Everglades Plans Focusing on Impact of Boaters

In the future, you might need to pass a test if you want to skipper a motorboat through the shallows of Everglades National Park.

And more of those backcountry waters might be off-limits, unless you paddle in with a kayak or canoe.

You might have more places to hike and bike in the park along Tamiami Trail, but fewer places to take out-of-towners on airboat rides.

For the first time in more than a quarter-century, Everglades National Park managers are preparing to overhaul the plan for running South Florida’s largest wilderness, 1.5 million acres spanning three counties and covering the fish-rich waters of Florida Bay and coastal Southwest Florida.

After four years of tweaking, they unveiled a set of proposals this week that could bring significant changes in what visitors can — and can’t — do in coming decades. A series of public meetings on the proposals starts in Miami on June 5.

"We know that people are going to like some things and not like other things," said Fred Herling, a supervisory planner for the park.

He said the goals were to enhance visitor experiences while protecting natural resources. It’s a difficult balance that some longtime users, particularly anglers, have complained managers struggle to maintain.

"That’s been a big criticism, that we want to keep people out," Herling said. "That’s certainly not our intention. We’re looking for ways to make the park more accessible to the community at large."

The proposals are wide-ranging, covering everything from bike paths to staff housing, but much of the focus is on long-standing concerns about the increasing impact of boaters.

Although one plan would leave rules unchanged, three other "preliminary alternatives" suggest a range of potential new restrictions on the park’s most frequent, but also most damaging, visitors.

"There are challenges to motorboating in Florida Bay, particularly in terms of protecting sea grass," Herling said.

Managers aren’t proposing any outright closures or no-fishing zones, long a concern of anglers, but clearly want changes to reduce the increase in the number of scars wayward or ignorant boaters have cut into the shallow banks of Florida Bay.

One plan would turn Snake Bight, a popular fishing spot near Flamingo, into a no-motor zone — accessible only by anglers propelling their craft with electrical trolling motors or push poles, a restriction already in wide use in the Keys.

Another option would ban boats longer than 24 feet in much of Florida Bay on the theory they’re more likely to run aground than the smaller skiffs most anglers use. A still more restrictive proposal would expand "pole and troll" zones to all waters less than three feet deep, an area that could cover vast swathes of Florida Bay and the southwestern coast.

PUBLIC INPUT

While park managers expect plenty of debate, Herling stressed the proposals will almost certainly change after public input is heard. He also said the plans include keeping all major channels, including in Snake Bight, open to boaters.

"It’s not an all-or-nothing proposition for these alternatives," Herling said. "There is likely to be mixing and matching."

It could take a year to craft a draft plan, which will be subject to public review, and the final version isn’t expected to be approved until at least 2009.

Boating and environmental groups, which have been discussing options with park managers for years, said they need more time to review details but see some promise.

"I think they’re going in the right direction," said Marshall Morton, a Miami man who frequently fishes out of Flamingo and attended previous park meetings on the plan. Morton said he and many experienced anglers favor properly marked "pole and troll" zones in sensitive areas "as long as they give us channels to get in there."

He also was pleased park managers had adopted a suggestion both he and environmental groups champion — a special permit to operate in the park’s tough-to-navigate backcountry waters. While details remain to be worked out, Herling said the idea is to require some sort of test, largely intended to educate less experienced boaters.

Morton said that step is badly needed. "A lot of people are totally clueless and wind up running onto the flats," he said.

The most restrictive plan also could curtail airboating, already confined to a small section of the East Everglades added to the park in 1989. It proposes confining private airboaters, who were granted lifelong access, to designated routes, but eliminating commercial operations. But two other options call for expanding commercial routes.

ON LAND

Many of the other proposals aim to expand options for landside visitors — adding more "chickee" camping platforms in Florida Bay, expanding biking and paddling trails off Tamiami Trail and at the Homestead entrance, building a new Marjory Stoneman Douglas visitor center on the Gulf Coast, offering seasonal tram service from Homestead to isolated Flamingo, and opening up the Nike missile base built during the Cold War to public visits for the first time.

Proposals also call for opening now-restricted creeks and bays along the southeastern coast to canoes and kayaks and expanding paddling-only zones and routes, including along the well-traveled Wilderness Waterway that winds from the southwestern coast to Flamingo.

Al Woll, owner of Florida Bay Outfitters in Key Largo, which rents and sells kayaks, said paddlers and boaters both would appreciate some space from each other.

"I hardly ever paddle the Wilderness Waterway, to be honest with you," Woll said. "I consider it more of a wilderness highway now, when you’ve got a boat passing you at 50 miles per hour 10 feet away."