Posted on April 6, 2017
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The East Hampton Town Board on Tuesday said it will ask the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to abandon plans to fortify the beaches to the west of Montauk Inlet, since doing so without constructing jetties, or groins, along the beach would cost some $21 million—$11 million of which the town would have to pay for. Instead, the town will tell the Army Corps to focus on the regular dredging of the Montauk Inlet channel and use the sand scoured out from there to provide intermittent bolstering to the beaches of Soundview and Culloden. The Army Corps had recommended that the town allow it to construct three groins perpendicular to the shoreline between the inlet and Culloden Point, truck in several thousand tons of sand to create a 20-foot-wide beach, and then add to it with sand dredged from the inlet every two years, with the groins to hold it in place. The plan would have allowed the Army Corps to fund the work, including dredging the inlet every two years for the next 50 years, with money from the billions in federal Superstorm Sandy shoreline protection grants. But constructing the groins would violate the town’s Local Waterfront Revitalization Law, so the town had asked the Army Corps to employ a larger one-time reconstruction of the beach with some 500,000 tons of dredged sand, creating a 70-foot-wide beach along Soundview and Culloden. The corps said that alternative would cost $21 million, and that the town would have to pay the difference between that and the $10 million cost of the option that created the smaller beach with groins. “Despite our best efforts to convince the Corps that [no groins] is the best plan and they should pay for it, they’re not going to,” Supervisor Larry Cantwell said on Tuesday. “An alternative is … that this project becomes a navigation project.” Mr. Cantwell said the town could ask the Army Corps to simply return to pre-Sandy plans to dredge the inlet every two years and deposit the approximately 20,000 tons of sand removed from the channel on the beaches to the west. That approach carries some uncertainty, because the Army Corps would have to go back to Congress for funding support of each round of dredging, but it would not cost the town anything. “That’s as close to taking care of these two problems as we’re going to get without a huge burden on taxpayers,” Councilman Peter Van Scoyoc said. Source: 27east
