A State Department of Environmental Conservation proposal to fill holes in the bottom of Jamaica Bay has sparked an outcry by the area’s recreational anglers. They say filling the so-called “borrow pits” in the bay will chase fish away.
“That would be a bad thing for fishing,” said Keith Gleason, who co-owns Team Bass Boy Bait and Tackle in Rockaway with his father. Anglers say the pits support a variety of fish, like striped bass, which hover around the lip of the holes to feed on the smaller fish. They worry that other species will be affected, too.
“The fluke and flounder like to lay in deep holes in the summer, to cool off in the mud,” Gleason said. Take away the pits, he says, and the fish will head for deeper waters offshore.
But officials with the DEC counter that filling the borrow pits will allow much more of the bay’s water to flush, making it more ecologically sound.
The borrow pits have been part of the bay’s floor since the 1940s, when sand was scooped out to fill in marshland so Idlewild Airport — now Kennedy International — could be built. Since then, pollutants have collected in the pits, and a DEC spokesman, Thomas Panzone, said the deepest holes have “virtually no fish community.”
At Cross Bay Bait and Tackle in Howard Beach, a manager who declined to give his name said the plan was another example of interference by “tree-huggers.”
“
I’m against anything that’s going to hurt my fishermen,” he said.
Since 2000, the DEC has been studying the suitability of leveling out the bay’s floor with fill taken from other areas of the New York Harbor, which the Port Authority is dredging to accommodate larger container ships. Under the DEC pilot project, the Army Corps of Engineers would use clean sediment to fill two of the deeper pits in the southeast corner of the bay, thus reducing their depth from 60 feet to 20 feet.
Dan Mundy Sr., a spokesman for Jamaica Bay Eco Watchers, an environmental group, said the plan is a bad idea, and he sides with the fisherman on the debate.
“You start fooling around with the ecosystem and changing parts of it, you change the whole ecosystem,” he said. Mundy, of Broad Channel, who is Eco Watchers’ founder, indicated that the long-range effects are unknown.
“We don’t want to be the guinea pig for something that may or may not work,” he added.
Recreational fisherman, Michael McGovern of Broad Channel, said recontouring would probably improve water quality, but he has little confidence in the agencies responsible for the job.“If I thought they were going to fill a borrow pit or do marsh restoration themselves, fine,” McGovern said, “but they give it out to a contractor and there is precious little oversight.”
McGovern is out on his boat, almost daily, eight months out of the year, and he cited a recent corps project as an example of the lack of oversight. According to McGovern, a corps contractor strung miles of plastic pipeline across the bay in order to pump hydraulic sand from Floyd Bennet Field in Brooklyn to Elders Point for salt marsh restoration.
“It created a hazard to navigation,” McGovern said, “and when the pipeline broke, it deposited sand where it doesn’t belong.”
Environmentalists also worry that the project will introduce toxins, such as dioxin, into the Jamaica Bay, because the fill material will come in part from a once contaminated site in Newark Bay.
But the DEC has given repeated assurances that it would use only fill material in Jamaica Bay that meets federal standards for ocean placement.
Don Riepe, of the Jamaica Bay Guardian, a group of conservationists, favors the DEC project.
“The fishermen are somewhat myopic about the ecology of the bay,” and they consider only the fish, he said. “Some of the people who get involved are more concerned about their own access. They don’t look at the bay as a whole.”
