ST. CROIX — The Virgin Islands Department of Planning and Natural Resources reeled in stakeholders to participate in a community kick-off meeting Wednesday evening in the Great Hall of the University of the Virgin Islands on St. Croix to discuss the best options for restoring Great Pond to a sustainable fish nursery.
“Great Pond is not in a good state, and this is essentially the driving force for us being here today and all being together in this area to talk about it, and to come together to figure out what can be done, how can we do it, and in what way we can do it,” Shamoy Bideau, Tysam Tech environmental specialist, told in-person and virtual attendees.
DPNR is engaging the community as it works to finalize plans to restore the South Shore salt pond for fish habitat with Tysam Tech, a local environmental consulting company serving as project manager to ensure engineering is correctly executed. The community is encouraged to participate in a two-day charette set from 3:30 to 8:30 p.m. on Thursday, March 21, and from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Friday, March 22 in the dining room at the UVI Medical Simulation Center to share their ideas on how best to move the project forward.
“The goal of the project is restoring to tidal flushing to function for fish habitat, to improve fish habitat,” Benjamin Keularts, Tysam Tech environmental engineer, said during the public meeting. “And, again, there are other benefits to doing so, and those can be incorporated and certainly come into play when we come up with the design.”
Options discussed among panelists included potentially dredging to reopen the bay mouth to allow tidal flushing, which is when the seawater flows in and out from the salt pond.
“You need to have sufficient flushing in the pond in order to maintain the fishery,” William Tobias, a former fisheries biologist with the Virgin Islands Department of Planning and Natural Resources, Division of Fish and Wildlife, who served on the advisory panel during the meeting, said after the presentation.
Great Pond has been impacted throughout the years by land development and hurricanes that have introduced sediment, making the water depth shallow and creating a barrier for tidal flushing that has been further affected by sargassum piling up near the bay mouth. Reopening the mouth to allow for tidal flushing is necessary to sustain a fish nursery, creating a natural flow between the pond and sea for fish to spawn in the pond and return to the sea.
“The idea would be to allow it to become a nursery to help the fishery outside function better,” Marlon Hibbert, Virgin Islands Department of Planning and Natural Resources, Division of Coastal Zone Management director, said about Great Pond after the presentation.
During a question-and-answer segment, Keularts discussed dredging as an option to facilitate tidal flushing.
“There’s certainly consideration to dredging that includes certainly the mouth as well as further inland,” he said, adding that dredging options will be determined by the hydrology and studies to determine the needs based on the tides, current, and other factors to include the dimensions the bay mouth must have.
Keularts said the idea of the restoration project is to implement a long-lasting solution that would create a fish nursery in the salt pond. He said dredging is an option to discuss, as well as what sort of dredging might be required.
“It is not lightly taken because dredging certainly is a lot of work, both in the actual action of dredging as well as where the material needs to go, so it will definitely all be weighed together in terms of what’s feasible for moving forward, but the essential part is making sure that the design matches something that will last for a long time,” he said.
A question about the potential downside of restoring Great Pond was answered by a member of the audience who serves on a committee composed of recreational and commercial fishers, scuba diving charters, and UVI scientists.
Carlos Farchette, St. Croix Fisheries Advisory Committee secretary, said fishers support the project to restore Great Pond to a sustainable nursery.
“They all want Great Pond to be restored, they all want it to be a nursery, and they want to prohibit fishing inside the pond until the pond has restored itself for a sustainable manner,” he said.
Hilary Lohmann, DPNR-CZM coastal resilience coordinator, in response to a question about whether DPNR has considered applying for a grant to help fund the project, said the department has funding secured from the America the Beautiful grant.
“We’re not putting the cart before the horse of what we would implement, and so we feel that we’re well positioned with the timing of it to pay attention to this exercise in the spring, and then connect the dots with our 80% design that we get out of this to put towards what we have funded in terms of implementing a restoration action at Great Pond,” she said.
After the presentation, Hibbert encouraged attendees to write their thoughts down on printed aerial maps of Great Pond distributed during the meeting. Panelists engaged the attendees in reviewing the documents while discussing the options for restoring the salt pond.
“Come up with the most Mars-like thought process you can,” Hibbert said. “Draw on it, doodle on it but let us see those thoughts that you have now swirling in your heads because if you don’t write it down, if you don’t say them, the only person who has them is you, and we want those thoughts.”
Now that DPNR and Tysam Tech held a kick-off meeting to introduce the project to the community, public comments and concerns will be incorporated into the design approach along with field surveys. A community charette is scheduled for March 22 in the UVI Great Hall. A social event will be held April 12 at DPNR’s St. Croix East End Marine Park Visitors Center at Great Pond. All the technical surveys, documents and input from stakeholders will then be incorporated to choose engineering design options while creating a restoration action plan. The engineering team will finalize the design and prepare drawings by May to show the project scope and prepare for permits.
