Apopka will study ways to deter bears

Hey, bears, Apopka wants to shut down one of your favorite buffets.

The City Council is expected to consider a “bear-management” ordinance next month to reduce potentially dangerous conflicts between bears and people and improve the city’s chance at a state grant for bearproof trash cans.

Hungry bears often get into garbage in Apopka neighborhoods. In a five-year period, from April 2013 to April of 2018, 1,282 calls were made to the state’s nuisance-bear hotline originating from an Apopka address and more than a third were about bears in garbage, Sentinel research shows.

Apopka, in northwest Orange County, is close to three popular black bear haunts — the Seminole State Forest, Rock Springs Run State Reserve and Wekiva Springs.

“Of all communities, the city of Apopka could be the poster child of why you need something like this,” said City Council member Kyle Becker, who lives in a neighborhood between Ponkan and Lester roads, where hungry bears roam.

“I’ll leave my neighborhood around 6 o’clock in the morning and you can tell who put their trash can out the night before,” he said. “There’s just a steady progression of trash cans that have been toppled and garbage strewn about . ... ”

The Florida Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission, which announced it has another $500,000 available this year to help communities buy bear-proof residential trash containers, lists bears “in garbage” as the most frequently cited reason for calls to the agency’s nuisance-bear hotline.

Apopka Mayor Bryan Nelson proposed the ordinance, which would be modeled after similar bear rules enacted in Orange and Seminole counties. Seminole County’s ordinance took effect in 2015, Orange’s in 2016.

In Orange, the county pledged $25,000 in matching funds to earn a $200,000 FWC grant, which the solidwaste division used to buy 918 lock-top, bear-proof garbage containers. Residents living in areas identified by the FWC as bear corridors could get a bear-proof trash bin for $50.

The bins usually retail for about $250, Nelson said.

The containers, fitted with a mechanism that unlocks the lid when turned upside down, are compatible with the county’s automated collection service, a key feature for the solid-waste vendors who use trucks equipped with mechanical arms.

Seminole enacted its rules after three women were seriously hurt in separate neighborhood run-ins with bears in 2013 and 2014, incidents that led the FWC to call the county the state’s “epicenter of human-bear conflicts.”

The FWC’s most recent bear-population study, finished in 2016, found 4,350 bears prowling the woods, or about 60 percent more than the population found by a similar agency study conducted in 2002, about 14 years earlier.

Bears no longer are a problem in Wingfield North, a Seminole County gated neighborhood where a mother bear with cubs mauled a woman in December 2103, according to a state database tracking calls about nuisance bears. The neighborhood homeowners association adopted special rules in 2014 requiring homes to use bear-proof, lock-top bins.

During last week’s Apopka City Council meeting, Nelson said the city would need to pass a “BearWise” ordinance to boost its chance at an FWC grant as 60 percent of the state money will be divided among communities with special bear rules.

BearWise rules generally require residents and businesses to keep garbage secure until the morning of pickup.

The ordinance would have to define a “bear-management” area, which Nelson figured would include Welch Road and other neighborhoods closest to wildlife corridors. Researcher Adelaide Chen assisted with this story.