PANAMA CITY BEACH — For Kennard Watson, the Front Beach Road Community Redevelopment Area Plan is the perfect opportunity to install wildlife-friendly street lights along the coast. 

As president of Panama City Beach Turtle Watch, Watson said he is concerned that the lighting being installed during CRA projects will negatively affect local wildlife. 

Because of his unease, Watson wrote a letter to City Manager Drew Whitman on May 3 seeking information on the current CRA designs and expressing his concerns about poorly designed street lights. 

"(I just want) to make sure we don't lose this opportunity to do something," he said of his motivation for the letter. "Probably one of the most significant things the city could do to reduce the serious problem of light pollution on the Beach would be to implement a consistent roadway lighting theme that doesn't cause harm to sea turtles."

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In his letter to Whitman, Watson said "poorly designed street lights can harm nesting and hatchling sea turtles by leading them in the wrong direction" as hatchlings crawl toward the brightest light source. On a natural beach, that would be the ocean horizon and not the dark profile of an unlit dune. 

Watson has noted that artificial lights are the reason more than half of the hatchlings born on the sands of Panama City Beach crawl in the wrong direction. 

In his letter, he also gave an example of wildlife-friendly lighting already installed in PCB. This is the amber-colored lights that illuminate the parking lot at Pier Park, which he said is the best option when it comes to street lights that have the smallest impact on nesting sea turtles. 

With portions of Front Beach Road redeveloped and others awaiting CRA construction, Watson said coastal street lighting in PCB currently is "a mishmash of some lights that are wildlife friendly and others that aren't."

In Whitman's response letter dated May 12, he wrote that the city's CRA plans call for LED lights equipped with shields that keep light from being visible from the beach, as well as to "any turtles that may venture upon it."

Adopted by the PCB City Council in 2001, the CRA is upgrading Front Beach Road and surrounding roadways with such features as tram lanes, sidewalks, bicycle lanes, new street signs, landscaped medians and enhanced lighting. 

"The interest of the city is singularly focused on finding lighting that will not suffer the maintenance issues that have plagued us since the installation of (current) lights," Whitman wrote in his response. "The City Council is not presently inclined to entertain any new lighting that reduces the illumination in the rights of way."

While city officials declined to do additional interviews on the topic with The News Herald, PCB spokeswoman Debbie Ingram wrote in an email that all lights being used as part of future CRA projects are "compliant" and "turtle friendly." 

Still, they will emit a white light and not the amber hue that Watson said is best. 

"If the plan is to upgrade street lighting in the CRA to white LED, that would not address the wildlife protection concerns regarding sea turtles since white light is highly disruptive to sea turtle orientation on the beach," Watson said. "LED is wonderful technology, but is has to be amber to be fully effective.

"I (have) concerns that the upgraded lighting would not be effective at protecting sea turtles if it doesn't have all of those elements of shielding with proper amber light sources."