BP oil spill money to help FSU revive Apalachicola oyster industry

Florida State University won permission Monday to use nearly $8 million from the state's BP oil spill fund on a project aimed at reviving Apalachicola's beleaguered wild oyster industry

Opposing FSU's bid for the money: the oyster farming industry.

"We are opposed to any public university competing with already established private industry businesses," Florida Shellfish Aquaculture Industry chair Heath Davis wrote in a letter to the committee overseeing who gets money from the oil disaster.

For decades, Apalachicola Bay produced Florida's sweetest oysters, thanks to a delicate balance between salt and fresh water in the bay. Apalachicola's oysters drew tourists galore, and their harvest became not just the prime support of the local economy but also a way of life for hundreds of families.

RELATED COVERAGE: Saving Florida's oysters is a shell game.

But in recent years the oyster harvest has sharply declined, hurting the town's economy and altering the culture of the region.

Former Gov. Rick Scott blamed Georgia's thirst for water from the river system that feeds the bay, and sued Florida's northern neighbor in the U.S. Supreme Court. Georgia officials contend that there were other factors involved, including drought and state mismanagement of the resource. The case has yet to reach its final conclusion.

To make matters worse, Hurricane Michael's landfall last fall badly battered the oyster operations that remained in business.

RELATED COVERAGE: After Hurricane Michael, a search for the surviving oysters in Apalachicola.

Enter FSU, which has a marine science laboratory in St. Teresa, a small Panhandle beach town about 30 miles east of Apalachicola. The university's scientists believe they can figure out what's gone wrong with the oysters and bring back the industry, even building a pilot-scale oyster hatchery. FSU also will contribute $1.5 million toward the project.

"The first stages of research involve a lot of information collection about the bay. Many people have theories about what happened – overfishing, the water wars, etc." said Kathleen Haughney, a spokeswoman for the university. "But there hasn't been a thorough scientific investigation into this. And so they do need to understand what happened in order to be able to move forward."

Ultimately, she said, "the end-result of this would be the development of a scientific plan to restore the bay."

To finance the first five years of the project, FSU sought funding from Triumph Gulf Coast, Inc., the nonprofit corporation that the state organized to oversee the expenditure of 75 percent of all funds that BP paid to the state for economic damages from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Deepwater Horizon oil tainted the white sandy beaches of eight Florida Panhandle counties, and so they are slated to receive the most money from BP. One of those was Franklin County, where Apalachicola is the county seat.

The Franklin County Commission endorsed the FSU proposal, with one commissioner calling it "the only way forward for Franklin County." When it came up on the Triumph meeting agenda Monday in Panama City, former state House Speaker Alan Bense made the motion to approve the request, and the vote was unanimous.

Afterward Davis, whose business is in Cedar Key, not Apalachicola, said his organization hasn't been contacted by anyone from the university to discuss it, he said, and that felt like a lack of respect so they opposed it.

Contact Craig Pittman at craig@tampabay.com . Follow @craigtimes.