PALM BEACH, Fl. — June 19, 2014 — You don't mess with Palm Beachers during an election year. That's the lesson from this week's sudden postponement of the Port of Palm Beach dredging project.
For the past seven years, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has been methodically going through the various permitting procedures to begin work on an $88.6 million project to deepen and widen the Palm Beach Inlet leading to the port.
The project has been authorized for construction by the Water Resource Reform and Development Act of 2014, and in April, the corps gave the project its final approval.
To get to this point, the federal agency engaged in a five-year feasibility study, spending $5 million to detail the environmental effects of widening the channel by as much as 150 more feet and dredging the bottom to make the channel 6 feet deeper than its current 33-foot depth.
That meant making sure that the dredging plan was in compliance with the following environmental protection measures: