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East Hampton Town may face up to $1 million in annual costs for reconstructing the artificial dune atop a sandbag revetment on the Montauk beachfront, and officials are again considering a special “erosion control” tax district to pay for sand replenishment.
Councilman Peter Van Scoyoc, who will take over as supervisor in January, said recently that the town may have to consider exploring the logistics of an erosion control district on some, or all, Montauk properties to help pay to maintain the artificial dune until a hoped-for major beach nourishment project can be done.
How such a district would be arranged would certainly be the topic of heated debate, he admitted.
“The question becomes, if you decide it’s necessary, who is in the district?” Supervisor Larry Cantwell said. “Is it the 13 oceanfront property owners, paying $750,000 a year, $50,000 each? Is it the whole downtown? Is it all of Montauk?”
Mr. Van Scoyoc said those questions would have to be weighed in the upcoming discussions of how, or whether, to proceed.
“Then the question is, who benefits … from the dune being there, and how much,” Mr. Van Scoyoc said. “There’s a number of ways you could go about it. You could base it on frontage [along the beach], on value, on proximity to the ocean. There’s a lot that would have to be figured out about what’s fair.”
Last winter the U.S. Army Corps, after lobbying by the town, said it was planning to add a broad reconstruction of the Montauk beaches to the nearly $1 billion Fire Island to Montauk Point Reformulation Study, or FIMP. Such a project would create a broad sand beach seaward of the revetment and, hopefully, halt annual erosion of the dune on top of it. But the FIMP work plan is not expected to be finalized for another two years and it could be four years or more before any such project gets under way.
In the meantime, the town is likely to see a large annual bill for replacing sand scoured away by storm waves.
The federal Army Corps of Engineers, which constructed the much criticized revetment, spent what’s been estimated by town officials to be in the neighborhood of $1.5 million to reconstruct the dune twice since its completion in the spring of 2016—once in the fall of 2016, barely six months after it was first completed, and again just six months later, last spring. Now the sandbags are again exposed and most of the artificial dune washed away in one section where erosion has been chronically severe.
When responsibility for the project was turned over to the town by the Army Corps, as per the original agreement, the mandate for maintaining the artificial dune covering it was tailored to require full reconstruction only once each year, in the spring, rather than constant maintenance. The scope of the reconstruction work required was also slimmed down to ease the financial burdens on the town and Suffolk County, which will share the costs, though not equally.
The town’s 2018 operating budget, which was adopted by the Town Board earlier this month, included $1.5 million from the town’s surplus reserves for capital projects, with sand replenishment one of the stated possibilities. Mr. Van Scoyoc said that money will be available for the reconstruction of the dune next spring, and potentially the following year as well, depending on the first year’s cost.
But with a long stretch of sandbags now more visible than ever before, another long stretch still barely concealed behind a steeply eroded section of the dune, and the winter storm season just getting under way, costs are not likely to be at the low end of the spectrum. Now town officials have started to consider how to sustain their obligations under the agreement with the Army Corps.
“I think it could reach a point where that becomes unaffordable,” Mr. Cantwell said this week. “If it’s going to be $700,000 to a million each year, in 10 years that’s $7 million to $10 million. It’s clear the beach is going to require funding.”
When the project was approved by the Town Board in 2014, the predicted costs of annual replenishment of sand were said to be just $150,000 per year. But the town said the project has not “performed” as the Army Corps had claimed it would, and that it has suffered much more severe erosion than had been anticipated by the federal engineers.
The project was fiercely opposed by environmentalists, almost from the start, and the Town Board was heavily criticized for approving it. The Surfrider Foundation and environmental advocate Defend H2O filed a lawsuit seeking to halt its construction, but ultimately dropped the suit when a judge refused to issue an injunction to stop the construction.
A new wave of fury was stirred up when the work of building the revetment began and bulldozers began carving away some of the tallest natural dunes in Montauk to bury the sandbags beneath them. Protests halted work for nearly a week and more than dozen protesters were arrested.
Concerns about the project focused on its effect on the beach, and claims that the revetment would create a seawall with no beach seaward of it. Such conditions have not materialized but criticism is still lobbed at the Town Board whenever the sandbags are visible along a stretch now referred to by naysayers as “Dirt Bag Beach.”
Mr. Van Scoyoc defends the project’s presence still as a necessary evil that would pay dividends if a major storm were to strike. The cost of the protection is the annual replenishments, and the unsightliness of the sandbags when they are exposed.
“But if it wasn’t there we’d be looking at those hotels’ foundations and septic rings,” Mr. Van Scoyoc said, referring to the concrete septic rings Royal Atlantic owner Steve Kalimnios had placed on the beachfront in 2014 to protect his hotel’s foundation, which had been exposed by erosion. “The important thing is what does it look like come summer, when most people are at the beach.”
27east on Nov 28, 2017