The Southern Shores Town Council is expected to approve a modest budget amendment tomorrow (Tues., Feb. 4) that indicates its interest in continuing to work with curbside recycling collector Bay Disposal & Recycling, but does not signal a long-term commitment to the beleaguered contractor.

The Council meets tomorrow at 5:30 p.m. in the Kern Pitts Center for its regular monthly meeting. See https://www.southernshores-nc.gov/wp-content/uploads/minutes-agendas-newsletters/Meeting-Packet_2020-02-04.pdf.

Joshua Smaltz, Bay Disposal’s Outer Banks Site Manager, first appeared before the Town Council at its December meeting to request an increase in the monthly per-home collection rate that the Town now pays under a three-year service contract, which expires June 30, 2021.

Mr. Schmaltz sought an increase from $5.42 per home to $7.40 per home, citing steep increases in the per-ton rates that Bay Disposal has been paying for processing.

According to the contract, which Mr. Smaltz and former Town Manager Peter Rascoe signed, there are 2,394 homes in Southern Shores. (You will find the contract in the meeting packet for the Council’s Jan. 7 meeting, not for tomorrow’s meeting. Bay Disposal also handles Southern Shores’ garbage collection.)

Before the Council had a chance to respond to Mr. Smaltz’s request, he notified the Town that the southeastern Virginia recycling processing center (also called a material recovery facility) that Bay Disposal had been using had refused to accept any more of its curbside recyclables. Since mid-December, therefore, Bay Disposal has been transporting Southern Shores’ recyclables, as well as the recyclables it picks up in other Dare County towns, to Wheelabrator, a waste-energy plant in Portsmouth that incinerates them.

No recycling, as such, occurs at Wheelabrator, and concerns have been raised about the air pollution associated with the facility’s incineration, especially when it burns plastics.

See The Beacon on 12/7/19, 1/9/20, and 1/18/20 for background.

The Council’s budget amendment calls for a transfer of $16,780 from the Town’s unassigned fund balance to the sanitation budget in order to cover increased recycling pickup expenses. There is no indication, however, in either the agenda or in the online meeting packet, what service-rate increase a Council majority apparently has approved and what service time period this increase is intended to cover.

The Beacon trusts that the Council will enlighten the public about its deliberations and decision-making when it takes up the amendment tomorrow. The Jan. 31 Town newsletter reports only that the Council will consider at tomorrow’s meeting whether to allow Bay Disposal to continue transporting town recyclables to Wheelabrator “until market conditions improve or other options are available.”

Not mentioned in this newsletter report is the fact that the State of North Carolina has a say in that decision.

In January, Mr. Schmaltz shared with the Council his concern about Bay Disposal obtaining the requisite permitting from Virginia to allow the Powell’s Point-based company to continue transporting product to Wheelabrator. He did not bring up permitting by North Carolina.

According to a Jan. 15 letter from an official with the Division of Waste Management (DWM) within the N.C. Dept. of Environmental Quality (DEQ), the State of North Carolina will allow Bay Disposal to transport recyclables to Wheelabrator “as a temporary measure and will revisit this decision in three months.” This letter is included in tomorrow’s meeting packet.

In it, Sherri C. Stanley, a permitting official in the Solid Waste Section of the N.C. DWM, informs county and town officials that do business with Bay Disposal—including Interim Town Manager Wes Haskett—of the Section’s understanding that “Wheelabrator recovers both ferrous and non-ferrous metals at their facility and that other materials are converted to electricity for the local power grid and steam for the Navy Shipyard.”

Ms. Stanley describes this arrangement as “not the ideal situation for management of collected recyclables.”

The Beacon agrees. We asked the Town Council at its Jan. 21 workshop to “think outside the box” in coming up with ways to perpetuate true recycling in Southern Shores, and we would like to believe that some members, as well as Mr. Haskett, are trying.

Not only was Southern Shores the first town on the Outer Banks to initiate curbside recycling, but Dare County leads the state in recycling the most household paper and container materials per capita, according to a 2018 report by the Dept. of Environmental Quality. The DEQ reports that the average Dare County household recycled about 2.56 tons in 2017.

In explaining its leadership, Dare County Solid Waste Supervisor Douglas Huff is quoted in press accounts two years ago as crediting “public outreach efforts” and “tourists from the North, where recycling is more of a common habit.” (A former “tourist from the North,” I have ceased my so-called curbside “recycling,” and am doing the necessary schlepping.)

That the Outer Banks is a fragile environment that Dare County property owners should protect also should be a driver for clean recycling.

THE DARE COUNTY RECYCLING ENTERPRISE

After The Beacon visited the joint recycling venture between Dare County and Kitty Hawk, located at 4190 Bob Perry Road, and talked with the Kitty Hawk public works director (as previously reported), we approached Dare County Sanitation and Recycle Supervisor David Overton, about the possibility of a joint venture between the county and Southern Shores. (For info about the Kitty Hawk recycling center, see https://www.kittyhawknc.gov/departments-and-services/public-works/recycling/.)

We had been informed by Rod McCaughey, former president of the Southern Shores Civic Assn., that the SSCA board and membership were interested in exploring recycling options, in light of the current crisis, so we thought contacting the county was worth a shot.

Mayor Tom Bennett reportedly told the SSCA at its January general membership meeting that the Town was not going to invest staff time and money in new recycling options.

What Mr. Overton told us was uplifting. Dare County does not offer curbside recycling, but it does operate four recycling disposal sites—including a main center in Manteo—that anyone can use at no charge. Even more gratifying: It is truly recycling the materials that it receives, locally and in nearby states. See https://www.darenc.com/departments/public-works/recycling.

The county appears to have a thriving recycling business. Where, we asked Mr. Overton, do the collected recyclables go? His answers were:

Paper and cardboard: They are compacted and taken to Virginia for recycling.

Metals and aluminum: The county has a buyer in Wanchese.

Plastic: These products, he said, “end up in Tennessee.”

Glass: This is the best component of its program. The county crushes glass in its own compactor—which it acquired in 2008, making it the first N.C. county to have such equipment—and makes it available, free of charge, to anyone who wants it.

And who wants it? According to Mr. Overton, the demand is great for “multiple uses” and “endless possibilities.” People use crushed glass for road construction, driveway surfaces, and landscaping projects, as well as for candles, lamps, stained-glass windows, jewelry, and other art objects.

Crushed glass makes a decorative mulch that can be used around potted plants or in outside landscaping. The Kill Devil Hills Buildings and Grounds Division is using recycled glass mulch around the town’s main building at 102 Town Hall Drive. (See https://www.kdhnc.com/564/Recycled-Glass-Mulch.)

All of the beer and wine bottles that Dare County tourists and residents go through do not have to end up in landfills or at Wheelabrator.

The glass mulch is safe. You can walk barefoot on the mulch without being cut. You also can hold it in your hands without fear of injury.

Southern Shores residents currently can take their clean glass recyclables to the Dare County-Kitty Hawk recycling center and be assured that the county will pick them up. The same is true of corrugated cardboard. But the single-stream recycling that you deposit at the Kitty Hawk center will be picked up by Bay Disposal, which is transporting all product to Wheelabrator, until further notice.

You can bring unsorted single-stream recycling to the Manteo recycling center, which is located at 1018 Driftwood Drive. The sorting will be done for you.

Kitty Hawk, unlike Southern Shores, does not have what is known as “mandatory” curbside recycling. Its curbside recycling is “voluntary,” by monthly subscription only, pursuant to a town contract with Bay Disposal. Also unlike Southern Shores, Kitty Hawk has a garbage-collection contract with the county.

Until July 1, 2018, when Mr. Rascoe contracted with Bay Disposal to pick up Southern Shores’ garbage, Dare County serviced Southern Shores, too.

I, personally, recall Mr. Rascoe’s decision not to renew the contract with Dare County as being controversial and not well-received by many residents, who wanted the relationship with the county to continue. Cost-cutting was certainly mentioned as a reason, but I have not delved into videotapes of 2018 meetings to probe the decision further.

According to Mr. Overton, the Town informed the county that it was not “happy with our service.”

That is also what Mr. Rascoe and Finance Officer Bonnie Swain told The Beacon in an interview about the FY 2018-19 budget regarding TFC Recycling’s curbside service. Customers were not satisfied, they said. The Town chose not to renew its recycling contract with the southeastern Virginia-based company at the same time that it parted ways with Dare County.

LOOKING AHEAD

The Beacon asked Mr. Overton: How does Southern Shores get in on what Dare County is doing with recycling? Why couldn’t we have a joint-venture recycling center in our town?

