Jack Morrow of our Wilmington office attended the first National Symposium on Working Waterways & Waterfronts in Norfolk, Virginia from May 9 - 11, 2007. There were speakers and participants from the entire US including lawmakers from several states. The general topic was decreasing access to public trust waters for most citizens, and the disappearance of "working waterfronts." Conversion of commercial waterfront real estate into private residential real estate is the largest cause of the loss of access and working (marinas, boat and ship repair yards, fish houses, and commercial boat dockage) waterfronts. As the initial national meeting the agenda was to frame the issues and consider ways to measure and mitigate the public and private loss of access and use of out public navigable waters. A report summarizing the Conference will soon be available but in the meantime the following are the some of major points discussed:
- While the anecdotal evidence seems overwhelming that there has been a significant decrease, there is no scientific process for measuring, let alone valuing, the publics' access to public trust waters.
- In measuring economic benefits from boating activities the Federal Office of Management and Budget only considers the value of commercial activity in Federal decisions.
- There are approximately 72 million boaters in the US with 17 million boats, of which 95% are trailerable and less than 26 feet in length. 75% of boaters in the US have a household gross income less than $100,000.00.
- The Federal, state and local governments and their agencies are the largest owners of waterfront real estate.
- The economic health of industries that are dependent on water access are threatened by the conversion of land into restricted access waterfronts.
There are several current projects under way to both measure and document the current inventory of access sites. With the help of NMMA and other agencies and Universities, Dr. Ed Mahoney of Michigan State University is developing a Boating Access and Surveillance and Indexing System (BASIS) that will integrate remote sensing, GIS quantitative geography and economic impact tools to:
- Measure, analyze and monitor boating access including publicly accessible and privately available access including marinas, dockage and launch sites,
- Produce national and regional boating access indices,
- Assess possible reasons for changes in the amount, type and distribution of access,
- Evaluate changes in the boating demand, and
- Estimate the economic impact of changes is the supply of boating access.
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