ATV debate rolls on

Here's an article out of sunday's Florida Today newspaperDecember 18, 2005

IS BIG CYPRESS RIGHT TERRAIN FOR ATVs?

ATV debate rolls on

BY BYRON STOUT
GANNETT NEWS SERVICE

It's the season for 226,000 hunters to suit up and head out into Florida's great outdoors -- about 5.5 million acres of public lands equal in size to New Jersey.

To get around the Sunshine State's expansive pine flatwoods and legendary swamps, the majority use off-road vehicles ranging from monster swamp buggies to camouflaged golf carts.

Which raises the question: What does that do to the environment and Florida's 111 species of endangered plants and animals that call the state's uplands and wetlands home?

One type of off-road four-wheeler already has been banned from most of Florida's public land.

These high-speed four-wheelers are known as all-terrain vehicles, or ATVs. Land managers view them -- many are used for off-road racing -- as disruptive to hunting and destructive to habitat.

By the same token, federal and state authorities acknowledge hunters couldn't access vast tracts like the 884-square-mile Big Cypress National Preserve in Collier County without other types of off-road vehicles, or ORVs.

The disputes arise over how restrictive -- some would say protective -- ORV rules should be.

Some environmentalists believe hunters are methodically destroying the lands they love. Hunters say claims of damage they do to the environment are overstated.

Nowhere are those issues more contentious than in the Big Cypress.

Environmentalists and sportsmen each have sued the National Park Service to preserve the land via vehicle restrictions or, conversely, to use it as they see fit.

Some issues have been settled, but how vehicles will fit into the picture was debated again this past week when the Park Service held public hearings on 146,000 acres being added to Big Cypress National Preserve.

'Mismanaging' land

Neither faction is happy about the management.

Fort Lauderdale travel agent and environmental activist Brian Scherf is among the most vocal of Florida's defenders of public lands.

Scherf's outrage stems from an experience he had in the Big Cypress in the early '90s.

"I was hiking in there, and I had to cross one of these big (wet prairies) that was almost annihilated by off-road vehicles," he said. "The ground was turned into a slurry by the vehicles. I just sank into this mud that had been churned over so many times, it was almost like quicksand.

Scherf said he sank to his knees and had to wedge himself out with a walking stick.

"To see the soils in such condition, it looked like Rommel's tank corps had run through there," he said.

The Park Service, he said, was mismanaging the preserve.

"The place is supposed to be managed in perpetuity for future generations, and here we were in this field of destruction," Scherf recalled.

So he formed his own environmental organization of six people -- the Florida Biodiversity Project -- and sued the Park Service in 1994 under illegal-dredging provisions of the Clean Water Act.

The suit claimed in part that swamp buggy tires picked up and moved mud in the preserve without the required permits.

The Park Service agreed to regulate vehicles in the preserve in a settlement that irks many longtime off-roaders to this day.

Travel-impact study

Scientific studies to determine the impacts of travel on the preserve and its wildlife are under way, with preserve botanists, hydrologists and other scientists supervising members of the Student Conservation Association.

Pedro Ramos, the preserve's assistant superintendent, has offered no definitive findings so far. However, managers are working with the assumption that extensive rutting alters water flows, damages vegetation and stresses wildlife, including Florida panthers.

"I will tell you very comfortably," Ramos said, "that we know that not having implemented an ORV plan would have continued to allow more damage to the resource."

The Park Service's plan was to begin designating trails in most of the preserve's six management units and to tell off-road vehicles to stay on those trails.

Some of those "trails" -- the service refuses to call them roads -- have been built up with synthetic anti-erosion webbing that forms a base to allow water to flow through and with trucked-in lime rock.

"You have to remember what we're trying to do here is strike a balance between conservation and recreation," Ramos said.

"We do feel the plan represents a good balance."

Proof may be neither environmentalists nor hunters are entirely happy.

"They've decided to put lime rock over 200 miles of trails," Scherf said.

"No one envisioned that. The standard should be if the natural soils can't withstand vehicle traffic, then they shouldn't be allowed."

Stout covers the Outdoors for the News-Press in Fort Myers.