BRADENTON BEACH – The free dockage for commercial vessels at city docks may soon come at a cost.
A discussion of the $5,000 cost to replace several floats lost on the floating docks during high surf in April turned to the city’s overall cost of dock maintenance and the possibility of charging a fee for businesses using the docks.
“Five thousand dollars every time that happens, that’s a lot of money,” Commissioner Deborah Scaccianoce said at the May 2 city commission meeting. “This is happening more than once, and it seems like it’s going to be a problem and we’re going to be chasing these floats constantly every time there’s a storm or a lot of wave action on that pier.”
Mayor John Chappie said he had received an update from Duncan Seawall General Manager Steve Porter that the replacement floats were on order.
“It’s a tough area to have the floating dock structure in there because it does get a lot of wave action,” Chappie said. “It’s totally exposed to the northern part of Sarasota Bay. I’ll try to get an update on cost and maintenance, what we need to do to prevent some of this damage that’s been happening and try to mitigate the maintenance costs.”
City Attorney Ricinda Perry said she agreed with Scaccianoce and said there should be an established maintenance program, then suggested that commissioners reopen previous discussions about charging commercial vessels to use the city dock.
“What I’d like to revisit, and we had talked about it but didn’t move it forward, was perhaps a charge for those commercial entities who are using the floating dock for their business at no cost to them,” Perry said.
Perry said that she has spoken with people who rent out slips at a minimum of $2,500 per month.
“If you start making a collection from the people who are running their business off of our pier at no cost, you could start to set aside maintenance money to keep that dock in great shape,” Perry said.
She said such charges would give the city the ability to collect funds for future maintenance but also regulate and know if commercial captains are properly licensed.
“We have under $300,000 sitting there for the entire pier, which isn’t enough to handle the wear and tear which the mayor and I have personally observed from these commercial companies who come in, they do not use anything to protect their boat from slamming into the structure and they take chunks out on the side,” Perry said. “We can’t help the storm vessels that come right under the floating dock and pop off floats and destroy the structure, but I do believe we should consider revisiting this concept of regulating through cost the people who are coming in and using our asset.”
Perry said that if someone on an uninsured vessel gets injured on the dock, the boat operator may not have proper insurance to cover losses.
“I’ve been told some of these commercial entities do not have licensed captains running the vessels and so those who do have the proper insurance and do have the proper captains are charging about $50 a tour,” she said. “Whereas those who don’t, their overhead is less and they’re charging $20-$25. They’re putting us at risk. We do have insurance to cover things that happen, but I believe it’s something the commission should consider revisiting again and we need to make sure we have the funds to take care of that.”
“We really should look at this again,” Chappie said. “We are that destination now and we’re getting more and more people to use the facility and the infrastructure that we have developed there.”
Chappie said the discussion will be put on a commission work meeting agenda in about a month.