If the Town had an existing garbage-collection contract with Dare County, it would be fairly simple to explore an expansion of services. Forging an arrangement now, in the absence of one, would require initiation of a discussion between Mr. Haskett and Dare County Manager/Attorney Bobby Outten. The Beacon is hopeful that the SSCA can play a role in making that happen.

Schlepping recyclables to a transfer center, rather than having them picked up curbside, is not convenient, but neither is paying money to a purported recycling collector to dispose of recyclables outside of the recycling-processing chain.

Southern Shores has always been in the vanguard on environmental issues. We hope it will be again.

Ann G. Sjoerdsma, 2/3/20

The Beacon would like to thank everyone who wrote to us in response to yesterday’s post. We greatly appreciate your comments, observations, suggestions, etc., and will share some of them at the end of this article.

First, though, we pass along information about the Town Council’s regular meeting Tuesday. Then we try to address some of the confusion and lack of information that surfaced at the Council’s Jan. 21 workshop when the discussion turned to beach-nourishment financing.

The Council’s Tuesday meeting will be held at 5:30 p.m. in the Kern Pitts Center. Here is a link to the agenda and meeting packet:

https://www.southernshores-nc.gov/wp-content/uploads/minutes-agendas-newsletters/Meeting-Packet_2020-02-04.pdf.

“Consideration of a Potential Beach Nourishment Project” is the fourth item of four listed under “Old Business” on the agenda. The other three items concern appointments to the Capital Infrastructure Improvement Planning Committee; the recycling contract with Bay Disposal, which is no longer taking curbside recyclables to a recycling center; and “Consideration of Consulting Firm for Hiring a Manager.”

Whether “consideration” on the agenda means that the Council will make a decision on any issues is anyone’s guess. The Beacon certainly hopes that a majority will finally select a consultant to manage the hiring search for a new town manager, making a decision that is long overdue.

***

The upshot of the Jan. 21 workshop discussion on beach-nourishment financing appeared to be that the Council would not select and approve a project option until it has in hand a monetary sense of what new Council members Elizabeth Morey and Matt Neal both called the “pain” Southern Shores taxpayers will feel. They want to know how much taxes would have to increase to pay for APTIM’s recommended projects.

It does not seem to bother the Town Council, as it bothered members of the public, that it has never had a public discussion about the merits of various financing methods, only one of which involves defining multiple service districts and levying tax increases according to those districts.

As Sea Mark coastal engineer and geologist Spencer Rogers told me by telephone Friday: “Nationally, there are lots of ways to fund beach nourishment.” Consider, for example, that many people rent out rooms to vacationing beachgoers via Airbnb and VRBO, but they do not live near the oceanfront.

In Southern Shores, however, those other ways are not being considered. The “done deal” nature of the Council’s discourse Jan. 21 on MSDs was obvious.

The Council unanimously approved a motion to have its financial consultant, DEC Associates, Inc., of Charlotte, work with Town staff to prepare actual tax-rate increases for it to consider, according to whether the Town levies a tax increase town-wide or uses multiple service districts (MSDs) as a tax framework and a town-wide contribution to pay for beach nourishment.

Councilman Neal, who made the motion—which Mayor Pro Tem Morey seconded—set forth three tax assessment/MSD options that the Council would like DEC and Town staff to investigate and “price”:

1) A town-wide tax levy in which all property owners would pay the same amount for a beach nourishment project;

2) A tax-increase levy on property owners in an oceanfront MSD, with a contribution made by the Town’s General Fund revenues; and

3) A tax-increase levy on property owners in three MSDs—the oceanfront and two more districts heading west from the oceanfront—with a contribution by the Town.

Not surprisingly, this task initially rocked Doug Carter, the father in the father-son team that owns DEC Associates, because, as he explained, that is not what he does: “We take little part in defining MSDs,” he said. Of course not, that is a legal job.

It would have been helpful to have had Town Attorney Ben Gallop present at the workshop to fill in the many legal blanks that arose, but, because the Council lacks information, were not addressed. MSDs are a matter of N.C. statutory definition and process, not town discretion. (As The Beacon previously noted, property owners have the statutory right to petition to be excluded from an MSD.)

In support of Mr. Neal’s requests, Councilman Jim Conners described the Council as being presented with a “chicken-and-egg” dilemma. Until Council members know, as Mr. Conners said, “how much [beach nourishment] is going to cost on your tax bill,” an apparent majority of them do not want to move forward with selecting one of APTIM’s recommended options.

That apparent majority does not include Mayor Tom Bennett, who has long appeared ready to make a commitment to beach nourishment and did so again on Jan. 21.

TOWN CONTRACT WITH DEC ASSOCIATES: WHAT THE FIRM DELIVERED AT WORKSHOP WAS NOT WHAT THE COUNCIL WANTED

On Oct. 1, 2019, a Town Council majority of three voted to approve spending $35,000 to hire DEC Associates, a beach-nourishment financial planner, to advise the Council about financing a project even though it had not yet committed to doing a project—and still has not. Rather than chicken-and-egg thinking, The Beacon views this as classic cart-before-the-horse planning.

As dissenting former Councilman Gary McDonald said at the meeting, and The Beacon reported 10/2/19: “We can come up with [the] scenarios” for financing, without a consultant’s assistance. It made no sense to him or former Councilman Fred Newberry to commit monies to a cart-before-the-horse contract with DEC Associates, which, according to Mr. Neal on Jan. 21, requires the consultant to do “MSD construction.”

But Mayor Bennett and Councilmen Jim Conners and Christopher Nason disagreed with Councilmen McDonald and Newberry. The three voted in favor of a $35,000 budget amendment that represented “half of the total amount due for financial planning from DEC Associates, Inc. for beach nourishment.” As is routine with budget amendments, the money came out of the town’s unassigned fund balance.

Not only are the scenarios or financing “modes” well known, as Mr. McDonald observed, they were presented by Doug Carter and his son, Andrew, at the Town Council’s Feb. 26, 2019 planning session.

You may access the Carters’ power-point presentation in the minutes of that meeting, at pp. 17-21: https://www.southernshores-nc.gov/wp-content/uploads/minutes-agendas-newsletters/Minutes_2019-02-26.pdf.

In explaining the reasoning behind this premature consulting contract, the Mayor said last October that DEC Associates would shed light on “how we finance this thing” and provide insightful “recommendations.” He also said that the hiring of the financial consultant would show Dare County that Southern Shores is “serious” about a nourishment project and about asking the county for funding.

If you heard the Carters’ presentations at both the Feb. 26, 2019 planning meeting and the Jan. 21 workshop, as The Beacon did, you experienced déjà vu. Much of what the Carters said two weeks ago was what they said nearly a year ago. Their new power-point presentation is duplicative, in part, of last year’s. For their latest, see https://www.southernshores-nc.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/DEC-Carter_Presenation.pdf. (The figures provided for debt service reflect a 3 percent interest rate.)

In their latest presentation, they included a bottom-line number for what Doug Carter described as the Town’s “skin in the game”—a phrase that Dare County Manager Bobby Outten also uses—if the Council approves one of the nourishment project options recommended by APTIM and the county pays 50 percent of the costs. This number is $1,073,928 per year.

The problem with this calculation, which is short of what the Town would need to cover its share of the debt service, is that Mr. Outten informed the Town Council last November that the maximum contribution currently available from the Dare County Beach Nourishment Fund is $7.5 million. That the Carters did not know that the county is not guaranteeing 50 percent payment of project costs is disconcerting, to say the least.

The Beacon pointed this out in a blog on 1/21/20, in which we reprinted an article that we wrote 11/9/19 shortly after Mr. Outten spoke to the Town Council. Mr. Outten explained then that the county could not split costs 50-50 with the various towns that have done replenishment because its Beach Nourishment Fund did not have sufficient funds to do so.

More disconcerting to Council members—who were led by Councilman Neal—was that the Carters did not provide the data that they wanted and expected: to wit, suggested municipal service districts in Southern Shores and tax-rate increases on property owners, according to those municipal service districts.

The disconnect between the Town Council and the Carters, especially the elder, who is the firm’s primary spokesperson, was near-palpable. Doug Carter did his North Carolina folksy best (I say that affectionately) to clear the dense fog in the Pitts Center, but his face appeared pained when he finally said about the Council’s expectations: “We did not have that understanding.”

(That there was a gap in understanding accentuates for The Beacon the need for a permanent full-time town manager to run interference.)

We daresay that when Doug Carter told the Council, “MSDs will require some time and effort,” no one on the Council had any idea what he meant. They should ask Mr. Gallop about all of the statutorily imposed requirements.

In the power-point description that Mr. Carter gives of his “preferred method” of financing beach nourishment—through special obligation bonds and MSDs—he omits mention of the notice, reporting, and public hearings that are required by law if the Town drafts an ordinance defining MSDs and passes it.

