Highland Beach officials review long-running beach-raker practice; manager to press companies and DEP for clarifications

The Natural Resources Preservation Advisory Board and town staff spent most of their Feb. 5 meeting reviewing the long-running dispute over private beach rakers in Highland Beach, with Town Manager Marshall Labady summarizing 15 years of consultations, permits and resident complaints and telling the board staff will send a letter to the raking companies and copy the Florida Department of Environmental Protection.

Labady, the town manager, told the board that ‘‘they are permitted by the state of Florida to bury the seaweed and the wet sand’’ under current DEP permits and that the state grants wet-sand burial in part because removing large volumes of sargassum could cost “$3 to $4 million” to truck off beaches during a heavy season. He described the recurring cycle: neighborhood complaints about ruts and buried trash, DEP permitting that allows wet-sand burial, and limits…