TO: Board of County Commissioners
THROUGH: John A. Titkanich, Jr., County Administrator
Kylie Yanchula, Natural Resources Director
FROM: Eric Charest, Assistant Director Natural Resources Department
DATE: April 16, 2025
SUBJECT: Florida Department of Transportation’s SRA1A Bridge Replacement and
Indian River County’s Artificial Reef Program
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BACKGROUND
Indian River County (IRC) Natural Resources Department Staff (Staff) have been in communications with the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) with regards to their upcoming State Road A1A Bridge Replacement Project (Project) over the Sebastian Inlet. As FDOT’s Project will result in the demolition of the existing Bridge, the County was made aware of the opportunity to repurpose a portion of the bridge demolition debris for use in its’ artificial reef program. IRC currently holds active permits through the US Army Corps of Engineers for 2 Artificial Reef locations offshore of the County, with adequate space to accommodate deployments for qualifying material such as what will be made available from FDOT’s Project.
As the cost for repurposing bridge demolition debris for use as Artificial Reef material is in excess of what it would cost the FDOT to appropriately dispose of the material, should the County be interested in utilizing it for Artificial Reef deployment, the County would need to enter into a Local Funding Agreement (LFA) with the FDOT to offset the increase in FDOT costs. FDOT has estimated that the additional cost to provide IRC with approximately 3,500 tons of artificial reef qualifying material, along transportation and deployment into one of the County’s permitted sites, would be $219,000.00 more than what the costs would be to properly dispose of the material.
Aware of increased costs to repurpose applicable material for Artificial Reef deployments, Coastal Conservation Associatio...
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