This omission may have been intentional by the Carters so that these bonds appear more appealing to municipalities than the more familiar general obligation bonds, which Mr. Carter called “laborious” because a voter referendum is required.

When The Beacon asked former Councilman Christopher Nason at the Council’s meeting last October what he knew about general obligation bonds and other modes of financing, he honestly admitted that he knew nothing. This is not acceptable

In explaining to the Council that his firm does not define MSDs, Mr. Carter said, “We talk to you about how you blend your resources between MSDs and taxes at large. . . .” DEC is all about blending funds. MSDs are the Town’s business with its attorney.

Until now.

Interim Town Manager Wes Haskett told the Council that he and DEC would have the tax-rate increase data, according to Mr. Neal’s proposed MSDs, “as soon as possible,” which at the earliest is probably Feb. 18, the date of this month’s Council workshop.

FOLLOWUP TO YESTERDAY’S REPORT

One reader wrote to tell us that the Southern Shores Civic Assn. makes available to its members a PDF of Spencer Rogers’s book, “The Dune Book,” which he co-wrote with the late David Nash, who was an extension agent in coastal management in Brunswick and New Hanover counties. I meant to provide an Internet link yesterday. You may download the book here:

“The Dune Book” (pub. 2003): https://ncseagrant.ncsu.edu/ncseagrant_docs/products/2000s/dune_book.pdf.

The book is a fast read, but if you are short on time, I recommend that you spend your time reading chapter two about how the beach works.

To say that the beach is moving, changing, shifting, doing many dynamic activities all of the time, is to engage in layperson understatement. I defer to Mr. Rogers, who last year received one of N.C. State University’s Office of Research and Innovation’s prestigious Awards for Excellence. A member of the Sea Mark staff since 1978, Mr. Rogers is THE go-to person in the state for coastal construction and erosion knowledge along and about the North Carolina shoreline.

The very affable coastal engineer/geologist/erosion specialist gave a presentation about “How the Beach Works” at the January 2017 Southern Shores beach nourishment forum. The graphic portion of his talk is on the Town website at: https://www.southernshores-nc.gov/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Beach-Dunes-S-Shores.pdf. Take a look.

Another reader reminded me of how limited Duck’s 2017 beach nourishment project was. This is important to understand. The teetering houses that I mentioned yesterday are on Duck’s northern end, north of the Army Corps of Engineers’ Field Research Facility and far removed from the commercial village and nearby developments, which were more recently constructed.

(In the 1970s, Duck was little more than a church and a campground. There was no public road north of what is now the commercial district. I remember it well.)

Here is a map of Duck’s 2017 beach-nourishment project area: https://www.townofduck.com/beach-nourishment-project/beach-nourishment-project-area-map/.

According to the Town of Duck website, the project cost $14,057,929, of which Duck paid $6,963,000 through its General Fund and increased taxation on property owners in municipal service districts that it identified. The Dare County Beach Nourishment Fund paid the remaining $7,094,929. The debt-service cost to the town is $1,221,390 per year for five years.

In contrast, Kitty Hawk replenished its entire 4-mile shoreline, for the primary purpose, as Mr. Outten told the Town Council last November, of preventing storm-related ocean overwash in the streets between N.C. 12 and Hwy. 158. That project cost about $18.2 million. Kitty Hawk, too, used MSDs to finance its portion of the costs.

Ann G. Sjoerdsma, 2/2/20

After Ken Willson presented APTIM’s latest report on potential beach nourishment in Southern Shores at the Town’s Council’s Jan. 21 workshop meeting, Mayor Pro Tem Elizabeth Morey asked a question that suggested a deeper level of study of APTIM’s analyses than previous Council members have shown. The newly elected Council member asked about Southern Shores’ shoreline history.

Mr. Willson, vice president of Aptim Coastal Planning and Engineering (APTIM), had shown images of the Southern Shores shoreline in 2008 and 2018. Ms. Morey asked if there was “imagery readily available that would give us an idea where the Southern Shores beach was in the seventies, eighties, and nineties, as opposed to in the 2000s.”

Is there any imagery dating back decades, Ms. Morey wondered, that would be “fairly easily” accessed “at low cost”?

In nearly two years of listening to Mr. Willson report to the Town Council—the first time in March 2018 about a 2017 baseline profile by APTIM of the town’s shoreline, then about APTIM’s December 2018 “vulnerability assessment” of the shoreline, in light of the town’s “beach management plan” goals, an update 17 months later of that study, and on Jan. 21 about the width of the beaches—The Beacon has never heard a Council member ask about Southern Shores’ history. It has been a major oversight.

Mr. Willson went from informing the Town Council after the 2017 profiling that “the shoreline is looking fairly stable” and there is “no big rush” to “jump” on beach nourishment to recommending “options” for sand replenishment along the entire Southern Shores shoreline that would cost in the neighborhood of $16 million.

At the Council’s recent workshop, Mr. Willson said that whether or not there is a “need” for beach nourishment in Southern Shores is a “discretionary decision by the Council.”

He also described APTIM’s analysis in support of nourishment as “subjective” and “discretionary.”

“A lot of it has to do with providing sufficient or acceptable level of storm damage reduction,” he explained. “How much [sand] volume do we need in the system to provide a specific level of storm damage reduction” in the event of a severe storm that may never occur?

The answer to Ms. Morey’s thoughtful question, to which Mr. Willson alluded, after first mentioning two other possible sources (one of them being U.S. Army Corps of Engineers data available just up the road at the Field Research Facility (FRF) in Duck), is yes: The N.C. Division of Coastal Management (DCM) has interactive maps accessible online that depict the location of the shoreline at various times, dating back to 1849.

Even more important, the DCM has online maps that document long-term average erosion rates that have been calculated and updated periodically along our beaches and offer a perspective dating back to 1940. The history exists! It is online!

Knowing the history of the Southern Shores shoreline enables today’s decision-makers to put the “risk” that Mr. Willson has identified into realistic perspective.

HISTORY INFORMS THE FUTURE: LAST SEVERE STORM WAS IN 1962

According to coastal engineer and geologist Spencer Rogers, who works with the exemplary research/education/outreach program, N.C. Sea Grant, in its Wilmington office, historical erosion rates provide a model for the future.

They are the “best indicator,” Mr. Rogers said in a telephone interview with The Beacon yesterday, of what will happen to a shoreline.

And yet, these rates have not been part of the conversation that Southern Shores has had during the past two years with APTIM. APTIM’s emphasis has been on erosion in the event of a severe storm, whose parameters (e.g., winds, wave action) it modeled after Isabel, the 2003 hurricane that, as Mr. Rogers noted, “pretty much petered out by the time it got to Kitty Hawk.”

As the highly regarded coastal specialist aptly pointed out, Southern Shores has not been directly hit by a severe storm since the Ash Wednesday storm of 1962, an Extreme Nor’easter that took out the old Sea Ranch Hotel at the current site of Pelican Watch, next to the Kitty Hawk Pier. Since this March 1962 event, no buildings in Southern Shores have been destroyed or threatened by erosion.

When Duck and Kitty Hawk did beach nourishment in 2017, houses in both towns were teetering at the ocean’s edge. Some in Kitty Hawk had already been lost. This has never been the case in Southern Shores.

While APTIM is advising the Town Council how to achieve “storm damage reduction protection” in the event of a monster hurricane, the reality is, as Mr. Rogers observed, that “storm patterns are pretty scattered” in the northern Outer Banks, in contrast to Hatteras Island and the southern Outer Banks.

Another reality—in addition to the town’s known 60-year history since the Ash Wednesday nor’easter—is that no hurricane of the magnitude of Katrina or Michael has ever hit Southern Shores.

(To read about the 1962 Ash Wednesday storm, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ash_Wednesday_Storm_of_1962.)

(For a “snapshot” of N.C. Sea Grant, see: https://ncseagrant.ncsu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/2017-18_snapshot_final.pdf)

(To learn about Spencer Rogers, see: https://ncseagrant.ncsu.edu/about-us/our-team/spencer-rogers/)

Mr. Rogers, who also serves on the faculty of UNC-W’s Center for Marine Science, was nice (and patient) enough to go through an interactive mapping exploration in Southern Shores with me. I will take you through the process later in this column and hope you will be inspired to do more of your own research.

LOOKING AT TYPES OF BEACH EROSION

As Mr. Rogers explains in his book, “The Dune Book,” there are four types of erosion: 1) seasonal erosion; 2) erosion caused by a severe storm; 3) long-term erosion; and 4) inlet erosion. Beach nourishment projects are designed to address #2, an “extreme storm event” and/or #3, “chronic day-to-day losses,” he said.

