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SWIM Team Marks 20 Years

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By SUSAN M. GREEN, The Tampa Tribune

Published: November 10, 2007

Updated: 11/08/2007 09:55 pm

RUSKIN - As if they had marked it on their calendar, a flock of white pelicans soared over Mount Cockroach as a crowd of people gathered to celebrate 20 years of making Tampa Bay a critter's place for clean living.

Some of Florida's original snowbirds, the feathered aviators were the first of their kind that Cockroach Bay Aquatic Preserve manager Richard Sullivan has seen this fall. The birds have been welcomed annually as a harbinger of winter since the preserve underwent habitat restoration starting in 1996.

"I called 'em in for you today," Sullivan quipped to guests arriving for the 20th anniversary of Florida's Surface Water Improvement and Management program.

About 150 people met on top of an excavation mound nicknamed Mount Cockroach to commemorate the anniversary with speeches and later with boat and land tours of Cockroach Bay, a 500-acre habitat restoration site considered one of the program's biggest success stories.

Many participants wore T-shirts identifying them as "SWIM Team" members. Most others were from the Southwest Florida Water Management District, which administers the SWIM program, or partner agencies such as Hillsborough's Parks, Recreation and Conservation Department, Tampa Bay Estuary Program, Tampa Bay Watch, Florida Department of Environmental Protection and the Agency on Bay Management.

Brandt Henningsen, an environmental scientist hired for SWIM shortly after the program started in 1987, created a "parade of homes" out of aerial pictures of projects that showed how wildlife habitats were created out of fallow farm fields, mosquito ditches, shell pits and even an old landfill.

The event also highlighted accomplishments of scientists and engineers who turned poorly functioning water pits into ponds that trap pollutants before they get to the bay.

Longtime Ruskin crabber Gus Muench and Gibsonton residents Pete and Jeanie Johnson traded memories of what the Hillsborough Bay shoreline looked like decades ago, when agriculture and anglers ruled the coast.

"I used to get cauliflower out of the fields here," Muench recalled, gesturing toward a piece of land threaded by a series of crisscrossing creeks. "We'd go pick it."

Former Gov. Bob Martinez of Tampa, who was instrumental in getting the original SWIM legislation to include the then-troubled Tampa Bay in the list of water bodies targeted for cleanup, was keynote speaker.

"You just look out that way," he told the crowd, gesturing toward the bay, "and you're in the middle of old Florida."

For him, the view from Mount Cockroach brought back memories of his youth 50 years ago, when he spent many hours fishing in Old Tampa Bay.

"There were mangroves everywhere you looked, and seagrass everywhere you looked," Martinez recalled. "Things were the way they were supposed to be."

Mike Perry, the first SWIM director who left the Tampa area a few years ago to become executive director of the Lake County Water Authority, said SWIM was one of the first programs to bring engineers, environmental scientists and heavy equipment operators together to solve environmental problems.

Another SWIM hallmark was assembling partnerships among various agencies and city and county governments to tackle land acquisition and retrofit projects that would be virtually impossible to finance and complete by one agency alone, Perry said.

Partnerships recently have expanded to include private corporations that own environmentally sensitive land. Perry said the SWIM program will have to become more creative in building partnerships because large tracts suitable for habitat and stormwater renovation are becoming scarce.

"Let's revel in what we've done today. ... But let's not forget there's going to be more that needs to be done," Perry said. "We're just getting started."

Sullivan, who oversees the Cockroach Bay preserve for the Hillsborough County parks department, said this year also is the 20th anniversary of the county's Environmental Lands Acquisition and Protection Program. Cockroach Bay is one of dozens of tracts totaling about 40,000 acres that the county has acquired for environmental preservation since 1987.

Through the ELAPP program, county and SWIM workers routinely team up to enhance the habitat and water quality value of those tracts, Sullivan said.

"It seems like they the two programs go hand in hand," he said.

Reporter Susan M. Green can be reached at (813) 865-1566 or sgreen@tampatrib.com.

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