Boaters welcome $6.5M park with boat ramps in Jupiter
Site will help to meet booming demand in western county areas.
JUPITER — Palm Beach Count y’s newest waterfront park — the first since Jim Barry Light Harbor Park was built in Riviera Beach in 2009 — opens Saturday on the Intracoastal Waterway on Indiantown Road.
“We are meeting the booming demand in boating, especially from the residents who live in the western part of the county,” said Palm Beach County Parks and Recreation Director of Park Development Bob Hamilton, walking on a recent morning along the three public boat ramps that will be open daily from sunrise to sunset.
The $6.5 million Waterway Park also has a boat staging area, a fishing pier and boardwalk, a restroom building, 52 boat-trailer parking spaces, 29 vehicle spaces and a tortoise preserve area.
Volunteers cleared Australian pines, dug up some 30,000 cubic yards of spoil and created 11 acres of mangrove and marsh-grass wetlands. They planted some 35,000 red mangrove seedlings and created a 1-acre maritime hammock at the southern end of the peninsula.
Dre d g i n g t h e I n t r a c o a s t a l Waterway just south of the Indiantown Road bridge was done to build the three public boat ramps. About 60 gopher tortoises were moved from the 31-acre property.
Developments such as Alton on Donald Ross Road and Sonoma Isles on Indiantown Road are likely to increase the demand for public boat ramps.
Spillover boat-trailer parking on U.S. 1 in north county hap- pens when Burt Reynolds Park is overcrowded. That’s dangerous for bicycle riders and motorists and boats back up at the ramps at Bert Winters Park on Ellison Wilson Road.
It’s not just local boat owners who use north county public boat ramps. Commercial fishermen from Sebastian and other areas are now bringing their boats to Jupiter. They park trailers in the lot to take advantage of the AprilJune kingfish season.
“There are just so many boats. As more people come, there will be more,” said Tommy Schultz, a Jupiter boat owner and co-owner of Fishing Headquarters near Sawfish Bay Park.
Wa t e r w a y P a r k h a s t w o entrances. The first is entrance- WEST PALM BEACH — The Palm B e a c h C o u n t y C o m m i s s i o n rejec ted a large development project west of The Acreage on Wednesday, marking a major shift from its more pro-development stance of recent years.
On a vote of 5-2, commissioners turned down a request to change the county’s comprehensive plan to accommodate the Iota Carol/ Delray Linton Groves project, which called for the construction of 1,030 homes on 1, 288 acres west of the Acreage in the northwest area of the county.
The project, west of Seminole Pratt Whitney Road just north of 60th Street North, was going to add another large-scale development in an area dotted with large-scale developments, including Minto Community’s Westlake, GL Homes’ Indian Trails Grove, and Avenir in Palm Beach Gardens.
L a s t ye a r, t he c ommission voted to send Iota Carol’s proposed changes to state officials for review. Only t wo commissioners — Melissa McKinlay and Paulette Burdick — voted against moving forward with the project at that time.
But the November elec tion brought changes to the commission. Two new commissioners — Mack Bernard and Dave Kerner — took over for Shelley Vana and Priscilla Taylor, both of whom had consistently voted in favor of requests for development. The new commission handed the chair’s gavel to Burdick, who in recent years had often been the lone vote against development requests.
Those changes doomed Iota