Posted on May 11, 2026
INDIAN RIVER COUNTY — County officials are moving forward with an updated beach preservation plan aimed at guiding long-term shoreline management and erosion control efforts along the county’s coast.
The draft update was presented to county commissioners during their May 5 meeting. Public comments on the proposal will be accepted through May 19 before the plan is revised and brought back to the board.
The beach preservation plan serves as the framework for the county’s beach management program and outlines strategies for shoreline stewardship and coastal resilience. The current proposal marks the sixth update to the plan, with the previous revision completed in 2019.
Consultants from Taylor Engineering presented findings on shoreline conditions and recommendations for future management efforts.
“The proactive management works and overall, the beach management program here has successfully maintained shoreline stability average on a countywide basis,” said Wendy Laurent, associate vice president of Taylor Engineering and a coastal engineer involved in the study.
Despite those gains, Laurent said several shoreline areas continue to face challenges.
“They’re primarily due to ongoing erosion, limited buffers, as well as infrastructure being located right along that shoreline,” she said.
Laurent emphasized the county’s beaches also play a significant role in the local economy.
“Tourism in specific locations and found that here in Indian River County, there is $248 million in annual economic impact directly related to beach tourism and it supports 9,000 jobs,” Laurent said. “The beaches and your coastline is very important.”
The draft plan recommends continued and expanded beach nourishment efforts, which involve placing additional sand along eroded shorelines.
“Overall, nourishment remains the most effective strategy,” Laurent said. “It’s the most reliable, environmentally compatible, and it’s what we recommend throughout this report.”
The presentation also highlighted the importance of securing additional perpetual beach easements to make future projects easier to complete.
“A huge achievement here is planning sector four gaining almost 100% of the perpetual beach easements,” Laurent said. “That makes it so much easier to go out and do projects in the future. They can react as quickly as possible because they don’t need to go out and collect new easements with each project.”
County officials identified obtaining more easements in other shoreline sectors as a priority moving forward.
Sector seven was identified during the presentation as the county’s most heavily eroded shoreline area.
“If we went ahead and put sand in sector seven on the easements we currently have, we would estimate that sand to disappear in about two to three years,” said Coastal Resources Manager Quintin Bergman. “So cost benefit analysis shows that we want to get more sand out there when we have the opportunity. So we’re looking for more easements than what we currently have.”
Officials also discussed the financial sustainability of expanding shoreline protection projects.
“We’re planning to do a financial sustainability analysis on this program to understand what our expenses have been in the past,” Bergman said. “And then looking forward into the future and trying to project what our expenses are.”
Commissioner Joseph Flescher said tourist tax revenues could potentially help fund future nourishment efforts.
“There may be room for more of the tourist tax dollar to be able to be diverted in that,” Flescher said, adding that doing so “would require a significant amount of work here.”
Laurent said the county’s coastal management strategy will need to remain flexible as shoreline conditions continue to change.
“Adaptive management is necessary,” she said. “It’s a very dynamic environment. Things change quickly on the beach. So you do need to make changes there.”
