MRTF tackles beachfront issues and shows study
The Marine Resources Task Force discussed issues such as beach raking, Fertilizer Ordinance education, kitesurfing and managed beach signage as part of its agenda during its monthly meeting Wednesday.
Staff Liason Keith Laakkonen provided an update on beach raking regarding shorebirds on the south end of the island.
“We have reached an agreement with some of the property owners that once the posts were out, they can return to their raking process and remove the vegetation and next year they’ll give us permission to post in (their properties),” he said. ” The key thing is private property owners would have to give us or the State permission to post on their property even with a threatened, endangered species. They are a little bit reticent about doing that because they are concerned about the vegetation growing in.”
Laakkonen said the Town issued the committee’s vegetation removal permit and is in the process of resolving the issue with the Department of Enviromental Protection Agency. According to Laakkonen, the safest herbicide on the market is the product ‘Round-up’ and, once it is applied once or twice and the growth dies, the raking can take place.
“The benefit here is that the property owners get the white, sandy beach that they like, and exchange for having that, they allow us to post for a threatened, endangered species which nests down there,” he said. “We had
more than 220 pairs of least terns nest this year and several pairs of snowy plovers which is one of the most endangered shorebirds in Florida. So, everybody kind of wins in this.”
Concerning Fertilizer Ordinance education, Vice Chair Jeff Werner read a revised version of the ordinance for the Town’s radio station due to the rules changing Sept. 30. Chairman Charles Hester provided The Beach Observer with an emailed copy of a water quality study to show the effectiveness of a study that was done on the Huron River in Michigan.
Laakkonen then applauded Lee County for their advertising brochures on fertilizer ordinance.
“It is kind of nice having Big Brother doing a bunch of advertising for you so that it actually helps incur those costs,” he said.
MRTF board member Jay Light visited Roy Massey of Ace Performer Windsurf, Kayak & Canoe Shop at 16842 McGregor Blvd. to discuss issues relating to dangers imposed by kitesurfers. Massey is one of the few suppliers of kitesurfs in the area.
“He’s probably more passionate about making things stay right then any of us because he is aware that people are threatening more and more ordinances,” said Light. “If that happens, it’s going to hurt his business. So, he’s doing everything he can to not have that happen.”
Light said when anybody buys equipment from Massey, he provides them with a copy of the Daytona Beach ordinance and tells them to follow the guidelines wherever they surf.
“He even suggested to me or anyone of interest that sees someone blatantly violating the guidelines by being stupid or dangerous around swimmers or anything, he will be very, very happy to track down the kite and have a chat with the guy,” said Light. “He said he’d do anything possible that could help us on this. Ultimately, it is his livelihood. He doesn’t want to see all these restrictions.”
Regarding Managed Beach Signage, the advisory committee discussed the situation where all sponsored signage must be placed on the FMB Town Council’s agenda and approved before being used.
“Anything that has the Town logo on it, it’s ultimately Town Council’s image that is going out,” said Laakkonen.
MRTF drew a consensus to put the Town logo on and bring it to council for approval.
The following study was from Ann Arbor, Mich. and submitted by MRTF Chairman Charles Hester.
Water quality improves after lawn fertilizer ban, study shows
In an effort to keep lakes and streams clean, municipalities around the country are banning or restricting the use of phosphorus-containing lawn fertilizers, which can kill fish and cause smelly algae blooms and other problems when the phosphorus washes out of the soil and into waterways.
But do the ordinances really help reduce phosphorus pollution? That’s been an open question until now, says John Lehman, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Michigan.
“It’s one of those things where political organizations take the action because they believe it’s the environmentally conscious thing to do, but there’s been no evidence offered in peer-reviewed literature that these ordinances actually have a salutary effect,” Lehman said.
Now, such evidence exists in a study published by Lehman and students Douglas Bell and Kahli McDonald in the journal Lake and Reservoir Management. The paper, published online Aug. 14, shows that phosphorus levels in the Huron River dropped an average of 28 percent after Ann Arbor adopted an ordinance in 2006 that curtailed the use of phosphorus on lawns. Phosphorus is naturally plentiful in southeast Michigan soils, so fertilizing established lawns with the nutrient is generally unnecessary.
Lehman was in an ideal position to assess the effectiveness of the Ann Arbor ordinance because he and undergraduate student Julie Ferris were already studying nutrient levels in the Huron River and two downstream lakes, Ford Lakes and Belleville Lake, for a different research project.
Ferris used some of the data from that project in her senior honors thesis, and she and Lehman published a paper on the Ford Lake and Belleville Lake research, but they weren’t sure what to do with the rest of the data from the Huron River around Ann Arbor.
“As we were talking about it, I got a phone call from Ann Arbor environmental coordinator Matt Naud, who knew about the work we had been doing,” Lehman said. “He said the city council had enacted an ordinance that would reduce the use of phosphorus-containing fertilizers, and he wondered if we would be able to detect any change that might occur as a result.”
Using statistical models, Lehman and Ferris figured out how much sampling would be required to confidently detect a 25 percent decrease in phosphorus concentrations. “We came up with the result that for most of the river that runs through Ann Arbor, we should be able to detect a change of that magnitude by sampling once a week for one summer or two summers, depending on the sampling station.”
Naud found funding to pay a student to do the work over the next two summers. By that time, Ferris had graduated and gone on to medical school, so Lehman recruited Bell to do the sampling and chemical analyses. When Bell graduated and took a job measuring phosphorus on research cruises around Bermuda, McDonald joined the project.
“Right away, we started to see decreases,” Lehman said. After the first year of data collection, it was clear that phosphorus concentrations were lower after the ordinance was enacted than before. But did the ordinance cause the drop? Though that explanation seems likely, public education efforts and general increased environmental awareness among Ann Arbor residents also may have entered in.
At any rate, the study already has attracted the attention of the Southeast Michigan Council of Governments (SEMCOG), which invited Lehman to present the study results at a meeting earlier this year, and may well generate interest beyond Michigan’s borders.
“Although the science wasn’t difficult, its ramifications in a political sense and in an environmental sense will not be insignificant,” Lehman said.
The research was funded by the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S.
Department of Agriculture and the city of Ann Arbor.
The Web site for project is at www.umich.edu/~hrstudy