Posted on October 8, 2021
Haley Witten said she spends about half her weekends in Oak Island. Witten moved to Leland five years ago, partly to frequent Oak Island and other nearby beach towns.
“It’s the best of all worlds really,” she said. “Its easy to just head to the beach whenever I have the time.”
Soon, Oak Island visitors like Witten may have to pay for parking on the island as it tries to raise consistent funding sources for its ongoing beach nourishment needs.
A proactive approach to protecting the beach
Knowing what the parking fees would go toward, Witten said she wouldn’t mind the paying each visit. She doesn’t care who pays for beach nourishment, as long as there’s a beach to go to.
“The important thing is to keep the beach healthy and here for future generations,” Witten said.
After years of discussion, Oak Island hopes to soon definitively answer the questions at the heart of the town’s future: Who should pay for its increasingly costly beach nourishment, and what is their fair share?
For the last several years the town has been creating a beach nourishment master plan — a long-term strategy for proactively protecting the beach from both routine erosion and frequent battering from hurricanes.
According to Oak Island communication manager Michael Emory, the town wanted to take a more proactive approach to its beach nourishment efforts, rather than react as dictated by each natural disaster.
“Regular intervals of beach nourishment help sustain longer periods of protection, as opposed to more of a reactionary building efforts that we’ve historically had,” Emory said.
“The thought is that if we could establish a plan ahead of time as a way to maintain the beach nourishment, then when we have those incidents like major storms we’re not in a situation where we have that much further to recover from.”
Millions of dollars sit on the town’s shoulders
Although the town is reimbursed by FEMA for sand lost from a named storm, the funding is not always guaranteed and can take years to materialize, Emory said.
In between those disasters, the island loses an estimated 250,000 cubic yards of sand every year to erosion, amounting to $4.75 million in regular sand loss that falls solely on the town’s shoulders if they choose to nourish the beach.
“That kind of feeds back into the initial motivation for wanting to establish a preventative maintenance for the town,” Emory said. “So we’re not necessarily at the mercy of FEMA and whenever their budget releases recovery funds.”
On the road to finalizing their master plan, the town convened a working group of citizens to review the beach nourishment plans Oak Island has compiled over the years and make a recommendation to the council.
The committee recommended what the town has been discussing for years: Building a FEMA-recognized engineered beach, built to withstand a once-every-25-year storm event using funds from a special tiered property assessment.
Engineered beaches take into account the area’s environment and coastal processes to design a beach that will help combat erosion.
“In the most basic, general sense it’s going above and beyond just the reactionary efforts that we have traditionally done to get it to that sustainable level where the federal government views it as worth maintaining with their efforts,” Emory said.
The town hopes by created an engineered beach, it will be able to maximize funding from FEMA, including nourishment funds not tied natural disasters. Creating an engineered beach would also help control erosion in the first place, requiring fewer nourishment projects.
Who will pay for beach protection?
While Oak Island has approved the frame work for how their assessment would work, and aims to make the costs equitable, the details are yet to be decided.
The proposed engineered beach would come at an initial cost of about $40 million and would require another $32 million in maintenance every six years to maintain.
The town is aiming to raise $10 million in revenue each year to cover the initial cost over four years. Additional maintenance funding would come from paid parking, which could net between $1 million and $3 million per year.
Oak Island home owners will be split into four “beach benefit zones” – areas identified as having a direct benefit from the engineered beach project – with zones closer to the beach expected to be assessed more.
However the town has held off on determining the exact rates for each zone, with the contentious issue tabled this summer until January.
While many residents have come around to the idea of paying for an engineered beach, whether the support continues will likely rest on how much residents will have to pay.
“That is part of the debate that has gone on around the master plan,” Emory said. “That’s ultimately what we have to balance out.”
Reporter John Orona can be reached at 910-343-2327 or jorona@gannett.com.
