Anchoring and Mooring

The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC), in consultation with the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), was directed by Florida’s Legislature in 2009 to establish a pilot program to explore potential options for regulating the anchoring or mooring of vessels (other than live-aboard vessels) outside the marked boundaries of public mooring fields. This Legislative action was codified in Section 327.4105, Florida Statutes (F.S.), and has since become widely referred to as the “Anchoring and Mooring Pilot Program.”

In an effort to seek resolution of the policy debate over how much authority should appropriately be granted to local governments with respect to vessels anchoring within their jurisdictions, the Legislature created Section 327.4105, Florida Statutes, in 2009. This law established a pilot program to further explore options for local governments to regulate the anchoring of vessels outside public mooring fields. FWC, in consultation with DEP, was tasked with selecting five locations for inclusion in the pilot program to test different anchoring and mooring policies, working with the local governments from those five locations as they developed anchoring ordinances, coordinating the review of the ordinances with the greater boating public and interest groups, monitoring progress as the ordinances were implemented, and reporting findings and recommendations to Florida’s Executive and Legislative branches by January 1, 2014. At the request of FWC and following the submission of the 2014 report, the Legislature extended the pilot program an additional three years, to July 1, 2017 in order to collect more data. The Legislature further required FWC to submit additional findings and recommendations by January 1, 2017. This report serves that purpose.

A copy of this report can be found at the following link: m.myfwc.com/media/4105248/17-anchoring-mooring-report.pdf