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Roger Wilson clearly remembers the moon landing 50 years ago. Closer to home – and more importantly for the region – he remembers when Boca Ciega Bay became the state’s first legislatively designated aquatic preserve. As a state representative from Pinellas County in 1968 to 1976, Wilson sponsored the legislation that led to the creation of the aquatic preserve.
Fifty years later, he’ll be a guest of honor at the celebration of Boca Ciega Bay Aquatic Preserve’s 50th anniversary on Thursday, Sept. 19, from 4 to 7 p.m.
Wilson was among the first state officials to recognize the problems that the then-common dredge-and-fill-activities were causing in Tampa Bay. “I had the good fortune to be a kid near John’s Pass in the late ‘40s and early ’50s,” he said. “It was a pristine fishing village growing up, but fishermen were reporting problems by the mid-1960s.”
By the time he finished college and had been elected to the legislature in 1968, the western shore of Boca Ciega Bay was mainly finger-fill canals. “They’d come in, dig up one seagrass bed and dump it on top of another, let it drain for a couple of months and then build waterfront homes,” he recalled. “We had to stop it.”
Of course, creating an aquatic preserve that prevented developers from building on their very valuable (albeit underwater) property caused some turmoil in the legislature. “It was controversial, and the Senate almost killed it, but we made it through,” he says.
Wilson also spearheaded the legislation that created a system of aquatic preserves across the state – a total of 41 preserves encompassing more than two million acres – and designated all water in Pinellas County as aquatic preserves to stop developers from replicating the finger-fill canals of Boca Ciega Bay in other places.
The anniversary celebration will bring elected officials together with stakeholders to continue the focus on environmental advocacy, said Terry Fortner, who is helping plan the event. “It’s a citizen-driven, science-based program,” she said. “It won’t be one of those ‘sit down and listen’ programs. It will be an opportunity to interact and explore actual activities that happen in the aquatic preserve including a virtual tour of the preserve, and to meet the people who made it happen then and now.”
Along with celebrating the anniversary of the state’s first aquatic preserve, Fortner hopes to kick off a citizen support organization for the region’s aquatic preserves. “The ‘Friends’ groups are non-profit corporations that support the parks – and the parks surrounded by the waters on the aquatic preserves,” she said. “We’re trying to focus on a new perspective looking at the interplay between a mosaic of habitats.”
The anniversary celebration will be held in the digitorium at the Seminole campus of St. Petersburg College, 9200 113th St. It’s free and open to the public. To register in advance, click here.
To read more about some of the history of dredge and fill activities in Tampa Bay– check out this article from our Fall 2015 archives!
USGS has a web mapping application that allows you to explore how the shoreline has changed over time- including topographic maps from the 1940’s from our region- http://historicalmaps.arcgis.com/usgs/
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