FEDS ENCROACH ON BOCA CHICA, TRY TO LIMIT PUBLIC ACCESS

By Juan Montoya

After a meeting with U.S. Fish and Wildlife officials in their Corpus Christi office, Cameron County Precinct 1 Commissioner came away with the conclusion that to federal officials, limiting the access of Boca Chica to the general public would be the ideal solution.

"What they were saying at the meeting was that they would be satisfied if we restricted the access to Boca Chica beach and have the people go to South Padre Island."

At the heart of the dispute over the only remaining pristine strip of beach in southern Texas is the controversy surrounding the picking up of trash by county workers. In order to make things move along faster, the county (as do workers at South Padre Island) use a tractor-mounted rake to collect the trash and a front-end loader to help workers pick up the 55-gallon barrels full of trash. The county provides the barrels for beach-goers to use when they visit the beach.

However, USFW representatives say the rakes also remove seaweed that floats to the beach and that provides food in the form of small crustaceans for migratory birds such as the endangered Piping Plover and other species. They also say that the use of heavy equipment could hurt potential endangered turtles that may seek the desolate beach as nesting grounds to lay their eggs.

Benavides said that to her knowledge there may have been one or two sites on the entire beach that could have indicated that turtles may have been present.

For that reason, the feds don't want the county crews to use the heavy equipment and will now require that a turtle spotter from their department reconnoiter the beach ahead of the crews. Additionally, they will require the workers to hand-drag the full 55-gallon drums to a truck waiting just off the water line at the beach.

A conservation website states that a 1986 survey found fewer than 300 piping plovers in Alberta, Canada. Since 1985, this species has been considered endangered by the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada. Piping plovers winter in the southern and southeastern U.S., Mexico and a few Caribbean islands, including Boca Chica beach.

On Monday, a county delegation composed of Cameron County Commissioner for Precinct 1 Sofia Benavides, Parks Director Javier Mendez, Administrator Pete Sepulveda, Public Works Supervisor Louis Ara III, and chief legal counsel Bruce Hodge traveled to Corpus Christi to make their case that access by the public to Boca Chica remain open and that some mutually-agreed-upon arrangement be reached where the beach can be cleaned in a manner that the county can afford.

"I told them that if they wanted us to manually drag those heavy barrels away from the dunes and on top the dump trucks, cleaning the beach would be a full-time job," Benavides said. "There's no way we could afford to do that."

Although some people say that beach goers are primarily to blame for the refuse-choked beach at Boca Chica, Benavides pointed out that there are many factors that result in trash piling up there. She pointed out, for example, that Mexican and U.S. communities all up the Rio Grande River contributed daily to trash being carried down the river and ending up in the waters off Boca Chica.

"During beach cleanup we run into many types of trash, including medical waste that beach-goers don't throw away," she said. "These are carried down the Rio Grande from communities on both sides of the river. Sometimes people forget that the Rio Grande is an international waterway."

Additionally, prevailing currents in the Gulf of Mexico also carry refuse from fishing boats, shrimpers, and ocean-going ships that empty their bilges into the water.

"The jetties become a natural barrier for that trash coming from the river and from the Gulf and keep it on Boca Chica," she said. "We are tying to do our best to go out there and clean the beach but there is a limit to what we can do with out our budget to do it."

Ironically, the sand-starved beaches in South Padre Island are also the result of the jetties stopping the flow of beach-nourishing silt there. In contrast, Boca Chica is said to have an abundance of silt, or a large "sand budget."

The State of Texas does own land on Boca Chica which, technically speaking, is a state park. However, there are no park facilities on this park of more than 1,055 acres offering a variety of outdoor recreation on its land and adjacent beaches of Del Mar and Boca Chica, including swimming, birding, camping, fishing and surfing.

In the last few years, the USFW and conservation groups have bought land south of the entrance on Highway 4 for wildlife refuges. North of the entrance, except for the park, most of the land adjacent to the beach is privately owned.

Because of the Texas Open Beaches Act, landowners cannot close the beach to the public.

Cameron County has had a contract with the GLO since the 1990s that leases Boca Chica State Park to the county for $1 a year. The lease requires that the county merely clean the beach periodically and the GLO reimburses the county at something like 75 percent for manpower and machinery. Indeed, Public Works (the successor of Precinct 1 crews) periodically go out to the beach, about 23 miles east of Brownsville, and pick up the trash-filled 55-gallon drums.

This weekend a fishing tournament is being held on the disputed strip of beach and a USFW turtle spotter with the local office was available to walk ahead of crews cleaning up the beach in preparation for the fishermen.

Benavides said that unless some modus vivendi can be found to satisfy both the county and the federal government, she doesn't see how the restrictions the USFW on the county's efforts to keep the beach clean for beach-goers can be kept up.

"We used to come out to Boca Chica when we were kids growing up in southeast Brownsville," she said. "This was the poor people's beach. I've gotten to the point where I park at the entrance and hand out plastic trash bags to the cars passing by. I want to protect the wildlife, but I'm also under pressure from the people to have a clean beach. We've got to work out a solution."