The Resources For Natural Resources

The resources for natural resources

The state Department of Natural Resources (DNR) is short on resources these days, so it wants to hand out some of its business. That its first local guardian of the environment will be Pinellas County, though, is a disquieting proposition.

Under a bill that is progressing through the House and Senate this spring, DNR could delegate to counties the management and protection of state aquatic preserves. The department supports such a bill, which is being advocated by Pinellas, because its bureau of aquatic preserve has only 26 full-time employees and a budget of $1.2-million. Only about half the 41 designated preserves have a DNR staff member within 50 miles of them. As state lands division deputy director Edwin Conklin puts it: "It has been a paper program to a large extent."

So rather than add staff to fulfill its legislative mandate to protect aquatic preserves, DNR is getting at least one county to do the job for it. That county, though, is hardly a beacon of environmental stewardship. The preserve it would manage, Boca Ciega Bay, is a national example of estuarine destruction. Pinellas itself, with its overbuilt barrier islands and over-pumped ground water supply, is a classic example of ecologically thoughtless urban sprawl.

Even worse, the programs that DNR would formally delegate to Pinellas under the law are ones the county has informally bungled for years. According to DNR field investigators, in the past 15 months alone the county has issued more than 500 dock permits in error. It has allowed people to build docks on state submerged lands without leases and it has granted permits for docks that exceed 250 square feet, the threshold at which DNR approval is required. In a flagrant abuse of permit authority, the county also has approved at least 30 multislip docks for condominium properties by awarding permits on a piecemeal basis. A DNR investigator says the county approved permits for each separate slip in the larger marina, allowing the builder to avoid more burdensome state approval for projects larger than 250 square feet. In some cases, the approved marinas are 40 times the size Pinellas is authorized to approve.

The disturbing trend at DNR is that the agency, in trying to improve its management, is making the laws fit its administrative natural resources rather than its administrative resources fit the laws. Another aquatic preserve bill proposed by DNR this year is a case in point. The agency wants to establish new categories of preserves, namely: conservation, preservation, restoration and urban. In so doing, Conklin says his agency can set better management priorities. The effect is that it would provide less management to the preserves designated urban, under the rationalization that they are lost to development anyway.

There's no secret that the marine industry is excited about the aquatic preserve bills this year. The bill that establishes categories also would eliminate an extra layer of protection for Boca Ciega, by weakening the requirement that development there take place only when "the overwhelming public interest so demands." The bill delegating authority to counties puts the permits right where Pinellas dock builders have had no trouble getting them. The new categories for preserves offer a lenient approach in urban preserves, which is where dock builders who are running out of space are looking.