Posted on October 6, 2025
On September 19, Currituck County announced that it is developing a Beach Management Plan. The plan follows a five-year Shoreline Stability Assessment study by Coastal Protection Engineering (CPE), the company that will be the consultant for the Beach Management Plan.
Currituck County Manager Rebecca Gay indicated that the county hopes to have a draft of the Beach Management Plan by the end of the year.
The announcement of the Beach Management Plan is the latest chapter of the longstanding issue of how Currituck County will maintain its beaches and protect homes and property along the shoreline given the impact of beach erosion.
Currituck County is the only coastal county in North Carolina that has not used beach nourishment to maintain its shoreline, and county commissioners have been consistent in the position that it is too expensive and will not be supported by mainland residents of the county, where the majority of voters live.
The refusal of elected officials to allocate funds for nourishment has been a sore point for Corolla residents and property owners.
In an interview in May 2023, then Commissioner Bob White who represented the Currituck Outer Banks, told the Voice that “The Board of Commissioners is never going to vote for [beach nourishment] which is “viewed as a beach problem not a mainland issue and ultimately, their voting base is over there and there’s no way that somebody in Moyock is going to pay for something over here.”
Knotts Island resident Commissioner Tony Angell currently represents the Currituck Outer Banks. In an interview for this article, he acknowledged the county’s beachfront contributes a “very significant portion of our county’s budget or revenue,” adding that Currituck Outer Banks property taxes “keeps my property taxes a little bit lower.”
Nonetheless, Angell said, “The people that don’t live on the beach shouldn’t have to pay for the beach outright.”
“I understand that there’s a lot of places in Corolla that do need some help,” he added. “And…I would like to see some small-scale trucking operations [for sand replenishment], that kind of thing, before we try to do any kind of offshore nourishment.”
The county has implemented small scale programs—there are sand fence and dune vegetation cost-share programs for beachfront property owners. Homeowners who are losing beach to the ocean have taken advantage of the county’s cost-share programs as well as paying out of pocket for dune pushes to rebuild sand dunes.
But Corolla resident Tony Cerri told the Voice that the smaller scale effort “no longer works in much of Currituck. There isn’t enough dry beach left to absorb wave power before it hits [the dune].”
Cerri, who has owned a home in Corolla since 2013, is a former secretary of the Corolla Civic Association (CCA), which has Currituck County alleging misappropriation of Occupancy Tax revenues. He has an engineering degree from West Point and spent 20 years in government as a computer scientist.
The current Beach Management project is funded by a grant of nearly $121,000 that goes toward “storm vulnerability modeling” and “a public engagement and outreach plan for the Beach Management Plan.”
The supplemental storm vulnerability modeling will be performed by a program called XBEACH, which Cerri thinks will provide a more complete picture of how Currituck beaches will be affected over time than the SBEACH program CPE used for their five- year Shoreline Stability Assessment.
“I am a fan of using the higher fidelity model in order to better shape the solution” he said, adding, however, that “I am not a fan of kicking the can down the road for yet more model runs. SBEACH and eyeballs are good enough to identify a huge problem.”
However, with more than 20 miles of beach along the Currituck Banks, Currituck County Commissioner Chair Paul O’Neal said “There is no quick fix. We’ve got several options that are being looked at. “
Those options, he said, include the sand fencing and beach grass program as well as “trucking in sand for some of the hot spots, looking at beach pushes which have been done in the past.” While he notes that beach nourishment is a possibility, it doesn’t seem to be a very likely one.
“It’s very expensive, and once you start, you never stop. A lot of communities are doing their second nourishment before they even paid off the first one,” O’Neal said. “That’s a really tough alternative.”
Angell agreed with O’Neal, telling the Voice, “It’s not economically feasible for counties to continue to fund beach nourishment.” But he wondered if legislation could be passed that would “fund a North Carolina-operated dredge that would operate up and down the [the state] and perform these dredging and beach nourishment operations.”
O’Neal suggested a number of possible options including hardened structures off the beach “which would prevent some of the erosion.” Hardened structures are not currently permitted in North Carolina for beach maintenance, but he suggested that “with enough of the coastal communities starting to…look at that and seeing where it’s been successful…maybe it’s time for the coastal communities to push for allowing those type of things.”
There will be, O’Neal emphasized, ample opportunity for the public to be involved in the
“You can’t do something of this scale without the public’s input,” he said. “The board of commissioners will never consider adopting without the public’s input.”
Cerri said the time for action is now, pointing out that the five-year assessment identified quite a number of properties, especially in Ocean Hills, that were being affected by shoreline change.
“Along this approximately 0.6-mile stretch of beach, nearly every oceanfront house was shown to be impacted over the 30-year horizon,” the 2024 Stability Assessment reported.
“This has been going on for over six years…Still not one shred of a plan…I don’t need a study to know what’s going on. My grandkids can see what’s going on every time they hit the beach. “
