Lake Lowery, Polk County: The County Owns Shoreline It Can't Reach

Polk County owns lakefront land on Lake Lowery and cannot build a boat ramp on it, because the only way to the land is a private road.

Jeff Spence, Polk's director of parks and natural resources, set this out for the county's Lakes Access Advisory Committee in July 2014. Work to secure public access to the 900-acre lake near Haines City was stalled for now, he said. The county held lakefront property it had acquired after the Federal Emergency Management Agency purchased the lots and demolished homes that had sustained repeated flooding. Access to that property was via a private road, and it would be impractical to develop a public boat ramp unless the public could use the road. Lake Lowery, The Ledger noted in its account of the meeting, is the largest lake in Polk County with no public boat ramp.

Lake Lowery has never had a county boat ramp. Writing in The Ledger in February 2010, Tom Palmer set down what access there had been: the 896-acre lake once had public access via Fletcher's Fish Camp on the south side, the fish camp had been closed for decades, and Lake Lowery never had a county boat ramp as far as he knew. What remained was access by lakefront property owners, or by residents and guests at Oak Harbor, a private vacation resort established in 1971. Palmer also noted that the county owned lakefront lots there and that the catch was the private road; committee chairman David Hupp had been asking County Attorney Michael Craig about options without result.

The county's land there came out of the flooding. Lake Lowery sits between Lake Alfred and Haines City, and the homes that generated the complaints stand between the lake's northern shore and Lake Lowery Road. Spence, then the county's natural resources manager, told commissioners the lake basin was unique because no civil improvement project could solve the flooding that inundated the neighborhood during El Nino. Six of the most seriously affected Lake Lowery homes were purchased by FEMA.

In 1998 Polk commissioners approved a program to buy vacant lots lying within Lake Lowery's flood plain, and tightened development standards. There were only a handful of takers. In August 2001 the commission rejected the first attempt in two and a half years to use what it called the Lake Lowery Corridor Project, voting 4-1 against buying a vacant three-acre parcel from William and Mary Overstreet for up to $32,595. Commissioner Don Gifford led that vote. Commissioner Bruce Parker cast the one vote for it, saying a previous board had made a commitment.

Polk County has held the power to cut a legal route since 1958. That year, county voters approved a referendum authorizing the County Commission to condemn land for secure access to water bodies. The committee kept coming back to it. At its June 2011 meeting, Hupp asked about the chances of using the 1958 referendum to improve lake access. Mike Callender, Polk County's parks and recreation manager, said that would be up to the commission, which would have to decide whether there was an important enough public purpose. "The commission would rather negotiate than take," he said. By July 2014 the county's legal staff was asking the committee for specific proposals rather than a blanket endorsement of using eminent domain in all cases.

The committee had been created in 2008 at the urging of then-County Commissioner Jean Reed, when about 80 of Polk County's 500 water bodies had public access. Lake Hatchineha, the other water named in the same testimony, had had no direct public access for some time, and the purchase that fixed that was part of the same effort Reed led to secure public access to as many lakes as possible. The Port Hatchineha Restaurant and Marina closed its doors to guests on April 30, 2006, which stopped local fishermen from reaching one of the few boat ramps on Lake Hatchineha; the owners, Patsy and Charles Russell, were making the three-acre marina off Hatchineha Road a members-only facility and looking to sell. The County Commission agreed to buy Port Hatchineha for $1.35 million, and the Lake Hatchineha boat ramp reopened on a Saturday in late November 2008 as a county facility.

The Spring 2014 Public Access Lakes directory from the county's Parks and Natural Resources Division lists Lena, Link and Livingston among its lakes, and Hatchineha as well, and nothing for Lowery. The one entry named Lowery in the state's boat ramp inventory is Lowery Lake, in Clay County, reached off Highway 21 by Greble Road and Treat Road.