Posted on May 3, 2018
By Carol Vaughn, delmarvanow
A proposal to establish a water access authority on the Eastern Shore of Virginia was presented to the Accomack County Board of Supervisors.
The board was not asked to take action yet on establishing an authority, which is made possible through legislation passed by the General Assembly in 2014.
“It was a long time coming. They’ve had this on the Middle Peninsula and on the Northern Neck for over a decade,” said Shannon Alexander, coastal resources program manager for the Accomack-Northampton Planning District Commission.
Potential benefits include access to properties that could be working waterfronts, provide recreational access, dredging project spoils sites, environmental education opportunities, climate adaptation and hazard mitigation and resilience.
The last item represents “one of the main focuses and reasons we have been working,” Alexander said, noting that the agency has seen an increase in potential applications for FEMA acquisitions.
“This would be an entity that could take those properties on without the counties directly having to do so,” Alexander said.
Grant matching, including leveraging of donated properties, could be another benefit and could bring dollars to the Eastern Shore.
The Shore has some 117 working waterfronts, including six retail and 11 wholesale seafood establishments and 15 marinas, according to the presentation.
Still, “sometimes they struggle in continuing to be successful with other pressures in the region,” including development or restrictions, Alexander said.
There are six Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries boat ramps and about 30 other public access sites serving nearly 1,400 miles of shoreline, according to 2017 figures from the Virginia Institute of Marine Science.
Still, areas where the public has access to waterways are not evenly distributed on the Shore.
Accomack County “is really quite good” when it comes to public access to waterways as compared to the rest of coastal Virginia; but Northampton County has some deficiencies, including “large gaps on both the seaside and the bayside where there is no public access to the water, which is a shame in a region like ours,” Alexander said, adding an authority could be a tool to help remedy that.
Increasing public access to waterways could encourage economic development through increasing recreation opportunities and property values, according to the presentation.
Dredging is one of the main areas in which having an authority could benefit the Shore, Alexander said.
Virginia’s Eastern Shore has 32 federal project areas and 27 non-federal project areas for dredging, with some 81 percent needing maintenance work requiring governmental permits. More than one-third of those have areas with less than three feet of water at low tide, according to the presentation.
“We have been working diligently with our elected officials … and partnering with the Middle Peninsula, Northern Neck and Hampton Roads Planning Commissions to get new legislation that will fast track the VMRC process and get some of these projects off the ground,” Alexander told the board.
New legislation introduced by Sen. Lynwood Lewis and passed in the General Assembly, and awaiting final budget approval, would allow the two water access authorities already established, along with the Eastern Shore one if it is created, to work collaboratively on grant applications for waterway maintenance projects through the Virginia Waterway Maintenance Fund Grant Program.
The legislation was modeled on a joint resolution approved by Accomack and Northampton counties in fall 2017.
“We would share the costs. It would make our proposals rise to the top; but without an access authority … we might miss out on those opportunities,” Alexander said.
The objectives of the authority include identifying land, either owned by the Commonwealth or private holdings, that can be secured for use by the general public as a public access site; researching to determine ownership of identified sites; determining appropriate public use levels of identified sites; developing a mechanism for transferring title to the authority; developing acquisition and site management plans for public access usage; and determining what holdings should be sold to advance the authority’s mission.
Potential authority members include Accomack and Northampton counties along with incorporated towns on the Shore.
The authority could be funded through a variety of ways, including both governmental funding and fees paid for things like commercial docking and hunting registrations.
“In other regions, it’s a slow-growing authority — it has taken a decade to even have a handful of properties on the Middle Peninsula,” Alexander said. In other regions, so far, the costs have been managed mainly through ongoing annual grants, such as the Virginia Coastal Zone Management Program Technical Assistance Grant and VDOT Rural Planning Grant.
The next steps in the process, if the counties decide to proceed with creating a water access authority, include drafting an operating agreement, followed by approval of a joint resolution to establish it.
Source: delmarva now
