Lake Otis, Winter Haven: The Two Parking Spaces That Unlocked the Hydrilla Money

Ingram Leedy, who owned a home on the lake, had spent more than two years on the effort, a hunt for hydrilla funding. He brought in experts from the University of Florida to evaluate the lake and called in the Southwest Florida Water Management District and the Department of Environmental Protection. He founded a nonprofit, Save Lake Otis Chain, Inc., and the group raised its roughly $40,000 from the people who lived around the water. Then he worked with Roger Griffiths, the Canal Commission's executive director, to find a piece of property for a boat ramp.

"Lake Otis is an independent lake, so convincing my neighbors to put a public boat ramp was a monumental task," Leedy told The Ledger in August 2010.

The site they found was on the west shore of Little Lake Otis, the water peninsula at the lake's south end, between Avenue L and Avenue M Southeast, on ground known as Lesnick Park. The Canal Commission paid approximately $140,000 for one parcel and about $35,000 for materials. The city bought the adjacent 50-foot flag lot for $105,000, used it to add a drainage swale and relocate a lift station, and then donated the lot to the Canal Commission. The ramp and parking area were poured in porous concrete over a six-to-eight-inch layer of gravel, so rainwater filters through and percolates into the ground to recharge the aquifer rather than collecting in a retention pond.

What that bought, on the ground, was two parking places, a turnaround spot, a boat ramp, a dock and a small grassy area. Leedy described it to the paper as a minimal boat ramp. A qualifying ramp has to have enough room to safely turn a vehicle and trailer around, and ample parking within a quarter mile. It has to carry a sign saying it is a public boat ramp or use area. There has to be at least one directional sign on the nearest paved roadway pointing the way in.

It opened in November 2010. By then, Leedy said, an FWC maintenance plan was in place and the hydrilla had been treated. The ramp was checked in March 2014 for Polk County's public access lakes directory and entered there as follows: Lake Otis, Winter Haven, 143 acres, 11.8 feet deep, maintained by the Lake Region Lakes Management District, ramp rating excellent paved. The district's current ramp list still shows it: Lake Otis, independent, 143 acres, boat ramp and fishing pier, district owned.

More than 450 public waters in Florida are eligible for aquatic plant management funding under that rule. Polk County has more of them than any other county in the state, with 85.

On July 23, 2019, at Polk County's request, David Eilers and David McIlwaine of the USF Water Institute worked four pie-shaped sections of Lake Otis for the Florida Department of Environmental Protection's Lake Vegetation Index, throwing a submerged-vegetation sampling tool called a Frodus along a five-meter belt transect in each section and identifying every species present. They came back with 44 species of wetland vegetation, 33 of them native. The submerged community was dominated by Vallisneria americana and Ceratophyllum demersum. The lake scored 48 against an impairment threshold of 37, which the assessment classified as healthy. Hydrilla is not among the 44.