President of Lido Key Residents Association says he does not believe homeowners will find the changes to be problematic
A new addendum to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ December 2019 solicitation package for the Lido Key Hurricane and Storm Damage Reduction Project would allow the contractor to have an extra 90 minutes each night to bring materials into a staging area within Ted Sperling Park on the southernmost portion of Lido Key.
The affected portion of the park, which is owned by Sarasota County, is referred to in the package as the “South Staging & Access Area.” The Jan. 24 addendum says, “To minimize the impact to daily Park goers, all deliveries of pipe and rock to the Park [are] limited to after the Park is closed, between 9:30 p.m. and 6 a.m.”
The original December 2019 solicitation package restricted deliveries to a window between 11 p.m. and 6 a.m.
The latter hours also were included in an agreement the City Commission approved on Dec. 2, 2019 for County Commission consideration. Ultimately, on Dec. 10, 2019, the county commissioners approved County Administrator Jonathan Lewis’ request to allow him and the Office of the County Attorney to execute an agreement with the city, instead of the County Commission’s approving the document City Attorney Robert Fournier had drafted.
City staff had explained that the USACE estimated that allowing the staging in the park would shave about $1 million off the total expense of the beach renourishment project.
The city was the co-applicant with the USACE in the effort to obtain the necessary state permit for the Lido initiative.
Responding to a Sarasota News Leader request for information this week about whether that staging agreement ever had been executed, Jan Thornburg, the city’s senior communications manager, wrote the following in a Jan. 27 email: “The attorneys are working on the final draft.”
Referring again to the staging in Sperling Park, the new USACE addendum does note, “Deliveries must enter through the access area off of Benjamin Franklin Drive.” It adds that the staging area will be “approximately 175 [feet] by 210 [feet].”
Along with widening an approximately 1.56-mile stretch of Lido Beach, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers {USACE) has planned two groins on South Lido to try to hold sand in place between subsequent renourishment initiatives.
The solicitation package calls for an estimated 1,510 tons of “armor stone” for Groin No. 1 and 2,700 tons for Groin No. 2.
The initial USACE solicitation package for the Lido initiative — published in May 2019 — anticipated 1,580 tons of armor stone for Groin No. 1 and 3,100 for Groin No. 2.
The original solicitation was cancelled in early August 2019, after the USACE reported that the two bids it received were “unreasonably high.”
According to a February 2006 USACE document the News Leader has reviewed, construction of groins entails the use of “marine mattresses. Those “are rock-filled containers constructed of high-strength geogrid … Geogrid panels are laced together to form mattress-shaped baskets that are filled with small stones similar to construction of gabions.”
“Gabions are rectangular baskets fabricated from a hexagonal mesh of heavily galvanized steel wire. The baskets are filled with rock and stacked atop one another to form a gravity-type wall,” the Massachusetts Clean Water Toolkit website explains, quoting the Massachusetts Erosion and Sediment Control Guidelines for Urban and Suburban Areas.
The USACE document about marine mattresses also points out that the typical width of such a mattress is 5 feet. Their lengths, it says, “vary up to a recommended maximum of 35 [feet].” The mattresses’ thickness can go up to 24 inches “for heavy-duty applications exposed to waves and currents, the document notes.
The new Lido solicitation package estimates that 6,740 marine mattresses will be needed for Groin No. 1; the figure for Groin No. 2 was put at 11,660.
Those figures also have changed from the estimates the USACE published with its original solicitation package for the Lido project. For Groin No. 1, that May 2019 number was 6,360; for Groin No. 2, 11,840.
Other changes in the addendum
One other significant change in the Jan. 24 addendum would allow the contractor to place booster pumps and “noise control measures within 1,000 feet of residential areas …”
The earlier version of that section prohibited booster pumps within 1,000 feet of residential areas but allowed such pumps to operate “adjacent to the public beach.”
The Jan. 24 addendum retains the original language at the end of the same paragraph: “The Contractor shall conduct his operations so as to comply with all Federal, State, and local laws pertaining to noise.”
On Jan. 27, the News Leader contacted Carl Shoffstall, president of the Lido Key Residents Association (LKRA), to ask if he was aware of the changes regarding the park hours and the booster pumps. “I have not heard anything yet from anybody,” Shoffstall replied during the telephone interview.
He was headed to the Sarasota City Hall later that day for other matters, he said, so he planned to inquire about the addendum.
The following day, Shoffstall told the News Leader he did not end up talking with anyone on city staff about the addendum. The following day, Shoffstall said he had reviewed the new USACE document himself. He did not find the changes to be problematic, Shoffstall added.
Asked specifically about the allowance for the booster pumps to be closer to residential areas, he said, “Nobody’s going to be mad out there. Everybody’s wanted the sand real bad.”
Even though the City of Sarasota completed an emergency renourishment project on Lido last year, residents have reported that the sand has been washing away.
On Jan. 27, the News Leader asked a USACE spokesman at the agency’s district office in Jacksonville about the new provisions for the park hours and the booster pumps. However, the News Leaderhad not received a response by its publication deadline.
A third change in the new addendum would allow the contractor to switch to a different sand borrow area in Big Sarasota Pass before removing all the sediment from the target depth of the first borrow area, under certain circumstances. Among the latter, the addendum said, is if, “in isolated areas the remaining sand thickness cannot be efficiently removed after suitable effort by the contractor to clear the entire borrow area … to target depth …”
Additionally, a revised diagram with the addendum says the landward limit of the beach fill on the Sperling Park shoreline will be “field determined,” meaning the decision will be made on-site as the project is underway.
Finally, the addendum says, “The Contractor should be aware that the Sarasota Powerboat Grand Prix Festival will be held at Lido Beach, June 20-28, 2020. The Contractor shall make all necessary and reasonable efforts to minimize impacts to the event. Information can be found at https://sarasotapowerboatgrandprix.org.”
In a presentation late last year to the Sarasota County Tourist Development Council, Lucy Nicandri, executive director of the Suncoast Charities for Children — which hosts the Grand Prix Festival — talked of the excitement of county tourism leaders about the boat race schedule having been moved up to late June. Over the past decades, the events have coincided with the July Fourth holiday.
Tourism industry representatives are hoping for a bigger boost in the number of summer visitors with scheduling of the 2020 Grand Prix not as close to the holiday, Nicandri noted.
What are the anticipated hours of booster pump operation? Is it fair to assume that these pumps are solely for pumping sand and that they will not be operational overnight?
Editor’s Note: We have queried the Corps of Engineers for an answer, which we hope will be provided early next week.