Len Berkstresser, president of ABWIG, works with a film crew to shoot an informational video about the dredging work the organization plans to begin by late summer.
MITCH TRAPHAGEN PHOTOS
By MITCH TRAPHAGEN
There were fundraisers, town hall meetings and door-to-door appeals throughout the community, and in the end, ABWIG, the Apollo Beach Waterway Improvement Group, reached their quarter-of-a-million-dollars goal. And now the time is approaching to put that money to use. When that will happen is still a somewhat open question, but the window is closing. At some point in the coming months, the work to begin dredging the primary canals into Apollo Beach should begin.
“The status is that we’re still on schedule to dredge late this summer,” said ABWIG president Len Berkstresser. “We are waiting to decide if we will dredge before or after the park is ready.”
Hillsborough County recently announced that major work will begin to protect the Apollo Beach Nature Park from erosion, primarily using rock jetties, among other engineering feats. The jetties could also help to protect the north canal leading into the community, a definite boon for ABWIG and its mission.
“We will have a town hall meeting on July 16th and by then we’ll know,” Berkstresser said. “But at some point, we’ll start regardless of whether the park is finished. Ideally, it would be better if they had the rock jetties out there, but permitting is an issue for that.”
The fundraising goal has been reached and ABWIG plans for dredging to begin in the main canals into Apollo Beach by late this summer. On Saturday, the organization made a promotional video to update boaters and the community and to give a group of children volunteers the chance to begin the dredging with plastic buckets and shovels. The video will be posted on ABWIG’s Facebook page.
According to Berkstresser, not all of the county’s permits are in place for the work on the park to begin.
“We are ready to go,” he added, referring to ABWIG and the dredging. “We have our permits. We have a couple more Ts to cross, but we’re ready to go. We are in our final bid packages — we’ll put that out pretty shortly; we’ll then have a 30-day evaluation and we’ll start moving.”
For the past handful of years, ABWIG has been working to raise the funds to dredge the primary canals into the waterfront community. ABWIG was first formed more than two decades ago to achieve the same goal, and over time the need to dredge arose again. Of course, the funds required have changed dramatically. The original incarnation of ABWIG sought to raise $60,000.
“Financially we’re in pretty good shape,” Berkstresser said. “We won’t know exactly what we’ll need until the bids come back but we hit our budget of $250,000, and even exceeded it a little bit — so we feel good about that.”
The goal was raised through a combination of corporate support and grass-roots fundraising.
On Saturday at the Apollo Beach Nature Park, the organization made a video to provide an update for the community and the boaters that use — or, in some cases, would like to use — the community’s canals.
“What we are doing today is to make a video to get the word out about where we are,” Berkstresser said. “It is going to be a bit of a parody, too. We’ll talk about the project and then we’ll cut away and show the kids in the water, and they’ll have their little buckets and their little shovels and they are actually going to do some dredging.”
So in essence, thanks to a handful of children, the work has already begun. But expect to see some much larger machinery in the area in the coming months. While the fundraising efforts and visibility of the group have faded in the past months, the years of work, and the visible results, should be taking off soon.
ABWIG’s video will soon be available via its Twitter and Facebook accounts. A town hall meeting, with the hope of providing a firm date for work to begin, will be held July 16.
For more information, visit www.abwig.org or on Facebook at tinyurl.com/observer-abwig.