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Lisa Hendrickson is almost out of sand.
Hendrickson is the mayor of Redington Shores, Florida, a wealthy beach town in Pinellas County. Her town occupies a small portion of an extremely weak barrier island that stretches to the west side of the vast Tampa Bay metropolitan area, separating cities like Tampa and St. Petersburg from the Gulf of Mexico. Many of her constituents have unobstructed views of the sea.
The town is the only protected area in the Gulf of Mexico An increasingly unstable storm is a pristine beach Attracting millions of visitors every year — but that beach is disappearing fast. A series of storms finally Hurricane Idalia last falleroding away much of the sand that protects the Redington coast and its surrounding towns, leaving residents just one step away from flooding their homes.
The dangerous situation is the result of a standoff between local residents and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the federal agency responsible for flood control and protection of many of America’s beaches. The Corps often transports thousands of tons of sand to rebuild eroded beaches, but the agency declined to provide New sand worth $42 million Unless coastal property owners in the area allow public access to the beaches behind their properties. However, hundreds of property owners have in turn refused to sign documents granting these access points, known as easements. The standoff brought storm recovery efforts in the region to a near standstill.
The standoff highlights growing tensions between the federal government and homeowners in coastal areas threatened by climate change. Beach protection and insurance costs are rising rapidly in Florida and other states as sea levels rise and powerful storms cause more damage than ever before. Agencies like the Legion must weigh those costs against the benefits to property owners in places like the Tampa Bay area. When these interests collide, densely populated coastal areas may be at risk or uninsured and targeted by the next climate storm.
“Our coastlines are the first line of defense against storms, and our bay beaches are eroding,” Hendrickson told Grist. “I don’t know what we’re going to do now or how we can come together to fix it. this problem.”
The Marine Corps established an easement policy decades ago to ensure that no public funds were spent to restore private beaches, but the agency didn’t start enforcing the rule in earnest until after Superstorm Sandy in 2012. When the Corps tried to redevelop New Jersey’s Broken Shore, it discovered it didn’t have all the easements it needed. local government spent years trying to get themstate governments must Use eminent domain Seize portions of the beach to satisfy the agency’s requirements.
In the years since, the agency warned Pinellas County and other local governments that they would not receive more sand unless they obtained easements from all property owners on the beach. The Corps said it first raised the issue with Pinellas back in 2017, but tensions began to rise last year after Idalia eroded the area’s beaches to dangerous levels, urgently needing new protective sand.
The Corps requires that the easement be “permanent,” meaning the public will always have access to the beach area behind the owner’s property. The agency says it does this just to be able to help after future storms: When hurricanes devastate beaches, the Marine Corps often swoops in weeks later to pay for emergency beach supplies to make sure homes don’t wash away. The agency said it cannot commit to the emergency work unless it can ensure beach access will remain public forever. It also says it requires an easement all Property owners in a specific area because a nutrition program will not work unless it is continuous along the entire stretch of sand.
Pinellas County officials went to great lengths to secure these easements, even going door-to-door to plead with residents to “sand sign”. Nonetheless, about half of 461 owners All along the barrier islands refused to grant them. County officials are still urging residents to submit applications, but they have received few new easements since late last year.
The odd thing about the easement dispute is that these beachfront residents don’t fully own the beach behind their homes—in fact, most of the county’s beaches are already public. State law states that all artificial sand beaches in Florida are public until the “erosion control line,” which is roughly the same line that marks high tide. In other words, everything from the water to the high tide line is open for anyone to walk, tan, or spread out a blanket. The land in dispute between the Corps and homeowners is simply a stretch of sand between the backs of beach houses and the high tide line, which in many cases is only a few dozen feet.
“For most of the project, the beaches were open to the public,” said John Bishop, Pinellas County coastal management coordinator. “A lot of the easement areas are not even on the beach but in the dunes behind the beach.”
Property owners have many reasons for rejecting the easement, but most are concerned that allowing public access to the beach behind their property will encourage visitors to venture onto their dunes or sit on the seawall behind their homes. Of course, they can’t stop tourists and beachgoers from using the beach, which is between the erosion line and the water, but they don’t want them anywhere near it.
Even those property owners who have been granted easements don’t see any benefit in doing so because the Corps won’t provide the sand until everyone complies.
Andrew Youngman, property manager at Sea Oats Resort Apartments in Redington Shores, said his 40-unit building’s board of directors was initially eager last year to grant a beach maintenance easement to the Marine Corps. But when residents learned they wouldn’t be able to get new sand unless the county obtained easements from all property owners, they thought it would never happen, so they never completed the paperwork. Since then, Youngman has watched the area around his property erode.
“We’re probably in the best position around here because we have our own dunes there,” Youngman told Grist. “Others are flat from their buildings to the water.”
The bitter rivalry between local government and the Army Corps of Engineers has raged for nearly a year, with some political heavyweights joining the county’s side. senator Rick Scott and Marco Rubio and representatives Anna Paulina LunaAll Republicans accused the Corps of delaying the beach plan on bureaucratic grounds. scott last month Sent a letter to the team Said his constituents “have seen enough inaction.” The letter urges the Corps to relax its easement policy and says “further delays in these projects could cause catastrophic harm to … coastal communities.”
In response to Grist’s question, a Marine Corps spokesman did not say the agency would budge on its policy, but that the agency has begun changing it. implement Elsewhere in Florida In other coastal countries, e.g. south carolina.
Even as Pinellas County tried to obtain a separate temporary easement to build new emergency dunes on top of the beach, many residents resisted, in part because of concerns that the new dunes would block their ocean views. A further standoff with homeowners forced the county to build a patchwork of sand dunes behind coastal properties, leaving holes in front of homes and hotels the owners didn’t want to grant an easement for.
Pinellas County Commissioner René Flowers, who has been pushing the Corps to move sand, said the broken dunes won’t be of much use during storm season.
“When there’s a break in the chain, all the work you do isn’t as impactful in terms of conservation,” she said.
Rob Young, a geology professor at Western Carolina University and a frequent critic of beach nourishment projects, said Pinellas County should fund beach nourishment projects through a sales tax increase rather than relying on the federal government to pay for new sand. He noted that some of the seaside towns on North Carolina’s Outer Banks tourist tax Pay for sand after federal government stopped paying fees.
“For many people, privacy is more important than the risk of destruction,” he said, referring to residents who refused to be granted the easement. “The solution is very simple – you do it at your own risk.” Young added that many nutrition programs don’t seem to be worth the money they cost. He was referring to the Jersey Shore, where a $1 million beach nourishment project Washed away in just one year.
The knowledge that beach nourishment may not be a good investment is of little help to local leaders like Pinellas County Commissioner Flowers, who is preparing for hurricane season, which meteorologists predict will be One of the most active hurricane seasons in decades.
“I’m very concerned about the homeowners who are going to be affected because maybe their neighbors choose not to allow access,” she said.
This article was originally published in Grist exist https://grist.org/extreme-weather/redington-shores-tampa-florida-beach-erosion-hurricanes/. Grist is a nonprofit independent media organization dedicated to telling the stories of climate solutions and a just future. For more information, please visit Grist website
