McKay Bay — Tampa, Florida

McKay Bay is the small, shallow arm of Tampa Bay on the eastern edge of the City of Tampa where the Palm River and the Tampa Bypass Canal empty out. The Southwest Florida Water Management District (SWFWMD) describes the bypass canal as running parallel to the Hillsborough River for approximately 15.7 miles before it empties into McKay Bay, so the bay is the end point of the flood control channel that carries high water around Temple Terrace and Tampa.

The lower reach of that channel is the Palm River. A SWFWMD release dated October 27, 2011 states that the Palm River is part of the Tampa Bypass Canal and flows from the District's S-160 Flood Control Structure, located just north of the Selmon Expressway, to the mouth of McKay Bay. On the bay itself, the City of Tampa manages McKay Bay Nature Park, a 38-acre preserve that the city presents as a national avian sanctuary. Around the bay sit a restored dredge hole, rebuilt Palm River marshes and the city's waste to energy plant, each with its own public record.

Dredging left a deep pit in the floor of McKay Bay. In the May to June 2012 issue of its WaterMatters magazine, SWFWMD reported that its Surface Water Improvement and Management (SWIM) Program was looking at restoring the 56-acre McKay Bay Dredge Hole, and that the work would require enough clean fill to fill two football stadiums. The case for choosing this hole came from the Tampa Bay Estuary Program, which had studied 11 dredge holes in Tampa Bay and found that the McKay Bay Dredge Hole had the poorest habitat quality.

The fill came from the port next door. The Tampa Port Authority was designing its Eastport Mitigation project on the nearby shoreline, which would create 17 acres of wetlands and a 3.4-acre tidal channel and free up 216,000 cubic yards of clean fill. A second Port Authority construction project would add 110,000 cubic yards of marine dredge material. Under the arrangement described in the 2012 article, the Port Authority took the lead on building an underwater berm and filling the dredge hole to the existing bay bottom elevation, while SWFWMD paid for construction as well as design and permitting. The stated aim was to bring the McKay Bay bottom back to life so that sea life would return.

The Palm River carries the scars of the canal project. According to the SWFWMD release of October 27, 2011, building the Tampa Bypass Canal in the 1960s required significant dredging of the Palm River, and in the 1970s areas of erosion caused by the construction were identified along the river. In 1976, Hillsborough County and SWFWMD installed rock riprap and vegetation to hold the banks. A 2002 U.S. Army Corps of Engineers study then identified approximately 20 acres of wetlands and 20 acres of upland areas along the Palm River with a potential for restoration.

Work started in fall 2011 on two of those sites. Phase I removed invasive plants, created intertidal marsh platforms and restored upland areas on District-owned parcels on the east side of McKay Bay along the mouth of the river; Phase II was planned to focus on water quality and begin in 2012. The District's Hillsborough River Basin Board funded $1.1 million of the project's $2.1 million cost, and the state SWIM program and the Florida Department of Transportation covered the rest.

By the 2012 WaterMatters report, the Palm River Restoration was described as a multi-phase project to reduce erosion, restore habitat and improve the quality of runoff entering McKay Bay, with Phase I restoring freshwater wetlands on 50 acres at the river mouth. A SWFWMD environmental scientist told the magazine that a bird rookery was already developing in the new wetland. SWFWMD expected the dredge hole, Eastport Mitigation and Palm River projects to be completed later in 2012.

The public face of the bay is McKay Bay Nature Park, run by the City of Tampa Parks and Recreation Department and open from sunrise to sunset. The city's trail page, updated October 1, 2023, describes a 0.17 mile boardwalk trail that winds through the mangroves toward the extensive mudflats of McKay Bay, where many species of wading birds forage, particularly in winter months.

Birds can be watched with spotting scopes from two fixed points: an observation tower and education pavilion on the east side of the McKay Bay preserve and a bird viewing station on the west side. A paved 1.25 mile multi-use path leads through the park and circles the peninsula to the south, and a half-mile nature trail crosses the 38-acre preserve. The City of Tampa lists parking, interpretive signage, bicycle racks and picnic tables among the amenities.

The park also serves as a staging ground for shoreline work. The Tampa Bay Estuary Program listed McKay Bay Nature Park as the location for the Hillsborough River and Coastal Cleanup presented by Keep Tampa Bay Beautiful on September 17, 2022, part of the International Coastal Cleanup, with other sites along the Hillsborough River, Alafia River and Little Manatee River.

Because the Tampa Bypass Canal ends in McKay Bay, the bay receives river water that would otherwise flow through downtown Tampa. SWFWMD's WaterMatters magazine for November to December 2004 recorded the scale of that diversion after Hurricanes Charley, Frances and Jeanne: the canal diverted more than 200 billion gallons of water from the Hillsborough River, routing it around Temple Terrace and Tampa to McKay Bay, at an average of 3.5 billion gallons per day. The District reported that it normally operates the canal once a year, but in 2004 ran it three times for a total of 58 days.

That pulse of fresh water enters the bay through the Palm River below the S-160 structure, the same reach where SWFWMD later rebuilt marsh platforms and planted wetlands. The SWIM Program, which SWFWMD says has restored more than 15,000 acres of freshwater, estuarine and upland habitat since 1987 and which lists Tampa Bay as a priority water body, paired the Palm River and McKay Bay work with the aim of cleaner runoff entering the bay.

The bay shares its name with the McKay Bay Waste to Energy Facility, operated by the City of Tampa Solid Waste department. The city states that the plant burns household and commercial garbage at very high temperatures to create steam that drives generators, that Seminole Electric Cooperative buys the electricity, and that the process reduces landfill waste by 90 percent. Tampa lists a $91.5 million investment to upgrade and maintain the McKay Bay plant, with improvements that began in February 2024 covering boilers, the turbine generator, cranes, cooling systems and air pollution control.

Port land frames the bay as well. The Tampa Port Authority's Eastport Mitigation project, described by SWFWMD in 2012, created wetlands and a tidal channel on the nearby McKay Bay shoreline as part of the same set of projects that refilled the dredge hole. Industrial, port and utility uses therefore sit beside the restored marshes and the avian sanctuary, which is why the McKay Bay record runs through several agencies at once: SWFWMD, the Tampa Port Authority, Hillsborough County, the Florida Department of Transportation and the City of Tampa.