Palm Beach is moving forward with its plan to clear its jurisdictional waters in the Lake Worth Lagoon of illegal mooring buoys and abandoned vessels.
At its October 14 meeting, the Town Council approved, on the first of two required readings, an ordinance that sets limits on overnight anchoring in town waters. A final vote is expected at the November 12 council meeting before the ordinance can take effect.
Under the new law, boats cannot be anchored for more than 30 days during any six-month period.
Councilman Ted Cooney dissented in the 4-1 decision, saying he preferred to give boaters, who expressed concerns about where they are going to keep their boats, more time to adjust before enacting the law.
The council, Town Manager Kirk Blouin, and Palm Beach Police Department leaders have all said illegal mooring and derelict or abandoned vessels is a longstanding problem in the lagoon – hazardous to navigational safety and detrimental to the environment.
But removing abandoned vessels can be expensive – averaging $20,000 to $25,000 each, officials say.
Palm Beach received a big boost at the council meeting when the Palm Beach Police and Fire Foundation announced its gift to the town of up to $250,000 to assist with the cost of removing the vessels.
Tim Moran, the foundation’s vice chairman and co-founder, said the gift is intended to help maintain the health and safety of the town’s waterways.
“We want to continue to do what we can to strengthen the quality of life for our residents,” Moran said.
Mayor Danielle Moore expressed the town’s appreciation.
“This is definitely something that we need desperately,” she said.
Blouin said that the town will make every reasonable effort to locate the owners of the derelict vessels to provide them with reasonable notice before the town removes them.
Palm Beach Police Lieutenant Paul Alber said the town will follow a procedure put in place by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission for declaring a vessel as derelict.
Alber said the foundation’s gift will expedite the removals. The town can use the money to pay the cost up front and then seek grant money for reimbursement, he said.
“We can start aggressively enforcing the state statutes already in place,” Alber said.
In August, Palm Beach launched an initiative to identify and remove illegal mooring buoys from town waters in the lagoon. The town’s marine unit removed approximately 30 illegal moorings, and began an education campaign for boaters, many of whom police said are unaware they are illegally moored.
The effort will promote safer navigation and address environmental harm to the lagoon’s water bottoms and seagrass meadows, which provide habitat for fish, manatees, and other marine life, the town said when it announced the initiative.
Palm Beach Police’s marine officers and partner agencies have been surveying and documenting illegal moorings in town waters. Where possible, they provide notice before removing unauthorized devices under state enforcement authority, Palm Beach Police Sergeant Michael Ogrodnick has said.
The initiative is possible because of House Bill 481, which allows municipalities within counties with a population of 1.5 million or more, including Palm Beach County, to set more restrictive anchoring rules. The bill became law in May.
Town Council President Bobbie Lindsay said House Bill 481 is bringing about real change to what has been a longstanding problem.
“This bill that passed is the first time in my lifetime that we actually have a tool to control, to some extent, what people do in our waterway,” said Lindsay, who has lived in Palm Beach for decades.
There are more than 100 illegally moored vessels – and only one legal mooring – in town jurisdictional waters – according to Palm Beach Police. Officials say a legal mooring requires a state permit, and that they can be difficult to obtain.
According to police, Palm Beach waters are roughly defined as extending from the channel markers near the Lake Worth/Palm Beach Inlet southward to 3475 South Ocean Boulevard, and from the town shore out to the Intracoastal Waterway navigational channel.
At its meeting, the council heard from boaters who expressed alarm about the 30-day anchoring limit and removal of the illegal mooring buoys.
Cary St Onge of Manalapan said the combination of the two initiatives will be devastating to the boating community.
“Taken together, they will eliminate yachting on Lake Worth,” he said.
He asked for a meeting between town officials and the boating community, including the Palm Beach Sailing Club.
St Onge said he’s sailed the Lake Worth Lagoon since 1989, rents a mooring buoy for his 80-foot yacht and only recently learned the mooring was illegal.
“If the town decides to cut the mooring buoy, I will have no mooring to return to,” he said. “I will be forced to anchor. After 30 days I will be illegally anchored.”
Elie Edmondson, speaking on behalf of the Palm Beach Sailing Club, said the town’s anchoring ordinance will cause the club to lose an estimated 40 to 45 members.
“This would probably destroy the club,” he said.
The non-profit club was established in 1966 and counts about a dozen Palm Beach residents among its members, he said.
Councilman Lew Crampton told the boaters they need to understand the town’s position. He pointed to the City of Riviera Beach’s effort to address the derelict vessel problem by establishing three managed mooring fields in the lagoon.
Riviera Beach proposed to set up one of the mooring fields in Palm Beach’s jurisdictional waters – a plan that Palm Beach strongly opposed. The Florida Department of Environmental Protection initially approved, then later denied, Riviera Beach’s application for that field.
“We just dodged a bullet from … Riviera Beach, who were invading our own property to create a mooring field that, in our opinion, would not have been responsibly run,” Crampton said.
Blouin told the boaters that “well-maintained vessels will not be the initial focus of the town’s removal efforts. We are going to focus first on the most egregious.”
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