Commissioner Knight acknowledges that work will not begin before June 1 official start of hurricane season
Although he still did not have a timeline for the start of the dredging of Phillippi Creek, the director of Sarasota County’s Public Works Department told the County Commission this week that it is his understanding that the intent of the West Coast Inland Navigation District (WCIND) “is to start as soon as they get their permit.”
At one point, Chair Joe Neunder stressed to Anderson, “We’re going into hurricane season. It’s been a year. … [My] significant amount of heartburn is [related to] how long it’s been taking to get permission to fix our home and fix the people who’ve lost I don’t know how many tens of millions of dollars in our community.”
Ultimately, during the discussion, Commissioner Tom Knight said, “Let’s be quite honest: “Phillippi’s not going to happen before storm season.”
During one exchange with Anderson, Neunder asked, “Was there a delay in our process? … Is this all fed-related? We’re essentially in hurricane season,” he emphasized.
Hurricane Milton struck on Oct. 9, 2024, he pointed out. From then to now, Neunder asked, “That’s how long this process takes? … And we’re just behind the eight ball with these other organizations?”
Anderson replied that WCIND has been working on its dredging project since Hurricane Ian struck Southwest Florida in September 2022. “It takes a while.”
Then Anderson stressed that, initially, everyone in his department was in “full-phase response and recovery to [the 2024] storm season. [That work] didn’t end on Oct. 9; it just continued.”
The “Invest 90L” storm struck the county in June 2024, followed by Tropical Storm Debby in August 2024, Hurricane Helene in September 2024 and then Milton.
The first mission, Anderson pointed out, “was to get everything cleaned up.”
Referring to the Phillippi Creek dredging, he added, “This was not something that was on that list of recovery and response at the time.”
Then he reminded the board members that their first stormwater workshop this year was held on Jan. 21. Between that event and the second stormwater workshop, in March 12, Anderson said, “is when activity really started to pick up on the … county’s portion of the dredging on Phillippi Creek in coordination with WCIND.”
“Was there a delay?” Anderson continued. “It was things we had to triage, in order.”
The permitting for the projects involving Phillippi Creek is in the “final stages,” Anderson continued during the board’s May 21 stormwater workshop.
WCIND is engaged in hiring a contractor for the work, based on the information he had received, Anderson said, and an effort is underway to determine sites where the dredge spoils can be deposited.
(On May 13, in response to a Sarasota News Leader inquiry, the Public Works Department provided this statement about the dredge spoils facet of the projects: “Sarasota County and WCIND are working to evaluate properties along Phillippi Creek to determine suitability for the temporary storage and transfer of dredged sediment. Properties from the feasibility study conducted in February and other properties identified by County staff are included. At this time, permit applications submitted by Sarasota County and WCIND are currently under review by the appropriate regulatory agencies.”)
As Anderson has reported in the past, the first project will entail the clearing of Phillippi Creek from its mouth to approximately 2,000 feet upstream of U.S. 41.
“They’ve said ‘summer,’ ” Anderson noted of the WCIND timeline for that work, “but that’s a point of frustration,” he added, for residents who live along the creek. “They want to know when we’re going to start work. … We can’t give them a date, because we don’t know when these permits are going to be approved.”
A slide Anderson showed the commissioners said permit applications had been submitted to the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (FDEP) and to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE).
Staff did comply with the USACE criteria for an expedited permitting process, he added.
The work would have begun “weeks ago … on our own,” he stressed, “if we didn’t have to get permits.” However, Anderson pointed out, the initiatives have to have legal authorization.
Commissioner Knight reminded Anderson, “We’re elected for a reason. … We advocate for anything we need to advocate for.” If projects “get bogged down,” Knight continued, the board members can contact people they know, including congressmen and state legislators representing the county, to try to speed up the process. “That’s constituent services.”
“There certainly will be a time that we do that,” Anderson replied.
