Rep. Elizabeth Porter, R-Lake City, gets ready for a boat ride on May 18, on the Santa Fe River, with FWC Maj. Camille Soverel, left, and Maj. Roy Brown, right, to check out the new speed-zone signs that will be enforced. Brown is retiring this month and Soverel will be the new Regional Commander for the North Central Region. Brown has served FWC for 31 years.

The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission installed new signs marking the slow speed, minimum-wake signs along the Santa Fe River recently.

Area county commissioners that participated on the working group to identify areas the signs should be placed were Wesley Wainwright, Suwannee; Jack Byrd, Lafayette; Rusty DePratter, Columbia; and Tommy Langford, Gilchrist.

FWC invited the working group Rep. Elizabeth Porter, R-Lake City, and the Suwannee Democrat for a boat ride to check out the new signs that were being installed.  

“We appreciate Rep. Porter for really brining this issue back to the forefront. She helped get us all together and without her assistance we wouldn’t be where we are at today. So, I thank Rep. Porter,” FWC Maj. Roy Brown said.

Although Wainwright was unable to attend the ride along to see the new signs being installed, he expressed excitement via phone.

“I think this is tremendous. This is going to help protect the folks who are on the river,” said Wainwright. “It’s been well over a year since Maj. Brown got the prospective commissioners that border the river together. This is the first time we could come together for agreement. Maj. Brown has been working on this for 20 years … finally it came together. It needed to be done and I am happy to see it accomplished.”

The new speed zones are at the confluence of the Santa Fe and Ichetucknee rivers (Columbia, Suwannee and Gilchrist counties); the U.S. Highway 129 bridge and Guy Lemmon Park boat ramp (Suwannee and Gilchrist counties); at the Sandy Point boat ramp (Suwannee and Gilchrist counties); Ellie Ray’s boat ramp (Suwannee and Gilchrist counties); and Butler Landing boat ramp and the confluence of the Santa Fe and Suwannee rivers (Lafayette, Gilchrist and Suwannee counties). The new signs mark the beginning and the end of speed-zones.

“I appreciate everybody coming together and being involved in this,” Porter said. “I thought it was something we needed to readdress with increasing traffic and decreasing water level. The river is getting narrower and narrower. There are more boats on it.”

According to Brown, the areas where the speed zones are in place are common sense areas where people should be slowing down.

“We just codified common sense,” Brown said.

FWC spokesperson Karen Parker said the zones were a product of the FWC and the counties responding to boater concerns about safety on the river. Each county that borders the river has created an ordinance to support these new zones. Boats must be off-plane, fully settled in the water and moving at a speed that makes little or no wake.

There have been signs posted in the past regarding speed-zones and they were being reinforced for a few years, but it was brought to the attention of the counties and FWC that not all the permits were in place to be legally enforcing the signs. The newly installed signs are fully permitted and enforceable.

Brown said there will be an educational period of about three months, but that does not mean tickets or warnings will not be issued, especially for repeat offenders. After those three months, there will be a time frame where warnings are issued to boaters not following the river signs, followed by enforcement with tickets.

The respective counties paid for the signs and FWC supported the process by supplying the man-power.

For more information regarding FWC or the speed-zone signs, please visit MyFWC.com.