Posted on March 23, 2026
San Clemente’s stunning coastline, which will serve as backdrop to Olympic surfing in two years, has also turned into a battlefield against beach erosion.
Construction crews, hopper dredges and bulldozers have worked to patch up vanishing stretches of beach with much needed sand.
The city has also contracted a coastal administrator to manage sand replenishment projects and serve as a liaison between government agencies.
As part of her “beach czar” duties, Leslea Meyerhoff gave a “state of the beach” presentation before the San Clemente City Council on Tuesday, as elected officials considered contract extensions and grant applications to keep efforts going.
“We have a critical erosion problem right now,” Meyerhoff told the council. “The goal here is to have programs that are supported by city leaders and also endorsed by community members.”
San Clemente’s beaches, which urban development has helped to choke off from natural replenishment, may be lacking anywhere from 2 million to 9 million cubic yards of sand, according to some coastal engineers.
A sand replenishment project overseen by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers helped pump some 251,000 cubic yards of sand dredged offshore around San Clemente’s pier in 2024, with more promised in six-year intervals.
North Beach, which faced critical erosion, got an emergency dump of about 37,000 cubic yards of sand that same year.
Meyerhoff called on San Clemente to respect the beach as critical public infrastructure.
Future projects treat it as such.
An Orange County Transportation Authority plan could add 540,000 cubic yards of sand in an effort to armor its coastal railroad tracks that run through San Clemente. The San Diego Assn. of Government’s third regional beach sand project has a feasibility study placeholder of 1.6 million cubic yards of sand for the city’s coastline.
Meyerhoff also reported that San Clemente secured a Sand Compatibility and Opportunistic Use Program (SCOUP) permit.
“If we have funding, we can place up to 300,000 cubic yards of sand over the next 10 years,” she said of the permit. “That’s a total of 3 million cubic yards of sand. We can source sand from the Santa Ana River, potentially the Prado Dam and, of course, local quarries and, basically, any compatible inland sand source.”
As part of the beach speech, the council also received an update on a shoreline monitoring program to track beach erosion.
Greg Hearon, a principal engineer for Coastal Frontiers, shared findings through last fall that show historically large losses of beach sand to the north and south of San Clemente’s coastline.
“We have about 660 acres of beach in the city … but we’ve been losing about 3 acres per decade,” Hearon said.
The Pier Bowl area, though, is not suffering from critical erosion and has above average sand deposits. That is due, in part, to the Army Corps replenishment project, as well as independent growth trends.
Following the state of the beach address, the council also received an update on efforts to find good offshore sediment deposits to dredge.
With cobble-strewn sediment marring an initial effort to pump beach quality sand around the pier, the Army Corps project had to move its dredge site from Oceanside to north Orange County, near Huntington Beach, which increased transportation costs.
Scouring for sediment has ruled out three possible sites so far, but offshore deposits near San Onofre and the Santa Ana River are considered promising.
“My initial thought is [that] we should spend some time at San Onofre, because it’s 6 miles away,” Hearon said. “It’s the closest site that we have that showing good promise. We want to understand if we can exploit that site for beach nourishment.”
Mayor Pro Tem Steve Knoblock asked if deposits between the beach and the offshore closure depth, a point of no return for drifting sand, could be an even closer sediment source.
“Has anyone ever looked at taking that sand within that close proximity and capturing that sand to get it back on the shore?” he asked.
“You’re not adding any new sand to the system, you’re just artificially perching it up top,” Hearon explained. “We have our sandbox. The amount of sand in there dictates how wide our beach is. If we move sand around inside of that sandbox, we’re really not going to gain any long-term beach width.”
The council voted to extend offshore sand source investigation efforts, which will include $300,000 in Metrolink funding.
They also unanimously approved a three-year extension of the shoreline monitoring contract and two grant applications for coastal project, including one for designing a nature-based “dog bone” offshore reef to retain sand.
“The main point of this sand retention project is a companion strategy to sand placement,” Meyerhoff said of the grant. “The idea is that, by adding structures…it blocks the wave energy and keeps the sand in place longer.”