Fortunately, we do not have to contend with inlet erosion. Shorelines adjacent to inlets—such as Topsail Beach—experience hazards that shorelines along oceanfront do not.

One such shoreline is along Ocean Isle Beach, which is between Holden and Sunset beaches near the North Carolina-South Carolina line. Beach nourishment done there 20 years ago by the Corps of Engineers “disappeared in a couple of months,” Mr. Rogers said. The town and Corps had to go back to the drawing board.

To compare the Southern Shores’ shoreline with a shoreline where an inlet is the major driver of erosion, as some local property owners have done, is to make the proverbial apples-to-oranges comparison. There are no inlets off of our coast.

(Mr. Rogers also noted that Dare County’s nourishment of unincorporated Buxton and Rodanthe, which had high LT erosion rates, “disappeared very quickly,” too.)

Seasonal erosion occurs because of a variation in wind and wave energy.

As the Sea Mark coastal specialist explained: “The beach oscillates in width from season-to-season and from year-to-year.” During the summer, he noted, sand moves north, so Southern Shores should benefit from Kitty Hawk’s 2017 nourishment project.

The beach is at its widest in late July and early August, according to retired longtime USACE Field Research Facility coastal engineer and former Southern Shores homeowner Bill Birkemeir, who also spoke with me by telephone last week. (To calculate beach widths recently, APTIM used measurements from May, not from the summer.)

In the “seasonal cycle,” Mr. Birkemeier said, the beach is “narrow and steep in winter” and “comes back in the summer.” Passing hurricanes and other storms push the sand off-shore, but it returns. “It’s really simple,” he noted, and very important to understand.

When Mr. Willson attempted to update in September 2019 what he called erosional and accretional “trends” in Southern Shores on the basis of data obtained between December 2017 and May 2019, oceanographers from the Field Research Facility challenged his conclusions.

As The Beacon reported 9/20/19, Dr. Katherine L. Brodie and Dr. Nicholas Cohn, both of whom live in Southern Shores, told the Town Council at its Sept. 19 planning session that APTIM’s conclusions were “based on limited data” and “on short-term trends that are not particularly helpful.”

“It is very challenging to understand what’s really happening to our coastline,” said Dr. Brodie, who characterized the Southern Shores dune system and shoreline as being “stable” over time. (“It is very difficult to eyeball the shoreline,” said Mr. Rogers, who has a master’s degree in coastal and oceanographic engineering from the University of Florida. There are “radical changes” going on that the eye cannot detect.)

Dr. Brodie also told the Town Council that “there is lots of seasonal variability” in erosion (loss) and accretion (gain) of beaches. The time to measure beach erosion is not in the winter, as APTIM had done.

Both Dr. Brodie and Dr. Cohn offered their professional expertise to the Town Council in helping it to make an informed and educated decision about beach nourishment. But the majority did not accept their offer.

Because Southern Shores has not been annually profiling its shoreline, we do not have what Mr. Birkemeier called “built-up knowledge” to evaluate short-term data. Some of us thought that APTIM’s 2017 profile would be the first in a series of annual surveys to keep track of the shoreline. But it did not take long for Mr. Willson to shift into recommendations for beach nourishment, with encouragement from the Town.

SOUTHERN SHORES HAS HISTORY OF LOW LONG-TERM AVERAGE EROSION RATES

According to its website, the N.C. Division of Coastal Management evaluates long-term average erosion rates for North Carolina’s 300-mile ocean coastline every five years. It updates these rates by obtaining new aerial photographs of the shoreline to add to its database and running the data through computer programs that yield “thousands of numbers.” It started this effort in 1979, using photographs that date back to 1940.

In a January 2019 report about the methods it used to update LT average erosion rates in 2016, the DCM reported that 88 percent of the Southern Shores shoreline had measured erosion, while the remaining 11 percent had measured accretion. The DCM calculated the average LT erosion rate for our beaches to be 0.5 feet per year.

This does not mean that every year part of the Southern Shores shoreline is losing six inches of width while another part is gaining sand.

The DCM explains the calculation by comparing a 1992 shoreline with a 1942 shoreline. To derive the long-term average erosion (or accretion) rate, you would divide the distance that the shoreline has moved by 50, which represents the 50-year time period. If it has eroded 100 feet, you have a long-term average erosion rate of 2 feet per year, 100 divided by 50.

According to Mr. Rogers, the median long-term average erosion rate for North Carolina shorelines is currently one foot per year, a figure that he said is driven by sea-level rise.

**

Let’s do some long-term erosion-rate research of the Southern Shores shoreline. We will start on a DCM page called “Oceanfront Shorelines and Setback: Interactive Mapping,” which you can access at https://deq.nc.gov/about/divisions/coastal-management/coastal-management-data/shorelines-setback-interactive-mapping.

*Once you are there, click on “skip intro” at the top. A map of North Carolina should appear on your screen. When it does, type “Southern Shores” into the location box and click the search key.

*You now should be looking at a map of the Southern Shores area that shows the Currituck County mainland, the Wright Memorial Bridge, and U.S. Hwy. 158 into Southern Shores, as well as some of the main streets in the southern part of town, including South Dogwood Trail and Ocean Boulevard.

*In a column to the left of the map, you should see some icons, including what looks like a stack of papers, second from the top. This is the “layers list.” Click on it.

*Eliminate the checkmark in the box next to “DCM Office Locations” by clicking on it, then scroll down. What you seek are “Erosion Rates—2019 (oceanfront)—pending adoption,” and, for comparison purposes, “Erosion Rates—2013 (oceanfront)” and “Erosion Rates—2004 (oceanfront). You and Mayor Pro Tem Morey also will want to look at “Shorelines: Oceanfront and Inlet,” which is the fourth choice beneath the 2004 Erosion Rates.

*Check “Erosion Rates—2019 (oceanfront) and type in your location box, next to Southern Shores, a street name, such as Mullet Circle, which is the example that Mr. Rogers used with me.

*You now should see a street map, depicting Mullet Circle, east of Ocean Boulevard; Pompano Court will be to the north, and Dolphin Run to the south.

*Move your cursor out to the shoreline and click on one of the red lines you see. Red denotes erosion; green denotes accretion. The LT average erosion rate for the Southern Shores beach at Mullet Circle is 0.7 feet/year. This rate was determined over a 76-year period, from 1940 to 2016.

*Let’s look at another section of the Southern Shores shoreline. Type in “Seventh Avenue” next to Southern Shores in the location box and click.

*When you get to the map of the shoreline at Seventh Avenue, you should see small green lines at the oceanfront. Click on one of these. You will learn that the DCM has calculated a long-term average accretion rate of 0.2 feet/year over the same 76-year period at the Seventh Avenue oceanfront.

If you move to the beach at Chicahauk Trail, you will learn that a number of spots along the Southern Shores shoreline between Chicahauk Trail and Skyline Road have LT average accretion rates of 0.1 to 0.2 feet/year. There is long-term accretion on the oceanfront at Third Avenue and Hickory Trail, too.

In my interactive mapping explorations, I discovered that the only areas of the Southern Shores shoreline that have LT average erosion rates above the state median rate of 1.0 ft./yr. are a section around Trout Run, south to Yellowfin, and the southern part of the beach, from Ocean View Loop to the Kitty Hawk line. These erosion rates are generally 1.0 ft./yr. to 1.1 ft./yr. The 2017 nourishment at Pelican Watch should have made a difference at the southern end.

The time period covered by the 2013 rates is 1940-2009; and for the 2003 rates, it is 1949-1998. Please check them out.

If you and Ms. Morey click on “Shorelines: Oceanfront & Inlet” box in the layers list, you will see how the shoreline has shifted. In 1849, it is out in the ocean. As Mr. Rogers explained, the 1849 shoreline is based on a “coastal geodetic survey” and is not entirely reliable. It was President Thomas Jefferson who initiated the idea of surveying the coast in order to ensure safe navigation and stimulate international trade.

In addition to the 1949 shoreline representation, the DCM map shows shoreline positions from 1940, 1998, 2002, 2004, 2009, 2012, and 2016. Of interest is the 2002 shoreline, which is considerably west of all of the others—a testament to the changing dynamics of the coastal environment. The shoreline subsequently “corrected” itself.

DECIDING WHETHER TO DO NOURISHMENT; ANNUAL PROFILING

When asked how he would evaluate the Southern Shores beach-nourishment decision if he were a member of the Town Council, Mr. Rogers said he would look at:

• the long-term erosion rates;
• the benefits and costs; and
• how the town can pay for it

It would be a “personal” decision, he said.

