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Canal Debate Drags On

Newschannel 8 Photo by Michael Egger

Canals in West Shore coastal neighborhoods

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By MARK HOLAN, The Tampa Tribune

Published: December 1, 2007

Updated: 11/29/2007 09:44 pm

BEACH PARK ISLE - Homeowners moving into this new waterfront neighborhood in the late 1960s paid $5 a year for sea wall repair and canal maintenance.

By the 1980s, the civic association increased the annual fee to $25.

But the charge disappeared in 1992 when the association amended its rules to allow the money to be used for "civic improvements, beautification, social, safety and protective programs."

Not a word about the waterfront.

Today, property owners in Beach Park Isle, West Shore and Davis Islands are debating who should pay to dredge the canals at the edge of their backyards. At least one neighborhood has paid privately to clean its canal.

"You're stupid to stay looking at the muck," said Arnold Hubbard, who organized the dredging effort in his community northwest of Beach Park Isle. "Get it done right; anything less is financially foolhardy."

Tampa Canal Preservation and Restoration, a civic group working with the city, supports a targeted tax to pay for dredging, with up to 600 waterfront property owners paying $8,000 each. The $6 million project also would tap $2.3 million in federal and city funds to remove decades of accumulated muck from 15 canals.

Some waterfront residents and other neighbors oppose the tax. They say the city and the Tampa Port Authority should pay for dredging because stormwater runoff contributes to the problem, and the port authority oversees navigable waterways.

The port authority released historical documents from Beach Park Isle to show that residents were supposed to pay for dredging. Plats for neighboring Culbreath Isles also show canals labeled as private waterways.

"The Tampa Port Authority is not responsible for dredging or making any other improvements for residential canals or other residential waterways," Charles Klug, the port's general counsel, wrote in an e-mail to The Tampa Tribune.

Two sea walls in Beach Park Isle were crumbling into the canal about the time Frank Gassler bought his house on West Bay Way Drive in 1985. He said the civic association paid for an engineer to look at the subdivision's sea walls, but the maintenance fund was too puny to cover repairs.

"They had never collected the kind of money to fix a sea wall or dredge a canal," said Gassler, a former association president and a member of Tampa Canal Preservation.

With 82 lots in the subdivision, the association would have collected about $2,000 a year with the $25 fee, since nonwaterfront residents also paid.

Gassler said the association faced a dilemma:

Declare bankruptcy because it failed to keep the maintenance obligation.

Try to reimburse those who paid into the fund.

Rewrite its articles of incorporation, removing the sea wall and canal obligation.

Gassler, a lawyer with Tampa's Fowler White Boggs Banker, said a lawyer from another firm was retained to handle the issue.

Civic association members voted overwhelmingly to change the rules, Gassler said, allowing the money to be used for other purposes.

"I don't remember a 'no' vote," he said.

Hubbard owns three waterfront properties on West Spanish Main Street. In 2005, he applied to the port authority for a permit to dredge the canal bordered on the other side by Sandpiper Road. The work was done this year.

"The years slip on by, slip on by, and it gets worse and worse," Hubbard said of the silted canals.

He said about eight neighbors helped him pay "six figures" to dredge their canal. He wouldn't reveal the project price or cost per property owner.

The permit called for dredging 5,100 cubic yards of material from the waterway to a depth of 5 feet below mean low tide.

The Tampa Canal Preservation plan calls for dredging a channel 20 feet wide by 5 feet deep at mean low tide. Property owners who want muck removed from below their docks would pay for the extra work.

Community support for the tax is unclear.

In September, Tampa Canal Preservation mailed a survey to 596 waterfront lot owners, with 43 percent returning response cards. Of the 256 people who voted, 170 indicated support for the plan, which is 66 percent of the responders, or 28 percent of the total mailing.

Among 52 property owners on the two canals in Beach Park Isle, 16 of 21 responders supported the plan, but 60 percent of the waterfront residents didn't return the survey.

Gassler said the proposal is the best option to come along in years.

"Would I love to have someone else pay to do it? Yes," he said. "But after years of negotiations, this is as far as we've ever gotten."

Reporter Mark Holan can be reached at (813) 835-2102 or mholan@tampatrib.com

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