Rep. Gwen Graham (D-FL2) was out on Apalachicola Bay earlier this week to raise awareness for a new piece of legislation. Graham is hoping to settle a fight over freshwater that has bedeviled the Bay and its oyster industry for decades.
Ricky Banks is Vice President of the Franklin County Seafood Workers Association, and today he’s skipper for a boat full of journalists.
“Did they tell y’all I don’t charge y’all to bring y’all out?” Banks says with a sly grin. “I charge you to bring you back in.”
Graham is out on another boat with the association’s president, Shannon Hartsfield. He’s showing her how to handle the tongs used in oyster harvesting.
They’ve got two long wooden handles connected kind of like a pair of scissors. At the bottom of each pole is a wide metal rake, and as they close they create a cage around the shellfish.
It’s difficult work—the oyster beds aren’t visible through the water, and the tongs would be heavy and cumbersome even without the strong current continually pulling against the rakes.
But in recent years oyster harvesting has been difficult for a different reason. Oysters grow in brackish waters where fresh and salt water mix and historically Apalachicola Bay was a perfect breeding ground. The Apalachicola River is fed by the Chattahoochee and the Flint before emptying into the bay. St. George Island acts like a huge breakwater keeping the surf calm and allowing the fresh water and salt water to blend. But as upstream demands on freshwater have increased, the flow into the bay has declined, and the oyster population has plummeted. Banks says last year’s flow was better, but the industry needs reliability.
“Actually the bay’s doing a little better now,” Banks says. “After we’ve been doing the shelling program and we’ve had good river flow this year, but we’re worried about low river in the coming up years affecting it again and killing our bay off again.”
That’s where Graham is hoping to make an difference. The Army Corps of Engineers controls a number of dams upstream. But increasing the amount of freshwater isn’t as simple as turning the tap. Like many governmental institutions, the Corps’ actions are tightly regulated. The only legal justification they have currently for increasing flow is to support an endangered species. Graham says her bill would also allow the Corps to consider eco-system wide impacts.
“We need to protect this bay,” Graham says. “And this act, the Apalachicola Bay Restoration Act will allow us to do that.”
Graham’s measure has the support of 20 other lawmakers in the Florida congressional delegation. Starting June 1 she’ll begin the push to get the bill through committee.