The Town Council has not considered erosion rates, because APTIM did not, nor has it done a cost-benefit analysis. No one has talked about how the town, which has few commercial properties, financially benefits from beach nourishment, except in terms of the relatively small amount that it receives as its share of the Dare County occupancy taxes. We suppose Southern Shores theoretically could become a ghost town, but neither its shoreline nor its tourist economy is in crisis.

Despite a report by a Seventh Avenue homeowner that he talked with tourists who said they will go elsewhere because the beach there has substantially deteriorated, that anecdote illustrates a very rare exception. Rental companies can tell the Town Council that they are not hearing that complaint. I can tell the Council that after 50 years of seasonal rentals in my family’s quaint 1970s-era oceanfront beach box, business remains robust. We rent out—and we are just north of Trout Run!

During the two years that I have been attending presentations by Mr. Willson—and also at the January 2017 beach nourishment conference, in which Mr. Rogers participated as a guest expert—I have never heard a rental-property owner outside of Pelican Watch complain about losing income because of poor beach conditions.

There is no reason, however, to treat the north end of the Southern Shores shoreline, where Seventh Avenue is, the same as the center of the shoreline or anywhere else along what the DCM says is a 4.5-mile shoreline.

“You don’t have to put sand everywhere,” Mr. Rogers said, in addressing the perceived “need” for beach nourishment, “or put the same amount everywhere.”

(Indeed, property owners may petition to be excluded from a municipal service district because they do not benefit. That is a subject for tomorrow’s post.)

You can distinguish among different sections of the beach, but first, The Beacon believes, you should know your beach. Both Mr. Rogers and Mr. Birkemeier recommend annual surveys. We do not know where the sand on our beaches is and where it goes. We need to start keeping track.

“It helps a lot to understand what your beach is doing,” Mr. Rogers said, “and to design a project [to suit your beach] when you do” decide nourishment is warranted.

Everyone on the Town Council should be familiar with the easy-to-access, no-cost data provided by the DCM. Everyone should know the erosion-rate history of Southern Shores’ beaches. Everyone should view the shoreline as more than just a series of modern-day snapshots.

The Town Council needs to get behind annual profiling now . . . and to keep asking thoughtful questions . . . of thoughtful and experienced professionals who will answer them thoroughly and without bias.

Spencer Rogers would be happy to come to Southern Shores for a public meeting, and the invitation from the FRF oceanographers is probably still open. Time is on our side.

TOMORROW: MORE ON BEACH NOURISHMENT AND THE TOWN COUNCIL’S JAN. 21 WORKSHOP

Ann G. Sjoerdsma, 2/1/20

 

Dear Readers:

I am finding that I have more time than I expected to have before taking a long-planned leave. I can report to you that the only actions the Town Council took at its workshop session yesterday were to delay for another two weeks the selection of a search consultant to assist with the hiring of a new town manager and to request that DEC Associates, whom the Council hired in October as a beach nourishment financial consultant, deliver figures on the tax-increase impact a potential project would have on property owners in various “municipal service districts.” This was information the Council expected to receive from DEC Associates at the workshop.   

Both of these actions were unanimous decisions.

Former Town Manager Peter Rascoe gave notice of his intent to retire Sept. 1, 2019 in mid-July, and Town staff identified the three search firms the Council is now considering in early September. The Council suggested it would choose a firm at its Feb. 4 meeting.

It was clear from public comments heard yesterday and at previous public forums that the most serious beach erosion in Southern Shores is at the northern end, from Third Avenue to the Duck town line. The beach and dunes are generally healthy elsewhere, especially in what might be considered a central area around Porpoise Run and Trout Run. (The Pelican Watch area is already in a nourishment program.)

I believe Councilman Matt Neal suggested yesterday that if the town goes ahead with a $15-$16 million beach nourishment project and obtains special obligation bonds to pay for it, the municipal service districts (MSDs) that must be set up could partition the oceanfront into three areas: north, central, and south. MSDs enable towns to assess property owners different tax-rate increases according to the districts in which their property is located.

I will pick up with this next week. In the meantime, I would appreciate it if you would take photographs of the Southern Shores beaches and send them to me at ssbeaconeditor@gmail.com. Please include the date and time of day of the photograph and indicate whether the photograph depicts the beach at high or low tide or somewhere in between. You may obtain tide times for Southern Shores at tideschart.com.

Thank you.

Ann, 1/22/20

The Beacon is on hiatus for a week. We will return next week with news and opinion about a potential beach nourishment project in town and its financing, the search for a new town manager, and options for recycling.

We will cover today’s Town Council workshop in detail next week. The only actions the Council took were to delay for another two weeks the selection of a search consultant to assist with the hiring of a new town manager and to request that DEC Associates, whom the Council hired in October as a beach nourishment financial consultant, deliver figures on the tax-increase impact a potential project would have on property owners in various “municipal service districts.” This was information the Council expected to receive from DEC Associates at the workshop.

Former Town Manager Peter Rascoe gave notice of his intent to retire on Sept. 1, 2019 in mid-July. Town staff identified the three search firms the Council is considering now in early September.

Because there was some confusion today about Dare County’s anticipated funding contribution in a beach nourishment project, we reproduce below an excerpt from an article we wrote Nov. 9, 2019, after Dare County Manager Bobby Outten and Dare County Commission Chairman Bob Woodard appeared before the Town Council on Nov. 6, 2019 to speak about the county’s funding. I spoke with Mr. Outten by telephone on Nov. 8 to clarify some of the points he made at the Council meeting, which was held the day after the municipal election. The Dare County officials appeared at the invitation of the Town Council.

THE BEACON, 11/9/19:

$7.5 million is currently available in BNF for project(s)

Currently, Mr. Outten explained, there is $7.5 million in the Dare County Beach Nourishment Fund (BNF) that has not been allocated for other purposes, such as paying debt service and covering maintenance of the projects that have been completed. Part or all of this money is available to be given to a town for its beach-nourishment project.

As The Beacon explained yesterday (11/8/19), the county’s occupancy tax is 6 percent. One-third of the occupancy taxes collected is set aside for beach nourishment. This amount is often referred to as “2 percent,” but it’s actually one-third of the 6 percent. These “2 percent” monies can be used for no other purpose, but to “put sand on our beaches,” Mr. Outten said, and to maintain that sand fill.

The county puts a premium on maintaining beach nourishment, thereby protecting its investment, and anticipates, for planning purposes, that maintenance will occur every five years. In a given beach town, however, maintenance may not be necessary that frequently. Nags Head performed maintenance just this year of its 2011 beach nourishment project.

[UPDATE: On Monday (1/20/20), Mr. Outten informed Chicahauk homeowner Craig Albert that none of the three towns that did beach nourishment in 2017, in addition to Southern Shores at Pelican Watch–Duck, Kitty Hawk, and Kill Devil Hills–had committed to doing renourishment in 2022-23. Mr. Outten told The Beacon in a Dec. 11 meeting that Kill Devil Hills had expressed an interest in delaying its maintenance.]

The occupancy tax money comes into the county as it is collected, according to Mr. Outten, so the BNF “grows and grows, then we spend it down.” What this means is that the unallocated amount can be expected to increase.

Formula for determining how much each town should pay for nourishment

As Mr. Outten explained at the Wednesday Town Council meeting, Dare County paid about 50 percent of the costs for Nags Head’s 2011 nourishment project, which was the first one on the Outer Banks. According to online reporting by the Town of Nags Head, the project’s total cost was $37 million.

When Kill Devil Hills, Duck, and Kitty Hawk subsequently came to the county to ask about funding for nourishment of their beaches, Mr. Outten said he had to figure out “how to fairly allocate county funds” among them. The BNF had insufficient funds to support a 50-50 split for each town, as was done in Nags Head.

What the County Manager eventually did was ask: “How much did Nags Head tax its taxpayers” in order to pay its share of the beach nourishment project? Mr. Outten said he looked at how much Nags Head “spent out of its coffers,” and divided that number by its tax base, to arrive at a tax rate paid by “everybody” in town. It was about 7.85 cents, as he recalled, or 0.0785 per $100 of property valuation. [Today, DEC Associates of Charlotte reported a figure of 7.82 cents.]

When each of the three towns applied that formula—i.e., multiplied their tax bases by the 7.85 factor—it could afford a nourishment project, Mr. Outten said. The county then made up the difference in the costs of each town’s project . . .

Because its tax base is so large, however, when Kill Devil Hills applied the 7.85-factor formula, it “got virtually none of the occupancy-tax money”—because it could afford to do without it—“and that didn’t seem fair,” Mr. Outten said.

KDH and the county negotiated, arriving at a 5.2 factor instead, Mr. Outten said, so “they had skin in the game at some level, and we put some skin in, too, to make it fair.”

