Posted on September 30, 2024
With reports of much-needed beach nourishment throughout the state, the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control (DNREC) commissioned a study on how beneficial replenishment will be in the long-run — and who should be paying for it.
Delaware has spent $68 million on nourishment projects statewide since the 1950s, but costs have gone up significantly in the 2000s due to the state’s cost-sharing obligation on large federal nourishment projects.
Currently, the state pays for the vast majority of replenishment projects with funds acquired by the state lodging tax and Bond Bill appropriations.
Industrial Economics, Inc. Economist Ben Blachly presented the draft findings, noting ocean beach property and infrastructure owners financially benefit significantly more from nourishment than the state does.
“Across all of the ocean sites, the communities face expected annual damages from coastal storms of about $33 million without nourishment, and nourishment avoids between 40-100% of these damages, again, depending on the site.”
Findings also show ocean beaches receive around 3.1 million annual trips by Delaware residents alone, and nourishment would help avoid the loss of those trips by up to 36% and would help avoid tourism economic loss by 1-17%.
For bay beach restoration projects, Blachly recommends only local and state governments handle funding due to the lack of county benefits.
“The tourism impacts at bay beaches are negligible so they don’t register, and we also happen to find no county owned infrastructure that would benefit from nourishment over the next 30 years.”
He explains the state cost share should be around 25-48% mainly due to the greater influence of the nourishment projects on coastal ecosystem protection on the bay, leaving local governments to cover 52-75% of the cost.
But for ocean beaches, the findings reveal the state should only pay 11-19% of the cost, while the rest should be left to county and local governments — 16-31% and 53-71% respectively.
DNREC plans to review questions of comments from the community on the findings this month, present the draft report to a workgroup and then present and discuss the results with DNREC leadership in early 2025.
The final report will be available publicly later this year.
