TALLAHASSEE -- A bill that won the support of the Florida House on Thursday could jump-start the stalled Port of Miami Deep Dredge.
The proposed legislation — which passed by a 110-5 vote — has to do with permits for storm-water management systems.
But earlier this week, House Majority Leader Carlos Lopez-Cantera, R-Miami, tacked on language about permits for deep-water ports. The amendment requires legal challenges to dredging projects to be heard within 30 days of the motion being filed.
The revised version of the bill could come in handy for the $150 million Port of Miami project, which is being held up by challenges from environmental groups and the community of Fisher Island.
An administrative law judge in Tallahassee recently ordered a hearing for August — putting the dredging and blasting scheduled to start this summer on indefinite hold.
During a trip to Tallahassee last week, Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos Gimenez asked members of the Miami-Dade delegation to help get the dredge underway as soon as possible.
“We need to speed this up,” Gimenez said.
Lopez-Cantera said opponents of the dredge had employed “delay tactics” and were afforded ample opportunity to have their voices heard.
“The economic impact to our community is too important to let a small group of obstructionists delay it any longer than necessary,” he said.
But Laura Reynolds, executive director of the Tropical Audubon Society, said the amendment sounded like an effort to circumvent legal procedure. She pointed out that the groups had already scheduled mediation hearings next month with Florida regulators in addition to the hearing set for August.
“We have a date scheduled and now we’re seeing this sort of an end run,” Reynolds said.
Reynolds said the aim wasn’t to derail a project that port managers say could create thousands of jobs, but to ensure that the work doesn’t come at the expense of the surrounding marine environment. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, she said, had rejected what she called “minimal” protections for things like water quality originally requested by the state.
“We have no delusions about stopping the port expansion,” she said. “We just want to protect Biscayne Bay.”
In a meeting Thursday with members of The Miami Herald’s Editorial Board, Corps project managers insisted the environmental impacts of the project would be short-lived and minimized by closely monitoring turbidity and temporarily shutting down buckets or cutters to prevent dense, damaging plumes from forming.
Terri Jordan-Sellers, the port’s biologist for the project, said critics had exaggerated the impacts from blasting.
“They think of bombs going off in the bay,” she said. “That’s not what we have here.”
Corps contractors would use special “confined” blasting techniques, which cap the small charges to direct impacts to the rocky channel bed and greatly reduce the underwater pressure waves that can hurt marine life.
Similar techniques were used in a 2005 dredging of another section of the port and follow-up surveys of sea grass and reefs showed no damage from silting, Jordan-Sellers said.
The Corps said no manatees, dolphins or turtles were killed during blasting and an average of 14 dead fish were recovered after each of 40 rounds of blasting — most of them small bait fish. There were also no complaints of vibration or damage from residents on Fisher Island or other nearby communities, Jordan-Sellers said.
via miamiherald.com