Of course, like Nags Head, the three towns didn’t actually apply the 0.0785 tax rate to every taxpayer because they used municipal service districts to tax oceanfront and oceanside property owners at a higher rate than other property owners.

***

DEC Associates provided no information today that The Beacon had not already learned from the power-point presentation it gave at the Town Council planning session Feb. 26, 2019 or from County Manager Outten’s talk on Nov. 6. In fact, in stating that the county will contribute a guaranteed 50 percent to a town’s beach nourishment project, it erred.

Ann G. Sjoerdsma, 1/21/20

 

 

Tomorrow’s Town Council workshop meeting, which convenes at 9 a.m. in the Kern Pitts Center, will present property owners and residents with their first opportunity to address the recycling crisis that has unfolded during the past three months.

As a Bay Disposal & Recycling representative made clear at the Council’s Jan. 7 meeting, the recyclables that residents have been putting out curbside for pickup since Dec. 10 have not been recycled; they have been taken to a waste-to-energy plant in Portsmouth, Va., where they have been incinerated.

That the Town has not informed the public on the Town website and/or in the Town newsletter about this significant development is more than an oversight. The Town has failed to fully disclose the situation and once again fueled public concerns about a lack of transparency in governmental affairs.

According to a Beacon source, Mayor Tom Bennett informed SSCA members gathered Jan. 13 for the civic association’s general membership meeting that the Town is not planning to do anything to save the recycling program in Southern Shores, which was the first municipality on the Outer Banks to offer curbside recycling.

Although the Town Council has not yet voted on renegotiating its “recycling” contract with Bay Disposal, Mayor Bennett indicated that the Town will continue to offer curbside pickup of garbage and other items that the collector will transport to Wheelabrator in Portsmouth for incineration. Trash burning at energy plants has been implicated in both climate change and air pollution.

Mayor Bennett reportedly cited a lack of staff resources and funding for the reasons why the Town is not trying to save recycling in Southern Shores.

Is this what the other Town Council members want? Or has this inaction been decreed by mayoral fiat? What about the public’s opinion? What does the Southern Shores public want? And why hasn’t the Town reached out to the public through its website or newsletter?

The latest Town newsletter, issued Jan. 17, showed graphics of which items are recyclable, and which are not, without informing the public that Bay Disposal no longer takes Southern Shores’ curbside loads to a recycling processing center!

Mayor Bennett reportedly mentioned the Kitty Hawk/Dare County Recycling Center at 4190 Bob Perry Road in Kitty Hawk as an option for Southern Shores recyclables. The Beacon has done the same, but is now concerned that the collector for this center is also Bay Disposal, which is hauling recyclables to Wheelabrator, not to a recycling processing center. [UPDATE: It is, indeed. See below.]

KITTY HAWK/DARE COUNTY RECYCLING CENTER

According to the Kitty Hawk town website, Outer Banks Hauling handles Kitty Hawk’s subscription curbside recycling. Outer Banks Hauling is another name for Bay Disposal. The Beacon tried to reach Kitty Hawk Public Works Director Willie Midgett and Dare County Sanitation and Recycle Supervisor David Overton by telephone this morning, but was unsuccessful—perhaps because of the holiday. [UDATE below.]

Undeterred, we traveled to the Kitty Hawk/Dare County Recycling Center to see the operation up-close and to speak with the attendant on duty. He was not given a holiday. The center is open Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday, and Saturday morning. See https://www.kittyhawknc.gov/departments-and-services/public-works/recycling/.

The recycling center separates glass and corrugated cardboard from the rest of the recycling it accepts, which is commingled in a single stream. Lavelle Jenkins, the very friendly and helpful part-time employee who assisted me, said that the county picks up the glass and the cardboard, and that the single-stream recyclables end up at Bay Disposal’s site in Currituck County.

[UPDATE 2 p.m.:] Mr. Midgett confirmed in a telephone call what Mr. Jenkins had said. Kitty Hawk will continue to have Bay Disposal pick up its single-stream recycling “as long as it does not go to a landfill,” Mr. Midgett said.

According to the Kitty Hawk Public Works Director, Dare County crushes the glass it collects and reuses it in road projects. The County bundles the cardboard it collects, he said, and sells it.

Kitty Hawk’s curbside recycling is strictly subscription-only, for which Bay Disposal charges $12.45 per month. Mr. Midgett said that town residents were given the option of “mandatory recycling,” but “it did not fly.”

In contrast to Kitty Hawk, the Town of Duck has a contract for residential and commercial curbside recycling with TFC Recycling, the Hampton Roads-based company with which Southern Shores previously did business. It is TFC Recycling that has refused to accept loads from Bay Disposal for processing at its recycling plant.

If the Town ceases to do business with Bay Disposal, there will be ample funds available to dedicate to searching for a solution to the recycling crisis. In FY 2019-20, the Town allocated $156,200 for “recycling collection,” just as it had done in FY 2018-19, the first year of its contract with Bay Disposal In FY 2017-28, the budgeted amount for collection was $139,849; in FY 2016-17, it was $134,594. (Former Town Manager Peter Rascoe touted a costs saving when he switched collection companies.)

Options exist for continued recycling in Southern Shores, and they should not be solely up to the “grass roots” to research and explore.

The calls The Beacon made today, along with calls to the Duck, Kitty Hawk, and Nags Head town managers, and the N.C. and Va. departments of environmental quality, can be easily made by Town staff without undue expense. What’s more, Interim Town Manager Wes Haskett is more likely to get a callback from these governmental employees than a blogger/reporter is.

You may access the agenda for tomorrow’s workshop here: https://www.southernshores-nc.gov/wp-content/uploads/minutes-agendas-newsletters/Agendas_2020-01-21.pdf.

Ann G. Sjoerdsma, 1/20/20

The curiosity of coastal-engineering consultant Ken Willson’s latest report to the Town Council is that, in seeking to define what constitutes “sufficient useable beach” in Southern Shores, he ignores the adjectival qualifier, “sufficient.” He also uses data from surveys done in May 2019, making no effort to collect new measurements or to compare last May’s data with historic data.

We now know what Mr. Willson, who is vice president of APTIM Coastal Planning & Engineering, has calculated to be the average beach widths in May 2019 of the Southern Shores, Kitty Hawk, and Kill Devil Hills shorelines, but nothing about their sufficiency. We also do not know, because he does not tell us, how the May 2019 data compare with widths now or with widths at any other time in Southern Shores’ history.

By unanimous decision Dec. 3, the new Town Council approved a cumbersome motion by Mayor Tom Bennett which, when revised, essentially instructed Mr. Willson to modify the methodology that APTIM had used to evaluate beach conditions in Southern Shores for its December 2018 Beach Management Plan and Vulnerability Assessment.

The Beach Management Plan was preceded by APTIM’s baseline assessment of the Southern Shores beaches in 2018 and updated in May 2019. (See below.) Mr. Willson presented the results of the update to the Town Council on Sept. 10, 2019.

After two property owners on Seventh Avenue persistently and publicly complained about their narrowed oceanfront being left out of Mr. Willson’s December 2018/May 2019 recommendations for beach nourishment in Southern Shores, the Mayor asked APTIM to re-evaluate. (Mr. Willson’s recommendations came less than two years after he told the Town Council that the Southern Shores oceanfront was “stable” and “in good shape.”

The Town Council’s request eventually took the form of a reformulated goal for the Beach Management Plan that reads as follows, with the italicized wording being new:

Maintain a healthy beach that provides sufficient useable beach and supports valuable shorebird and sea turtle nesting habitat.

Notably, no effort was made by the Town Council to define what constitutes “sufficient.”

AVERAGE BEACH WIDTHS COMPUTED BY APTIM AS OF MAY 2019 

According to the new report, which was submitted Jan. 14, Mr. Willson examined May 2019 beach-width conditions on the Southern Shores coastline and along the entire Kitty Hawk-Kill Devil Hills shoreline that was nourished in 2017, and came up with average beach widths.

But he never assesses the sufficiency of these averages, nor does he detail where along the many miles of this shoreline, ranging from the northern limit of Southern Shores to East Baum Street in Kill Devil Hills, does he derive his measurements. Addresses of the so-called “profile stations” would have been very helpful.

Mr. Willson concludes that the “average useable beach width” along the Southern Shores coastline south of Third Avenue last May was 84 feet. He says that the average useable beach width last May in the area south of Southern Shores that was renourished in 2017 was 103 feet.

Are 103 feet necessary for a beach width to be “sufficient”? Of course not. A beach of 40 feet could be sufficient, if it is used seasonally by few beachgoers. In contrast, a beach of 150 feet might be considered insufficient if it is mobbed with people. But in using the methodology that he used, Mr. Willson implicitly suggests that Southern Shores beaches must be 103 feet to be “sufficient.” Nonsense.

