Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Tight squeeze
Fort Lauderdale Commission considers ways to ease gridlock crisis on New River
“The New River hasn’t shrunk, but the boats have gotten larger. We’re really trying to make sure large vessels can get up the river.”
— Steve Witten, chair of the marine advisory board
Boats are getting bigger. But the New River they travel up and down is not.
The channel, one of Fort Lauderdale’s busiest waterways, already has a reputation for being the most challenging river to navigate on the East Coast, marine experts say.
Mega yachts and barges are especially feeling the squeeze — and some worry they might abandon Fort Lauderdale in search of kinder, gentler waterways.
All those mooring piles and extra-long finger docks that jut far out into the waterway don’t help. Before the problem gets worse, Fort Lauderdale’s marine advisory board has asked the City Commission to impose a one-year moratorium on dock waivers along the New River. There’s also talk of revamping the city’s dock ordinances and reining in how far boats can extend past mooring piles.
Under current rules, mooring pilings should not project more than 30% into the width of the waterway or more than 25 feet from the property line, whichever is less. But in recent months, Fort Lauderdale has seen an “avalanche of requests” for waivers from waterfront homeowners who want to exceed current code requirements, said Jimmie Harrison, a member of Fort Lauderdale’s Marine Advisory Board.
“It’s like the floodgates are open,” Harrison said. Around 8,500 vessels travel the New River every month, according to the U.S. Coast Guard. And
every day, yachts that are 165 feet long or more need a tow to make it through the most narrow and winding sections.
Steve Witten, chair of the marine advisory board, recently played a video for commissioners showing a 164-foot yacht making its way through the narrowest sections of the New River.
The yacht, with one tugboat at the bow and another at the stern, took up so much of the waterway, there was little to no room for other boats to pass by.
“The New River hasn’t shrunk, but the boats have gotten larger,” Witten said. “We’re really trying to make sure large vessels can get up the river.”
‘It’s hectic down there’
A waterfront estate known as “Little Florida” for its resemblance to the state’s peninsula is one of the toughest spots to maneuver around, boaters say.
“My boat’s tiny so I can wiggle around it,” said Fort Lauderdale fishing guide Jeff Maggio. “But it’s hectic down there. Lots of people don’t go out on the weekend because it’s hairy.”
Homeowners worry about their docks getting hit just as much as yacht owners worry about hitting the docks.
“Everybody on the river is worried about it,” Maggio said. “It’s freaking crazy. I don’t fish on the weekends because of that. Even 20 years ago, before the boats got so big, people would bring their boats to Lauderdale Marine Center and call guys like me to drive their boats up the river because they weren’t used to all the traffic.”
And now, with boats getting bigger every year, the New River seems like it’s shrinking, some say. “It used to be a 120-foot boat was a big boat,” Maggio said. “Now a 280-foot boat’s a big boat. I don’t know of any other place in the world that gets 200-footers like we do.”
Fort Lauderdale plans to hold a public workshop in the coming weeks to get feedback from marine industry officials, homeowners and boat owners on possible solutions.
Officials with the city’s Marine Advisory Board laid out the problem for commissioners during a recent meeting.
One property owner’s request for a waiver was denied by the Marine Advisory Board but later approved by the City Commission, Harrison noted. Commissioners have the final say.
Bigger boats, longer docks
Mayor Dean Trantalis said he warned of the very same issue 10 years ago when the city kept on approving waivers for waterfront homeowners seeking to make space for bigger and bigger boats.
“I thought this whole waiver thing became a rubber stamp of the commission, and I knew at some point it was going to catch up with us,” he said. “And here we are today.”
So many boats are being stacked next to each other on private docks that sections of the New River are starting to resemble a marina, Harrison said.
A finger dock runs perpendicular to the property, allowing space for more boats.
“A majority of these waiver requests are for multiple slips, essentially turning the property into a marina,” Harrison told the South Florida Sun Sentinel. “They may have a 50-foot lot, but with these docks they can put a couple 80-foot boats behind a house with a 50-foot lot. The applicants say they are not going to rent out dock space. But they are creating a personal marina for their boats or their family’s boats.”
Barges, known for being slow and hard to maneuver, also are having a tough time making their way down the New River.
A few months ago, a barge that had been hired by a local boatyard was unable to make its way past a homeowner’s mooring pile, Harrison said.
The pilings had to be removed, with the homeowner’s permission.
“The pilings were blocking the barge,” Harrison said. “They had to ask the homeowner if they could pull the pilings out so the barge could get through. Then they had to put them back.”
Taking a breather
Barges play a key role in the marine industry — and that role is only going to expand.
In the face of climate change, homeowners will be required to build higher seawalls to prepare for rising seas. That means more barges will be making their way up and down the river to help build those seawalls, Harrison said.
Marine Advisory Board officials worry the city might be sacrificing safe navigation on the New River to accommodate the bigger boat trend.
“What we’re asking for is a breather,” Harrison told the commission. “We’re denying all these applications coming in for waivers and worry the commission will be pressured by the applicants to ignore our recommendations to deny them. For the marine industry, it would be catastrophic.”
Fort Lauderdale is known as the yachting capital of the world, he noted. But that could change if it becomes too difficult for the mega yachts to make their way to and from the boatyards on the west and the Atlantic Ocean on the east.
“If we make it hard enough, they will go somewhere else,” Harrison said. “There’s other places to go for people to get their boats fixed. Boats are brought to Fort Lauderdale to sell and buy. When boats get bought and sold, that’s when they get worked on. This is the yachting capital of the world, but it’s more than that. It’s the yachting hub of repair and refit for the world.”
Choke off the river to the big boats and the industry dies, Harrison warned.
“It’s here now,” he said. “All you have to do is keep it alive.”