Lake Maggiore

No launch fee is published. The City of St. Petersburg's boat ramps page and its Lake Maggiore Park page carry no fee language at all, and FWC's inventory row records no fee — a 2009-era attribute. A free launch is consistent with both, but no City page affirmatively says so. The one fee nearby is Boyd Hill Nature Preserve's gate — “$3/adult $1.50/children ages 3 - 16 under age 3 is FREE” — and that does not gate the boat ramp.

No navigable route is described anywhere. A dam at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. St. S. separates the lake from lower Salt Creek — Thomas Hallock writes that “a dam divides Salt Creek from Lake Maggiore” — and Friends of Salt Creek describes the lower creek as largely culverted and channelized through the city. Salt Creek does reach Tampa Bay at Bayboro Harbor, but not in a boat you launched in Lake Maggiore. Plan on 363 acres and nothing beyond it.

That is what the City publishes — “Boat ramp open 24 hours | Park opens 30 minutes before sunrise and closes at 11 p.m.” — and it contradicts FWC's inventory, which records “Daytime Use Only.” The City owns and runs the ramp, so its line governs. But the same open-24-hours wording appears on all nine ramps the City lists, so it reads as a directory template rather than a per-ramp operating statement, and the 11 p.m. park closing is the real constraint on your trailer in the lot. Call (727) 893-7441 if you plan to be out after dark.

The only agency species record is the restocking: SWFWMD reports FWC put “75,000 bluegill sunfish and 25,000 redear sunfish from the Richloam fish hatchery” into the lake at a December 2018 ceremony marking the end of the restoration. No FWC fishery survey, site forecast or City species list exists for this lake, so the usual largemouth-and-crappie assumption stays unconfirmed. A 1930 newspaper line quoted by Thomas Hallock says the new dam made “Maggiore a freshwater lake for bass fishing” — intent from 1930, not a current fish record.

Yes, treat this as alligator water. It is a 363-acre lake abutting a 400-acre nature preserve, and Friends of Salt Creek's newspaper-archive timeline records nuisance-alligator removals in 1978 and rising complaints in 2005. In the same neighbourhood, WFLA reported St. Petersburg police and FWC officers pulling an 11-foot and a 9-foot alligator from Lake Eli, near Dell Holmes Park and Lake Maggiore. Keep dogs and children off the ramp edge and away from the water. FWC's Nuisance Alligator Hotline is 866-FWC-GATOR (866-392-4286).

Better than it was, and still listed as impaired. SWFWMD's senior environmental scientist is quoted saying “The restoration efforts have improved the lake's water quality by increasing water clarity and reducing nutrient and chlorophyll levels” after a 20-year, $17.8 million restoration that dredged nearly 1.3 million cubic yards of muck. The Tampa Bay Water Atlas still shows WBID 1731A with an Impairment Status of Impaired, across 20 stations and 21,090 samples logged from 1997-02-26 to 2025-12-23. That page does not name the parameter. FDEP does. Its Impaired Waters service, queried 2026-07-31, returns four listings for WBID 1731A, all of them in assessment category 4e with the status "Ongoing Restoration Activities": Nutrients (Chlorophyll-a), Nutrients (Total Nitrogen), Nutrients (Total Phosphorus) and Specific Conductance. So it is a nutrient listing, not bacteria and not metals, and category 4e specifically means the lake is impaired but already under an adopted restoration plan rather than waiting on a TMDL — which is why looking for a TMDL record here comes up empty. The restoration described above is that plan. The City's own numbers agree: its 2019 Water Quality Report Card grades three Lake Maggiore stations, LM-1, LM-2 and LM-3, and gives all three a red for chlorophyll a in 2018, meaning more than one exceedance across 2016 to 2018, with total nitrogen marginal at yellow and phosphorus and dissolved oxygen green. Two agencies, two methods, the same first answer: chlorophyll. The practical translation for a boater is that this is a nutrient-enriched urban lake that grows algae, not a lake with a contamination problem — and that the restoration is working on the thing the listings name.