Figure 3 in Mr. Willson’s report, which is identified as “Addendum A” to the Town’s Beach Management Plan, purports to show the beach widths at a number of profile stations, only several of which are identified in the report. One of them is at Skyline Road, which had a beach width last May of about 100 feet.

The lowest width along the examined shoreline appears to be in the southern end of renourished Kill Devil Hills, where the beach last May was 50 feet.

Mr. Willson reports that the average useable beach width from Fifth Avenue in Southern Shores north to the Duck line last May was 57 feet.

How wide are the beaches now? We do not know. The shoreline ebbs and flows, accretes and erodes. As Dr. Katherine Brodie, an oceanographer at the Duck Research Pier who lives in Southern Shores, said at a September 2019 Council meeting: APTIM’s “data are limited.”

We do not have the benefit of long-term data. This is a glaring omission.

APTIM RECALCULATES COST ESTIMATES FOR ‘OPTIONS’

After computing averages for beach widths along the Southern Shores-to-Kill Devil Hills coastline as of last May—widths that he says “may meet the Town’s desired criteria [sic] of ‘sufficient’”—Mr. Willson then considers cost ramifications of revisions that would be based on them.

He looks at expanding the potential beach nourishment project in Southern Shores from 15,000 feet of oceanfront shoreline, as he recommended in 2018-19, to 19,712 feet. The latter would be the Town’s entire oceanfront.

He then adjusts the beach-fill options he recommended to the Town Council last September by adding two more.

In what he calls “Option 4,” Mr. Willson proposes to place a “design volume density” of 30 cubic yards of sand per foot along the 19,712-foot oceanfront, even though he states that the beach south of Third Avenue “had sufficient useable beach as of May 2019.”

Option 4 is an update of what was previously termed Option 1, which would have placed 36 cy/ft. of sand volume on the beaches south of Third Avenue to the Kitty Hawk line. Mr. Willson estimates the total cost of Option 4 to be $14,755,600, as compared with Option 1’s $13,974,200.

So-called Option 5, Mr. Willson writes, “is essentially the same beach fill configuration in Option 1 [36 cy/ft.] from Third Avenue south,” but it also includes placing 30 cy/ft of beach fill from Third Avenue north to the Duck line. The cost for this option is estimated to be $16,196,500.

APTIM CALLED SOUTHERN SHORES BEACHES STABLE IN 2018

The Beacon is well aware how tedious and cumbersome it is for property owners to sort through, and make sense of, Mr. Willson’s data compilation and manipulation and his various reports of the past three years. We would like to have independent experts, such as oceanographers from the Duck Research Pier, study his Southern Shores reports and recommendations as a whole and in the context of the coastal environment—starting decades ago—and give us their opinions on his conclusions.

We are hopeful that Dr. Brodie and her oceanography colleague, Dr. Nicholas Cohn, who also lives in Southern Shores, will attend Tuesday’s workshop and speak in the public forum. Property owners would benefit from their expertise.

Mr. Willson first appeared on the Southern Shores scene as a presenter at the beach nourishment forum that the Town held in the ballroom of the Hilton Garden Inn on Jan. 17, 2017. Because Mayor Bennett turned this special forum-conference into a regular Council meeting and allowed public comments to be heard before the assembled experts spoke, many of the hundreds of people who came to listen to the experts left before the program started.

A floodgate of Pelican Watch homeowners, who had already complained in a private meeting with the Mayor and in Town Council meetings, delayed for more than an hour the start of the forum that everyone had come to hear. I still hear from people that they no longer attend public meetings because of what occurred at this forum.

Allow me to tell those of you who avoid meetings that Mr. Willson has changed his tune during the past two years.

Subsequent to the forum, the Town Council, with former Town Manager Peter Rascoe’s guidance, authorized Mr. Willson, then a “project manager” for APTIM, to do a baseline assessment of the Southern Shores beaches in 2017.

APTIM, which is based in Wilmington, has nearly cornered the market on conducting beach-profile surveys and doing beach-nourishment project planning and execution for Outer Banks towns. APTIM has been a contractor of Southern Shores, Duck, Kitty Hawk, and Kill Devil Hills. Only Nags Head has hired a different coastal engineering firm.

Mr. Willson presented his 2017 beach assessment to the Town Council at its March 6,  2018 meeting, informing members that the Southern Shores “shoreline is looking fairly stable” and there is “no big rush” to “jump” on beach nourishment.

“I think time is on your side,” he concluded. Check out the tape. He said it.

The results of APTIM’s 2017 surveys of 22 beach profiles, which are locations along the Southern Shores shoreline spaced 1,000 feet apart from each other, showed 1) the shoreline is “stable,” having lost only 0.4 feet (that’s five inches) between 2006 and 2017; and 2) the volume of sand in the system had actually increased during the same time period.

“The shoreline is looking pretty stable,” Mr. Willson said. “We’re not seeing any hot spots right now. The long-term averages and the short-term averages [for shoreline changes] look to be pretty stable, pretty manageable.”

But, he continued, cautiously . . . we do see some areas along the shoreline that have less sand volume than others, some houses that are closer to the stable line of vegetation than other houses. He, therefore, recommended to the Council that it authorize APTIM to conduct a “vulnerability assessment of the oceanfront structures” and to determine the “minimum cross-section of [sand] volume” that should be maintained to protect the shoreline from storm damage.

And, just so the Town Council would have the information it needs, he said, he would provide a “five-year plan” for “what a project would look like” when he conducted the vulnerability assessment and the volume determination.

Not that the Town needs to implement that five-year plan, you understand.

And this is how the Beach Management Plan that APTIM submitted in December 2018 and that the Town Council authorized updating in May 2019 came to be.

At the Town Council’s Feb. 26, 2019 special planning session, at which Mr. Willson first presented his three recommended options for beach nourishment in Southern Shores, the now-vice president of APTIM told the four members in attendance (former Councilman Christopher Nason was absent):

“The dune system in Southern Shores is in pretty good shape.” It is “fairly intact,” he said, providing protection against storms and erosion.

But, somehow, time is no longer on our side.

You can read all about the short beach-nourishment journey in Southern Shores from the Town’s coastal engineering consultant’s acknowledgment of stability on our oceanfront less than three years ago to what now appears may be an ill-advised leap by the Town Council into investing in a project, on The Beacon:

2/28/19 (the special planning session);

3/31/19 (an editorial opposing beach nourishment as unnecessary);

4/4/19 (public forum, Rascoe’s urging of “pulling the trigger”);

9/17/19 (questions by oceanographers about APTIM’s “limited” data); and

12/14/19 (the Town Council’s “useable” beaches).

See you Tuesday morning.

Ann G. Sjoerdsma, 1/19/20

The Nags Head Board of Commissioners is expected to consider next month whether to renegotiate its residential recycling contract with Bay Disposal & Recycling, with whom Southern Shores also does business, after learning that the hauler is taking the town’s recyclables to a waste-to-energy plant rather than to a recycling plant, as the town’s contract requires, according to a Jan. 14 report by The Outer Banks Voice.

The Voice’s Michelle Wagner reports that the Powell’s Point-based collector, which also collects Southern Shores’ curbside recycling and has requested a rate increase from the Town for its services, notified the Town of Nags Head on Jan. 7 that “all its recyclables were being transported to Wheelabrator, a waste-to-energy facility in Portsmouth, Va. to be generated as renewable electricity for a utility and used for steam at the U.S. Navy shipyard in Norfolk.”

See: https://www.outerbanksvoice.com/2020/01/14/nags-head-may-face-tough-choice-on-recycling/

Bay Disposal’s Outer Banks Site Manager Joshua Smaltz, also advised the Southern Shores Town Council at its Jan. 7 meeting that it is currently taking all of Southern Shores’ curbside recycling to Wheelabrator, a company with waste-to-energy facilities in the United States and the United Kingdom.

According to a timeline prepared by Mr. Smaltz, which was included in the Jan. 7 meeting packet, the Bay Disposal employee informed “the Town” on Dec. 10, 2019 that TFC’s recycling center in Hampton Roads would no longer accept Bay Disposal’s loads. On Dec. 16, Mr. Smaltz writes, he proposed to the Town that its recycling be reused “at the energy plant.”

Both Interim Town Manager Wes Haskett and Mayor Tom Bennett, thus, knew weeks before the Council’s meeting earlier this month that Bay Disposal was taking Southern Shores recyclables to Wheelabrator (“the energy plant”), which is mentioned in the Jan. 7 meeting packet, along with a notation about its costs. (Comments by Mayor Bennett at the Council meeting confirm his knowledge.)

