Damn the manatees!
That’s basically what the Miami-Dade Commission said on Wednesday when it approved the Miami International Boat Show’s application to increase the number of boat slips by about a third to almost 1,000 and have “sea trials” — kind of like test drives for boats — in sensitive manatee nesting and feeding areas during their five-day event in downtown this January.
The Miami-Dade Department of Environmental Resources Management recommended against the sea trials and Miami-Dade Chief Bay Officer Irela Bague, tasked with saving Biscayne Bay, said she hoped there could be some balance and compromise for a win-win situation. DERM Director Lee Hefty — who has never been accused of being too friendly with developers (wink, wink) — said the department had recommended approval of the increase in slips from 637 to 947, but that the test drives were a non starter.
“It’s not just about running the manatees over. It’s disrupting their behavior,” Hefty said in an impassioned plea, citing the example of a mama manatee and her calf foraging for food at a time when Biscayne Bay is dying and food is more scarce. The activity displaces them, he added.
Read related: Miami-Dade Commission votes to kill Calusa preserve for Kendall developer
Doesn’t matter. Money runs this town. Lobbyists are in charge. Niesen Kasdin and Brian May earned their checks Wednesday.
Doesn’t matter that the Florida manatee is classified as threatened under the federal Endangered Species Act.
Or that the count of manatees has dropped from an estimated 6,620 in early 2017 to only 5,733 in 2019, when the state did the last aerial survey.
Or that more than 615 manatees died in 2020, according to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, up from the 2019 total of 592 manatee deaths.
Or that more than 300 died in the first six weeks of 2021, more than half the 5-year annual average of 578, marking a record mortality rate, according to Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.
“Florida may be moving into a manatee extinction crisis,” PEER Executive Director Tim Whitehouse says in Oceanographic Magazine earlier this year.
Doesn’t matter.
“We’re a county that runs on tourism,” said Commission Vice Chairman Oliver Gilbert, adding that the trickle down economic effect is a boon to hotels workers and Uber drivers, too. “We were elected to balance things… grow our economy.
“We don’t just want to have a county for manatees. We want to have a county for people, too,” Gilbert said, sounding like a clown.
Commissioners concerned with the potential harm to or displacement of the manatees — Raquel Regalado, Danielle Cohen Higgins and Keon Hardemon, for the most part — asked why the test drives couldn’t happen elsewhere. May said that would cause other problems, like additional vehicular traffic and water taxis. Like seriously?
“It sounds like an easy solution. It’s not an easy solution,” he said, when what he meant is it’s not a convenient solution for his clients.
It also seemed that Chairman Jose “Pepe” Diaz was lobbying on the boat show’s behalf. Such advocacy! Not for the manatees, though.
First he talked about how popular the boat show was among the elbows he and the mayor rubbed on their recent trip to Italy. “Everybody was talking about the Miami Boat Show,” he said. “They wanted to make sure to be here.”
Then he minimized the impact. Because there were 99 slips with “sea trials” in prior years and the show producer wants 147 slips for sea trials now, Diaz said that was nothing. “They’re looking for an increase of 50 more boats than permitted before,” he said, almost imploring his colleagues.
But that doesn’t even count the ingress and egress of the boats to the 900+ slips that are now going to be moved to behind the old Miami Herald building from the Marine Stadium in Key Biscayne, which didn’t work for a multitude of reasons, principally that Key Biscayners didn’t want it there.
Read related: Key Biscayners, activists watch closely as Boat Show begins
The boat show people said the sea trials are vital to the viability of the show — probably because nobody’s gonna drop seven figures on a yacht before seeing how it handles — and that they had no idea there was a problem.
But earlier they had said that they had worked for months trying to mitigate the issue with the manatees, as Hardemon pointed out. “So you were aware DERM was concerned about sea trials at this location,” he said, adding that it didn’t seem the applicant was as honest as he pretended to be.
Gotcha!
Doesn’t matter. The commission voted unanimously to approve the extra slips and the sea trials. They ignored the recommendations and impassioned pleas of the professional staff that is paid to protect and represent us in order to please the boat show people and their lobbyists.
And where was our Alcaldesa Daniella Levine Cava? The self-proclaimed water warrior and caped defender of our environment? Doesn’t matter.
At least the boat show didn’t get a 10-year permit they sought. Commissioners limited the permit to 2022 and Sally Heyman said that gives producers time to find a new way and place to do those sea trials in 2023. They will also have to produce reports on the impacts this year.
“You have more than a year now.”
Will it matter?
(Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story noted that Niesen Kasdin, who has yet to take his ethics course with the county, had not registered to lobby for the boat show, while Brian May did. Kasdin has since written to inform Ladra that he didn’t have to register because it was a quasi judicial item. “You cannot lobby on those,” he said. Except that was exactly what he was doing. Anyway, Ladra deleted the reference. Oh, but he still hasn’t taken the ethics course.)
Miami-Dade Commission approves boat show traffic over manatee safety added by Ladra on
View all posts by Ladra →
