News

By Tim O’Meilia
    
A proposed inlet-to-inlet approach to beach restoration and management will cost small coastal towns $4,000 to $19,000 a year with no promise that a beach protection project would be approved.
    The pilot project proposed by state environmental officials is the first of its kind in the state to take a regional approach to beach management rather than evaluate each individual project. It’s also designed to streamline the state and federal permitting.
    After meeting monthly since May with local town and Palm Beach County officials to craft an agreement, state officials will visit council meetings in February to seek approval of the basic five-year, 33-page agreement.
    “We’re 90 percent there, folks. We’re down to the fine-tuning,” Danielle Fondren, deputy director of the state water resource management division, told municipal officials, environmentalists and engineers at the final
meeting Dec. 6 in Palm Beach.
    “This allows us to take the blinders off our eyes and take a longer look at beach management. We’re not looking narrowly, we’re looking regionally, more realistically,” she said.
    The contract would cover projects along the 15.7 miles of shoreline between the Lake Worth Inlet and the Boynton Inlet, and would require the coastal towns — Palm Beach, Lantana, South Palm Beach and Manalapan — to share in the annual cost of monitoring hard-bottom, sea turtle behavior and physical beach changes, including dunes.
    The monitoring is key to accelerating approval of projects because the basic information needed for state and federal permits would already be on hand.  
    Three previously approved projects — all in the town of Palm Beach — would benefit most from the agreement, mostly from accelerated permitting.
    Two proposed projects — at the south end of Palm Beach and in South Palm Beach and Lantana — are in the middle of environmental impact studies after previous proposals to install breakwaters and groins were rejected over environmental concerns.
    The towns would pay for the annual monitoring regardless of whether a project is eventually approved for that town.
    Fondren proposed two assessment methods, one based on the percentage of shoreline and the other on the percentage of critically eroded beach, as established by regulatory agencies.
    State officials estimated the monitoring costs at $472,000 a year, not including about $50,000 more in the first year. Under either method, Palm Beach would pay the vast majority of the cost.
    While the costs to Lantana and Lake Worth would be similar, Manalapan would pay more than $80,000 based on shoreline alone but only $4,725 based on eroded beach. South Palm Beach would pay $5,670 under the shoreline method and $19,372 under the eroded beach version.
    “Is Manalapan likely ever to have a project? No,” Fondren said. “Are they going to have benefits? Yes.”
    Manalapan Town Manager Linda Stumpf said there is little reason for her town to sign. “We have no projects. We won’t have any projects,” she said.
    Only 12 one-hundredths of a mile of Manalapan’s shoreline is classified as critically eroded, all in front of the Ritz-Carlton resort. Stumpf said the resort’s management had no interest in footing the annual bill.
    Other officials acknowledged that the monitoring would benefit future projects. “I know the difficulty in getting permits. If this helps expedite permitting, it’s a good thing,” said South Palm Beach Councilwoman Bonnie Fischer.
    Lantana Town Manager Debbie Manzo said she would leave the decision to her council but recommend an annual cap of $5,000.
    If some towns refuse to sign the agreement, Fondren said, the project may be dead.
“Right now, I consider it an all-or-nothing thing. If not everyone signs, then we lose the benefit of the regional approach,” she said.
    She said she hoped that Palm Beach County could be persuaded to pay a share of the monitoring. The county spends $42,000 a year on monitoring individual projects between the inlets now.
The agreement has not gained the support of environmental groups.
Dan Clark of Broward County-based Cry of the Water said too many questions remain, especially regarding turbidity monitoring while projects are under way.
    Fondren insisted that the regional approach is better. “None of the regulations have been compromised or weakened. In fact, they’re strengthened by the beach management agreement. We’re testing a wider area. We’re going beyond what we normally would require.”