Posted on July 11, 2018
By Tim Buckland, StarNews Online
Town officials could decide Tuesday night to resume and finish its stalled project to dredge the bottom of Carolina Beach Lake.
“My gut is that we’re going to finish the job,” Mayor Joe Benson said Friday. “I don’t think we’ll ever take this project up again if we don’t do it now.”
The idea was to dredge the lake to a depth of up to 8 feet — most of it was about 18 inches deep — to provide more room for stormwater during heavy rains, thus helping reduce flooding of the town’s streets. The town also hoped the greater depths would prevent algae blooms, which have been a recurring problem at the lake.
But the project was halted late last year after Army officials with the Military Ocean Terminal Sunny Point, or MOTSU, told the town to stop placing material removed from the lake bottom on undeveloped land owned by the military base. Although located across the Cape Fear River, Sunny Point owns a large swathe of land along the western edge of Pleasure Island to act as a buffer of undeveloped land in case of an accident at the Brunswick County military port.
Almost half of the project — primarily on the western part of the lake — was completed before the project was stopped. On Friday, Benson pointed out how the western part of the lake features crystal clear water free of algae.
Earlier this year, town manager Michael Cramer presented the council with four options — finish the job as originally planned, do nothing and use the budgeted funds for other projects, use some of the dredged material to build an island in the middle of the lake or “blend” material from the eastern section that contains arsenic with other places on the island to get the arsenic to within acceptable levels.
At the time, Cramer acknowledged that the final two options were the least feasible. And Benson said Friday that meetings with members of the community yielded a strong response to get the project done.
“The consensus among most residents is to finish the job,” he said.
Benson said the town is pursuing an easement that would allow it to store material on about 5 acres the town owns to the south of the former Coast Guard LORAN-C transmitter station near Snow’s Cut.
“We just need a short road to our property,” he said.
Source: StarNews Online
