area.
    The council should embrace the Lake Wyman plan, Alley said, and not delay improvements by seeking more studies or making major changes to the proposal. Such tweaking would raise costs and allow the area’s mosquito and homeless populations to grow, he said.
    In 2011, the estimated cost of the restoration was just more than $3 million, with FIND contributing $2.1 million and the county and city $450,000 each. This time, a developer from Highland Beach has volunteered to pay for constructing of a mangrove ecosystem at the north end of the project as well as its continued maintenance. The developer needs mitigation credits for mangroves.
    To get the deal done, FIND would want all permits in hand by September 2017. Boca Raton needs to reapply for a permit from the Army Corps of Engineers, which will take a year if there are no big changes to the original plan, more time if new options are chosen.