Miami Boat Show is moving downtown and into a manatee fight
The Miami International Boat Show plans to go very big in Miami in February, and that has sparked a fight with regulators about protecting manatees.
After running the show on floating docks off Virginia Key for four years and scrapping this year’s event due to COVID-19, the Presidents Day Weekend show is moving its main on-the-water element to several spots off the shore of downtown Miami.
Staging the show at those locations requires constructing temporary docks for hundreds of slips over bay bottom that Miami-Dade County has designated as manatee-protection zones.
That led to a flare-up this week over boat traffic and the risk of fatal manatee collisions when the administration of Mayor Daniella Levine Cava attempted to bar the Feb. 16-20 show from conducting test drives for more than 100 boats that the event wanted to make available for sea trials.
The county’s environmental regulators endorsed constructing temporary marinas over the manatee areas. But they said allowing daily back-and-forth trips of roughly 150 boats needed for sea trials throughout the five-day event would be too risky for manatees, whose ranks have been ravaged by a loss of sea grass to feed on.
MANATEES A MIAMI-DADE CONCERN FOR BOAT SHOW
“It’s not just running the manatees over. It’s disrupting their behavior,” Lee
Hefty told commissioners Wednesday. “If you’re a manatee with a small calf looking for food — and right now it’s a heckuva thing to try and do when there are no sea grasses — everything that is disrupting your behavior through boat traffic is disrupting your ability to survive.”
Miami-Dade commissioners overruled Hefty’s agency, the Division of Environmental Resources Management, and issued the permit without the ban that DERM wanted on sea trials.
Instead, the board approved a cap of 150 slips to be used for sea trials and required the Boat Show to come back for another approval ahead of the 2023 show. The commission also asked DERM to produce a report on any manatee impacts from the 2022 show.
“It does seem silly we’re not going to be allowed to use the boats during the Boat Show,” said Commissioner Eileen Higgins, who represents District 5, which includes shoreline on Biscayne Bay.
Sea trials involve licensed captains taking potential buyers out on a boat to demonstrate how the vessel operates.
MIAMI BOAT SHOW LEAVES VIRGINIA KEY
The Boat Show’s prior location on Virginia Key is not identified by Miami-Dade as a manateeprotection zone. “Sea trials were not an issue at Marine Stadium because the area is not in essential manatee habitat,” Hefty said Thursday. Brian May, a lobbyist for the Boat Show, said the event had a limit of 250 slips that could be used for sea trials at the temporary
Virginia Key docking facility.
In prior years, the boat-show weekend involved the Miami Yacht Show downtown and a separate Miami International Boat Show, but now the two events are under the same umbrella. The main show’s indoor expo is returning to its longtime home at the Miami Beach Convention Center, while the on-the-water portion will be in downtown Miami.
For 2022, the downtown location is planned to include floating docks off the land once occupied by the Miami Herald as well as near the Sea Isle Marina north of the Venetian Causeway.
Those county permits approved in 2018 for the downtown location stated “no sea trials are proposed,” prompting a green light from DERM.
For 2022, the Boat Show wants a larger waterfront set-up at the Miami locations than what was there in prior years. Instead of the roughly 630 slips in that area for prior events, the Boat Show requested 947.
‘WE NEED SEA TRIALS’
Show representatives argued it made no sense to bring yacht manufacturers to an event centered on selling boats without offering sea trials.
“We need sea trials for the viability of this show. They’ve been a staple of the show for decades,” said Spencer Crowley, an Akerman lawyer representing the show. “For us to lose the sea trials from one year to the next is just not tenable for the show.”