A plan resurfaced Monday at City Hall to build islands on Naples Bay out of dredged material — but without the neighborhood outcry.
Homeowners along the bay’s eastern shore cried earlier this year when they saw engineering drawings showing a series of five islands, ranging from two acres to 12 acres, off their backyards.
The islands would rebuild habitat for mangroves, birds and fish on the bay and avoid having to haul away material dredged from the bay bottom.
The Naples City Council killed the idea but left open the possibility of building the islands farther south in Naples Bay. 
Last spring, Natural Resources Manager Mike Bauer told a city advisory board that he favored dropping the idea altogether after a search of other potential sites on Naples Bay found oysters and sea grasses already growing there.
On Monday, Bauer told the City Council that further study has found potential spots farther away from shore west of Windstar.
The potential sites are in places too shallow for boaters to go anyway, but the size of the islands and how far they would stick out of the water remain to be worked out, he said. He called them “theoretical at this point.”
City Council members praised the city’s environmental section staff for sticking with the idea in the face of public opposition. “I think this is a wonderful thing,” Councilman Gary Price said.
Councilwoman Dee Sulick questioned the wisdom of building spoil islands that she said would be washed away by wakes of speeding boats. “Doing this and not having slower boat speeds on Naples Bay is like throwing dirt in the wind, good money after bad,” she said.
Councilwoman Penny Taylor suggested going a step further by using rocks dug up from the bay for a long-discussed project to build riprap along bayfront seawalls. She said riprap would be good for the bay but questioned whether the rocks would be too smelly.
“It’s going to be smelly for a few days but not all that long,” Councilman John Sorey said.
Bauer said he planned to talk with Collier County project managers about the possibility of using material to be dredged out of the Naples Bay channel in 2009 as a test for the spoil island idea.
Another dredging project along the edge of Royal Harbor, Oyster Bay and Golden Shores still is two years away, he said. The cost of spoil disposal can top $1 million but using the spoil to build islands in Naples Bay would save money, Bauer wrote in a memo to council members.
Bauer said spoil islands have been created in Lake Worth, Biscayne Bay, and the Indian River Lagoon on Florida’s east coast and in Sarasota. The projects become “local treasures” that are valued for their recreational, aesthetic, habitat and shoreline protection values, he wrote in his memo.
Source: Eric Staats, Naples Daily News
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