County staff submitted information to the USACE last week, he continued, in regard to the county’s “high spot emergency process.” Anderson added, “We need to give them at least a little bit of time” to go through those materials. “If they give us a laundry list of things on the return, then that’s a good time for us to say, ‘Wait a minute; this is getting silly. We’ve got local authorization; we’ve got state authorization. Let’s just get through the red tape and get the federal authorization done.’ ”
After looking at his colleagues, Knight told Anderson that he believes they agree with him: “We know a lot of people; we can make a lot of phone calls.”
In response to questions from Chair Neunder, Anderson said that after staff submitted its emergency process permit application to the USACE, the federal agency did send staff a Request for Additional Information (RAI), and staff had responded to that.
Commissioner Teresa Mast pointed out to her colleagues, “We’re one of 67 counties that are all making pretty significant requests because of how bad we’ve been hit [by the 2024 storms].” She had been reminded of that, she said, when she had talked with other elected officials, especially at the Legislature, she indicated. “So I just said [to those other officials], ‘Anything you can do to help, that would be greatly appreciated …’ ”
She told her colleagues, “I think it’s important that we continue to advocate …”
Commissioner Ron Cutsinger acknowledged of the process that has to be followed, “It is frustrating.”
“We look at [this] from a perspective of ‘Let’s get this done,’ ” Cutsinger added, “but we cannot do anything until we get permits in place.”
Cutsinger represents Sarasota County on the WCIND board.
WCIND was able “to get the [necessary] feasibility study done ahead of time,” he noted. “It is ready to move forward, [but] we can’t do anything until the Corps releases [the permit to WCIND].”
Cutsinger added of the USACE staff, “We have lobbied heavily [for the permit], but they move at their own speed.”
WCIND does have its permit from FDEP, he said.
“Let’s hope that in the next 10 days, those permits come through, and we can see some action,” Cutsinger added.
The county projects for Phillippi Creek, in more detail
As he has during past discussions, Anderson explained that, after receipt of the USACE permit, the first phase of the county’s portion of the Phillippi Creek clearing — from U.S. 41 to Beneva Road — will entail tacking what he has called the “high spots.”
He showed the board a map with the 11 segments marked for that work. The map had purple boxes indicating the areas where county staff had bathymetry reports needed for the expedited permitting process.
“The majority of the sediment in the creek,” he stressed, is in the main part of the creek.
Staff had to focus on “high spots” that it could cite as having been produced by the 2024 storms, Anderson continued, as USACE staff had made it clear that county staff could not blame all the sediment buildup in that portion of Phillippi Creek on the storms. The expedited process, they told him, could be used just for storm response, he said.
“We’ve submitted all the detailed engineering work to them,” he added.
Phase 1 “does not address the oxbows [in Southgate],” Anderson pointed out, “because we didn’t have the bathymetry for [them] in order to meet the requirements of the expedited process.”
He was referring to a section of the Southgate community, where residents also have cited severe sediment buildup.
Phase 2, he continued, will involve the full creek from U.S. 41 to Beneva Road, including the oxbows.
However, Anderson stressed, “We keep a 10-foot minimum from [seawalls and boat docks],” as those are private structures that staff would not want to damage in any way, given the liability issue.
“There’s so much sediment there,” especially in the area of the oxbows, he added, that it is keeping some of the seawalls in place. “Bank-to-bank dredging is really … not advisable from a county perspective,” he pointed out, because of risk of harm to the private structures.
Funding that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) awarded the county this year to respond to the 2024 storms has been targeted for Phase 2, Anderson said.
The commissioners agreed to allocate $75 million of the $210.1-million grant for waterway initiatives, including projects within the city of Sarasota.
Anderson said on May 21 that he is hopeful that by the time the county has the necessary permits from the USACE and FDEP for Phase 2, the money will be available from the HUD grant.
After checking with the manager of what county staff christened the Resilient SRQ Programs — including an earlier HUD grant for responses to unmet needs from Hurricane Ian’s strike — County Administrator Jonathan Lewis reported that staff is anticipating HUD’s sign-off on the County Commission Action Plan for the newer HUD grant will come in mid-June.
However, if the federal money is not available when staff is ready to start Phase 2, Anderson said, other sources of money are available, including stormwater assessment fees held in a reserve account.
