Posted on November 30, 2017
By Tim Buckland, StarNews Online
Halting the stalled Carolina Beach Lake dredging project seemed to be the favored option among members of the town council at a workshop meeting Tuesday morning.
“It sounds like a lot of dollar signs and too many complications for me,” Mayor Pro Tem Leann Pierce said.
The idea behind the project is 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, reducing 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. Town Manager Michael Cramer noted that the portions of the lake that have been dredged are algae-free.
The project has been in limbo since Army officials with the Military Ocean Terminal Sunny Point, or MOTSU, told the town last month to stop placing material removed from the lake bottom on undeveloped land owned by the terminal. 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.
The project’s prospects became murkier during a workshop meeting of the town council Tuesday morning, when the town council found out what its options are for storing more material at MOTSU and that some parts of the soil have tested positive for arsenic.
Project options
Cramer said MOTSU officials have provided the town with some informal guidelines to move the material to another location on the land the town leases and leave it there for three to five years, but would “have to find a new home for it” eventually.
“There are various options that we have,” Town Manager Michael Cramer said.
But, he said, the Army would allow for only 10,000 more cubic yards of material added to the 30,000 yards already moved to the site, Cramer said. The original project scope called for removing 83,000 cubic yards of material dredged from the lake bottom.
“So roughly half the material from the original project is what they’ll let us store there for three to five years,” Councilman Steve Shuttleworth said.
“That’s correct,” Cramer said.
Shuttleworth and Mayor Dan Wilcox noted that the N.C. Ferry Division is permitted to store dredged material on its land, which it also leases from MOTSU, without a time limit to remove the material.
“I’d like to see us treated the same,” Wilcox said.
Finding an ultimate location could prove problematic, as some of the material has tested positive for levels of arsenic, Cramer said. He said the material would not be appropriate to be placed in residential areas or to be used as foundation material, but could be stored on unused land.
The water in the lake did not test positive for arsenic, officials said.
Cramer said efforts to find construction sites to place the material did not work out and that costs to transport the material to the New Hanover County landfill were prohibitive. He said another option could be to build a road to access a landlocked parcel the town owns behind the former LORAN-C transmitter station near Snow’s Cut.
A resolution to terminate the town’s contract with Civil Works Contracting likely will be voted on at the council’s Dec. 12 meeting.
Public frustration
Mayor-elect Joe Benson and councilman-elect JoDan Garza — both of whom attended Tuesday morning’s meeting — each said they believed public frustration with the idle project, in one of the town’s most visible sections, may have contributed to their Election Day victories, which saw Wilcox and councilman Gary Doetsch lose their re-election bids.
Cramer said town employees plan to “clean up” the site so the walkway will be accessible during the town’s upcoming lights festival on the lake.
Erin Nortonen, who owns a lakefront condo on Atlanta Avenue, said she is tired of seeing heavy equipment and dredged material.
“I would invite you come sit on my little deck and look at what we’ve looked at,” she said.
Shuttleworth said he wanted to see “the big blue box” and other equipment and material removed “at least until we’re ready to move forward on an option.”
Cramer said he “hoped” large equipment would be moved by the end of next week.
Source: StarNews
