Posted on March 29, 2018
By Dee Langston, The Outer Banks Voice
For decades, Currituck officials have tried to get permission to dredge a channel connecting the Currituck Sound to the boat basin in front of the historic Whalehead Club in Corolla.
The answer, from the North Carolina Division of Coastal Management and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, has been “no, no, no.”
Most recently, the answer was “a rather loud door slam,” County Manager Dan Scanlon said in an email, referring to a February meeting with the permitting agencies.
Undaunted, the county’s current board of commissioners is trying again to get the necessary permits. This time, three of them went straight to the top.
Currituck commissioners Paul Beaumont, Marion Gilbert and Mike Payment traveled to Washington earlier this month, and while they were there, made a pitch for the federal government’s help with obtaining the permits.
The Army Corps of Engineers permitted the county to deepen the boat basin at the Whalehead Club, Beaumont said during the March 19 commissioners’ meeting. “That’s a great feature for the county, but there’s only one small problem: you can’t get boats into the boat basin,” he said.
“We’d exhausted working through the Army Corps of Engineers out of Wilmington, so we used (the Washington meeting) as an opportunity to make an end-around and go directly to the presidential administration,” Beaumont said.
The trip was organized by the National Association of Counties, or NACo, which invited county commissioners to come to the White House to meet with the Intergovernmental Affairs Office of President Trump’s administration.
Prior to meeting with administration officials, representatives from NACo coached commissioners to let the federal administration know about issues that affect their counties.
The group then met with Billy Kirkland, special assistant to the president and deputy director of Intergovernmental Affairs at The White House, along with other government officials.
“We spent about four hours in briefings with members of Trump’s administration,” Beaumont said.
“They asked for questions, and boy we gave them to them. We used that opportunity to bring a bunch of issues forward,” Beaumont said. One of those issues was the channel.
“I remain guardedly optimistic that we might actually get some traction,” Beaumont said.
The county has sought permits to connect the sound to a deepened boat basin numerous times, starting in 1996, but each time, the request has been denied.
Most recently, county staff participated in a pre-scoping meeting for the channel in Washington, N.C. Feb. 20, County Manager Dan Scanlon said in an email.
A pre-scoping meeting allows applicants to meet with the various state and federal agencies to discuss and review the applicants’ intent of submitting an application, before an application is actually submitted, Scanlon explained.
Quible & Associates, a member of the county’s team, expanded on the county’s previous application and offered additional mitigation ideas during the pre-scoping meeting, Scanlon said in the email.
In the past, the Division of Coastal Management has rejected the proposed project because of potential damage to aquatic plants, adversely impacting the fish and other marine animals that feed on them.
During the February meeting, coastal management representatives emphatically stated that they did not believe the county had the opportunity to even submit an application for their consideration, Scanlon said in the email.
The Army Corps of Engineers representative read a statement saying that the county has previously been denied the application, and should not anticipate the position has changed, Scanlon said.
“It was a rather loud door slam,” he added.
Source: The Outer Banks Voice
