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Pensacola is getting better all the time


Have you seen the Admiral Mason Park east of the base of Ninth Avenue on Bayfront Parkway? I invite you to take a stroll around the attractive lake, joining the host of people with their dogs or on bikes or just walking hand in hand.

You would never suspect that the marsh-lined lake is a stormwater pond designed to hold and treat stormwater runoff from the watershed to the northwest.

Most stormwater ponds are ugly holes in the ground with high chain link fences around them. Stormwater runoff from parking lots is often as polluted as sewer plant discharge. That is why the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (FDEP) requires that stormwater ponds catch and treat runoff.

Not only is the Admiral Mason Park facility treating run off and thereby protecting water quality in Escambia Bay, it is also nominated for awards for being a beautiful place to visit.

Years ago, while I was working with the University of West Florida biology department, I was asked to help justify construction of the Bayfront Parkway.

Some local groups were against building a road there, saying it would mess up the pristine “natural” waterfront.

I located several surveys and maps of the waterfront in question dating back to the 1780s. The maps showed that nothing was the same as the original “natural” shoreline.

One of the oldest of these surveys showed a creek ending in an esturarine marsh where the Admiral Mason stormwater pond is now located.

Such estuarine marshes are protected by both federal (EPA) and state (FDEP) agencies. They are protected and valued because they are critical in the life cycles of many saltwater fish and crustaceans. Perhaps even more important, these wetlands take up and store such nutrients as phosphates and nitrates, which could cause algal blooms and resulting fish kills in saltwater ecosystems.

So, the area that was an estuarine marsh in the 1780s has come full circle. It now does an even better job in nutrient uptake that the marsh did. It just also happens to be one of the most beautiful places to visit in West Florida.

Farther to the east, just past the Muscogee Wharf housing development and where Chase enters the Bayfront Parkway, you will see more of what I intended for the marsh and protective energy barriers in my justification for the parkway.

Here, the FDEP has created Spartina salt marshes where, with each tidal excursion, estuarine animals enter and exit the marshes to feed, lay eggs and mature before going out to bays and oceans to complete their life cycles. The FDEP spent a lot of money on this masterpiece. The FDEP also stated large areas of oyster reef areas to the west of the Muscogee Wharf.

Years before the FDEP success, I had a $10,000 grant from the city to plant marshes in the same place. I used $5,000 of the $10,000 to hire high-school students to thin out existing Spartina marshes nearby and plant a marsh along the shore east of the Muscogee Wharf. It as an instant success that drew fish with in turn drew wading net casting fisherman. This traffic and the excess energy destroyed my prized salt water marsh.

I returned the remaining $5,000 to the city with the explanations that the site was borderline for the creation of the estuarine marsh because of the long fetch of open water and the resulting high-energy wave action.

Pensacola is a great place to live and is getting better all the time.