INDIAN RIVER COUNTY — Federal regulators’ concern with sea-turtle nesting prompted county commissioners Tuesday to stretch a $7.3 million North Beach-restoration job over two years.

“They don’t have a high level of confidence in the (inland sand) material the county is proposing,” county Coastal Resources Manager Jonathan Gorham told commissioners. (more…)

PORT ST. LUCIE — Put a kid on a bike on a race track sprinkled with jumps, lumps and bumps, and you’re likely to have one happy kid. Or teenager. Or adult, for that matter.

A new bicycle track for riders who love speeding through 1,000 feet of tricky obstacles is expected to open near Crosstown Parkway and Interstate 95 in Port St. Lucie in October. (more…)

MARTIN COUNTY — A $4 million federal grant announced Tuesday should mean restored oyster beds, cleaner water and about 100 jobs in Martin County.

The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration has allocated $4,024,969 to the Martin County Commission. At their meeting Tuesday, commissioners are scheduled to award a contract to build about 200 acres of oyster bed reefs in the St. Lucie River between the Roosevelt and Evans Crary bridges and in the Northwest Fork of the Loxahatchee River near Tequesta.

The money for the project comes from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, part President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus package. More than 800 applications for grants were made and 50 approved. Of the four projects funded in Florida, Martin County’s was the largest.

To qualify for the stimulus money, said Kathy FitzPatrick, a Martin County coastal engineer, the project had to be “shovel-ready.”

FitzPatrick said bids from contractors are expected Wednesday.

“If the commissioners award the bid on July 7,” she, “we’ll be out on July 7, 8 or 9 doing surveys on the St. Lucie and Loxahatchee rivers to see exactly where to put the oyster beds.”

Work could be completed in about a year.

FitzPatrick said “seven or eight” sites in the St. Lucie have already been permitted for beds. Patch reefs 30 feet in diameter and made of old oyster shells will be placed in the water near Martin Memorial Medical Center and Rio.

Closer to the Crary bridge, smaller reefs made of oyster shells in mesh bags will be placed in the water both as oyster habitat and to protect shorelines from erosion by boat wakes. Several landowners have signed on for mangrove plantings along their shorelines, FitzPatrick said.

County officials have identified 106 jobs that will be involved in the project, “everybody from marine contractors, barge operators, quarrymen for the huge amount of shells we’ll need, to nurserymen, scientists and ecologists,” FitzPatrick said. “There will be a lot of people employed by this over the course of the year, and almost all of them local.”

Oysters once thrived in the St. Lucie River, said Vincent Encomio, an oyster research specialist at the Stuart-based Florida Oceanographic Society.

“But over the years the St. Lucie has lost about 75 percent of its living oyster bed acreage,” Encomio said. “Creating more habitat for oysters will improve the habitat for all the other organisms that depend on the reefs to live.”

Oysters filter water at a rate of 40 gallons per oyster per day. With about 600,000 oysters per acre of reef, that’s 24 million gallons of water a day.

FitzPatrick said the bivalves will be able “to filter the entire volume of the river every month. That improvement to the water quality is very substantial.”

By Tyler Treadway

VERO BEACH — The former Dodgertown Golf Course, with roots deep in the history of baseball, could be restored, possibly with the assistance of Minor League Baseball.

Tough economic conditions, however, are likely to delay any possible restoration for at least of couple of years.

The city of Vero Beach now controls the former golf course and maintains mowing the land once roamed by Los Angeles Dodgers Hall of Famer Jackie Robinson.
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STUART — Martin County’s lowest-paid workers will keep fighting the county’s furlough program because they can’t afford a 5 percent pay cut, a union leader said Tuesday.

Teamsters Local 769, which represents 275 of the county’s clerical and blue collar workers, will ask the Public Employees Relations Commission to resolve the contract dispute through binding arbitration, said Mavis Curley, the union’s chief steward in Martin County.

The furlough program requiring all county employees, except fire rescue workers, to take one unpaid day off per month starting Friday violates the Teamsters contract, Curley said. Under the contract, a workweek is 40 hours.
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The $10 billion spending bill signed Wednesday by President Obama provides $183 million for Everglades restoration projects, including $4.5 million earmarked for the Indian River Lagoon.

The legislation was approved Tuesday night by the U.S. Senate; the House of Representatives approved the bill in late February.

Nanciann Regalado, spokeswoman for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers office in Jacksonville, which is overseeing the Indian River Lagoon project, said it wasn’t clear Wednesday evening where the money would go. She said the Corps has asked Congress for $4.5 million to design a reservoir and stormwater treatment area for the C-23 and C-24 canals, which drain much of St. Lucie and northern Martin counties.

“We’re still determining exactly how the money will be used,” Regalado said, “but it definitely will go toward the Indian River Lagoon Plan.”
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