FOR
IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: John Yarbrough, Lee County Parks & Recreation
(941) 461-7410
FORT MYERS, Fla. (April 16, 2002) – Lee
County’s largest regional park – the 1,115-acre Hickey’s Creek Mitigation
Park – will officially open to the public Saturday after a ceremony to be
attended by the many organizations, agencies and citizens that made the park
possible.
The ribbon cutting ceremony
will be at 10 a.m. at the park, located three miles west of Alva off State Road
80. Take State Road 80 (Palm Beach Boulevard) east of I-75 and past where the
road no longer is a divided highway. The
park is at Hickey Creek Road on the south side of the highway.
The festivities will continue
from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. with family activities, canoeing, musical entertainment,
hiking and story telling. Lee
County Commissioner John Albion will serve as master of ceremonies and will be
joined by a number of officials from the environmental community, Conservation
2020 program and descendants of the Dennis Hickey family.
Improvements to the park
include five miles of natural hiking trails that include a fishing pier,
canoe/kayak landing, two pedestrian bridges across Hickey’s Creek, two
overlooks and two boardwalks across wetlands.
The park also has restrooms, parking, an amphitheater and two picnic
areas. The construction manager was
Taylor-Pansing Inc. Cost: $815,000.
The park includes pine
flatwoods, forested and herbaceous wetlands, and hardwood hammocks.
Hickey’s Creek is the most striking feature of this park and is
relatively untouched from the park boundary to the end of the watershed.
The park provides habitat and protection for the Florida Scrub Jay and
Gopher Tortoise.
Hickey’s Creek Park also
complements the nearby 768-acre Caloosahatchee Regional Park on the north side
of the Caloosahatchee River. A
canoe trail runs from the regional park along the Caloosahatchee River and into
Hickey’s Creek and the Mitigation Park.
The county purchased most of
the property for Hickey’s Creek Mitigation Park in 1994 and has added acreage
since through a Conservation 2020 purchase, a land donation from Lehigh
Corporation, and a Florida Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) purchase
of additional acreage through the Greenways and Trails Acquisition Program.
The park improvements are being paid for with a combination of revenues
from regional park impact fees and tourist taxes, and DEP grants.
The residents of Alva and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission also were instrumental in the creation of the park to preserve this open space from development and provide a Gopher Tortoise mitigation area. The total acquisition cost of the park was $3.9 million.