Re-nourishment and the Council Elections
To the editor:
Our current Fort Myers Beach Town Council reached consensus that Lee County had failed to get the 90 percent of the easements that county identified as needed for a re-nourishment project. County got about a third of the easements of that 90 percent needed. Federal renourishment funding is now gone.
Council also agreed that all current easements needed to be cancelled by county. With the demise of re-nourishment, a simpler construction easement is appropriate and does not encumber the easement giver’s property for 10 years or longer.
Council recognized that uncanceled, the current easements would affect property values and be unfair to the owners.
Council agreed that county’s latest proposal is a navigation project for Matanzas Pass, and no funding should be asked from our town. The project was identified by county as a navigational project and governmentally funded as such last December. However, the navigation project groin design has problems.
In writing, the Florida Environmental Protection Agency pointed out potential erosive problems with the groin that county proposes for their navigation project. We do not need another beach failure.
For five decades, Matanzas Pass has been dredged, and hadnine successive failures. Eight times the sand was used to re-nourish the Pier area, an area of real erosion. Eight times the sand washed away and the pass had to be dredged again, about every 6 years.
Last July, with the ninth dredging, the dredged sand was placed offshore in a different area notonshore in the Pier area. The Bowditch area then experienced an immediate beach erosion result.
Current council recognizes these dredging and beach failures and is receptive to looking for solutions for the new navigation project in order to fix these historic problems.
County needs to begin to recognize their problems, treat our council as an equal partner, work with our council, and not try to dictate to them.
The prime question before the new council will be how to get county to be receptive to other engineering approaches or new technologies that will yield improvements over a dismal array of past failures.
Frank Schilling
Fort Myers Beach