DREDGING, DREDGING
February 6, 2019
February 6, 2019
The dredging of the Cedar Key Marina has long been on commission agendas and commissioners’ minds. Speediness of the project has been impaired by the expense and the placement of the resultant spoils.
The Dock Street/C Street Bridge construction, scheduled to begin in the next year or so, has pushed the dredging the Cedar Key Marina entrance to the forefront. The proper disposal of those spoils is a complicated matter.
The simplest place to move the spoils is an upland site. Unfortunately, Cedar Key owns no upland sites; even if it did own an upland site, trucking the spoils is expensive. Other places proposed for spoils disposal were a county-owned site off the island and a site at the airport. These sites were negated by the county.
Another seemingly simple place to move the spoils is into the depression at Cemetery Point Park. The park itself consists of spoils that came from dredging the channels around it. The concern with the park, even though it was established from spoils, is that it is part of the area that may now be a “wetland.”
To answer the wetland question, on Monday morning, February 4, 2019, at 10 am, City of Cedar Key Vice-Mayor Sue Colson and University of Florida’s Dr. Mark Clark met Florida Department of Environmental Protection0n personnel, Environmental Specialists Janice Price and Kimberly Mann at Cemetery Point Park.
After several hours of digging in the depression to establish the approximate size of the possible wetland area in question, taking samples, inspecting, and photographing what they found, Price explained that she would be taking the information gathered from the depression back to her office to be studied and the calculations made. She would then be able to determine if the area meets the criteria of a wetland and if so, is the wetland area that may exist small enough to be considered as insignificant.
If it is determined that the area within the large depression is not considered a wetland area or is not large enough to considered as significant, it may work as a site for the marina spoils location.
The Cedar Key News looks forward to a FDEP response soon.
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