(See pp. 14-15 and 18 in the packet at https://www.southernshores-nc.gov/wp-content/uploads/minutes-agendas-newsletters/Meeting-Packet_2020-01-07.pdf.)

Mr. Smaltz did not publicly elaborate, however, at the Council meeting upon the nature of Wheelabrator’s operations, nor did Mr. Haskett or Mayor Bennett explain the nature of Wheelabrator’s operations—and none of the other Town Council members asked.

Wheelabrator converts residential waste to useable energy by burning it. It does not recycle material.

(For background on the recycling crisis in Southern Shores, see The Beacon’s reports of 12/7/19 and 1/9/20.)

Bay Disposal reportedly breached its contract with Nags Head when it transported its recyclables to Wheelabrator, without advising the town.

Under Nags Head’s current contract, The Voice reports, “Town Manager Cliff Ogburn said that no more than 10 percent of the weight of recycled materials collected in Nags Head could end up in [a] landfill or be incinerated without permission from the town.”

According to The Voice: “While sending Nags Head’s recyclables to Wheelabrator is permissible under the town’s 30-year agreement with the Albemarle Solid Waste Management Authority, Ogburn said a consideration just as important is whether the commissioners and the community want to continue the recycling program based on this new information.

“Some in the community, Ogburn told the Voice, may support recycling, but are ‘not as agreeable to this form of use.’”

Some in Southern Shores also may not agree with having their recyclables incinerated at Wheelabrator, but they have not been adequately informed by the Town Manager, Mayor, and Town Council of the circumstances.

The Beacon believes it is long past time for Interim Town Manager Haskett to step up in this crisis and show leadership. He is quoted by The Voice as saying that Southern Shores “is currently waiting to hear back from Bay Disposal about state requirements regarding the route by which recyclables get to Wheelabrator, which will, in turn, impact rates. ‘Either way, we are looking at a rate increase,’ he noted.”

Such passivity is unacceptable. Bay Disposal does not run Southern Shores, and Mr. Haskett does not need the Town Council’s permission to contact Mr. Ogburn and the town managers of other nearby beach towns to start a dialogue on how the towns can work together to ensure that Outer Bankers can continue to recycle, curbside or otherwise.

Recycle, not incinerate.

Southern Shores should not be in the position of waiting to hear what Bay Disposal has to say and then seeking to accommodate it. We should take action for our own good now.

Which single-stream recycling centers in Virginia and North Carolina are closest to Dare County? What would it cost each beach municipality that currently has a contract with Bay Disposal to transport its recyclables to these centers? Can the towns collaborate and pool their resources to keep costs down? What other options exist for the Dare County beach towns to work together for the betterment of all?

Creative problem-solving about the recycling crisis has yet to occur in Southern Shores, and it is long overdue.

Ann G. Sjoerdsma, 1/18/20

Jan. 21 workshop speaker Ken Willson of APTIM Coastal Planning and Engineering of N.C., has submitted a report to the Town detailing his analysis of what he believes constitutes “sufficient useable beach” on the 3.7-mile-long Southern Shores coastline. Doug and Andrew Carter of DEC Associates in Charlotte, however, have not filed any documents in advance of their presentation next Tuesday about financial planning for possible beach nourishment in Southern Shores.

The Town Council’s Jan. 21 workshop session will convene at 9 a.m. in the Pitts Center. According to the agenda, the first item of business will be the search and hiring process for the next town manager. Mr. Willson and the Carters will speak after the conclusion of that business, after which a public forum on a “potential” beach nourishment project in town will be held.

You may access the agenda here: https://www.southernshores-nc.gov/wp-content/uploads/minutes-agendas-newsletters/Agendas_2020-01-21.pdf.

The Town has posted Mr. Willson’s latest report, along with two previous reports filed by APTIM, in the workshop meeting packet.

According to the agenda, the Carters will be showing a power-point presentation, just as they did at the Town Council’s Feb. 26, 2019 special planning meeting, when the issue of financing beach nourishment first arose publicly.

You may access the Jan. 21 meeting packet here: https://www.southernshores-nc.gov/wp-content/uploads/minutes-agendas-newsletters/Meeting-Packet_2020-01-21.pdf.

APTIM’s report about “useable” beaches in Southern Shores, which was submitted Jan. 14, is directly accessible here: https://www.southernshores-nc.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Southern-Shores-Addendum-A-DRAFT-01142020.pdf

The meeting packet also contains voluminous materials from the three highly recommended, experienced, and qualified search firms that have applied to assist the Town with its search for the next town manager. Southern Shores has been without a permanent, full-time town manager since mid-August 2019, when Peter Rascoe went on two weeks’ leave before his Sept. 1, 2019 retirement.

See the town manager search packet here: https://www.southernshores-nc.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Manager-Search-Firm-Packet.pdf

One of the search firms, The Mercer Group—which is headquartered in Georgia and has an office in Raleigh—assisted the Manteo Board of Commissioners with its recent successful search to find a successor to longtime City Manager Kermit Skinner. (See pp. 63-66 of the town manager meeting-packet materials.)

As The Beacon reported 12/11/19, after learning of further delay by the Town Council last December in selecting a search firm: “Manteo underwent a rigorous search process to hire its current manager earlier this year, after 30-year Town Manager Kermit Skinner retired. Mayor Bobby Owens would likely be pleased to share his wisdom with the Town Council.”

The first reference listed on the application that The Mercer Group submitted to Town Human Resources Director Bonnie Swain last November is, in fact, Mayor Owens.

Despite having ample information on-hand from each of the three consultants, the Town Council decided to hear from Hartwell Wright, a human resources consultant with the N.C. League of Municipalities (NCLM), before choosing a consultant. He will speak at the Jan. 21 workshop.

As Mayor Tom Bennett explained at the Town Council’s regular December meeting, Mr. Wright will inform the elected officials “what he recommends we look for in a manager based on his history and experience.”

The Mercer Group lists in its application about 60 executive searches that it has performed for government clients, most of them to fill vacancies for city, town, or county manager—and that’s just in North Carolina. Its experts have managed dozens more searches nationwide.

We wonder how Mr. Wright’s track record compares with The Mercer Group’s record or with the other two applicants’.

The Mercer Group’s fee would be $17,500, which is comparable to what Developmental Associates, LLC, of Chapel Hill, and N-Focus of Kannapolis would charge.

BEACH NOURISHMENT FINANCING?

The Beacon will examine the latest APTIM report in more detail in a blog post over the weekend. It addresses adding sand to a 19,712-foot-long oceanfront, an increase of about 4,000 feet over previous recommendations for nourishment. It also recalculates project costs, which have previously been estimated at $14 to $16 million, depending on how much sand is added to the beaches.

We have reported about beach nourishment in Southern Shores on the following dates: 2/28/19, 3/31/19, 4/3/19, and 9/17/19.

In our 2/28/19 report about last February’s Town Council planning session, we reported: “[T]he father-son financial-adviser team of Doug and Andrew Carter, of DEC Associates in Charlotte, explained to the Town Council the various complicated methods available for beach-nourishment funding.

“Popular among them are special obligation bonds, which permit a town to set up ‘municipal service districts’ and to levy different tax rates within the MSDs, Andrew Carter explained, so that, for example, people who own oceanfront property would pay more than other property owners do for the sand fill/replenishment.

“Once a beach town embarks upon a nourishment plan, said Mr. Carter, whose firm specializes in N.C. shoreline protection financial planning, it commits to ‘long-term planning’ for future periodic maintenance and beach operating costs.

“He echoed Mr. Willson’s earlier assertion that beach nourishment is ‘an exercise in adaptive management. . . . It is never seen as a one-time event.’

“The Carters said their fees would be $35-$40,000 for developing a financial plan and setting up a ‘beach fund’ for the earmarked funds; and $30,000 for working on finding the financing, which is typically for five years.”

The Town Council voted 3-2 on Oct. 1, 2019 to hire and pay $35,000 now to DEC Associates to ensure, as the Mayor said, that a financial consultant would be on board in the event the Town were to go forward with a beach nourishment project. Former Councilmen Gary McDonald and Fred Newberry dissented.

All of the Dare County beach towns that have done beach nourishment—Duck, Southern Shores (for the Pelican Watch beaches), Kitty Hawk, Kill Devil Hills, and Nags Head—have used DEC Associates.

The Beacon is eager to see how the appropriated $35,000, which came from the Town’s unassigned fund balance, has been spent so far.

The following is the power-point presentation given by the Carters on Feb. 26, 2019 at the Council’s special planning meeting:

https://www.southernshores-nc.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/DEC-Association-PowerPoint-ToSS-February-2019-Town-Meeting-.pdf

Ann G. Sjoerdsma, 1/17/20

While the landscape on the south end of Dogwood Trail is being decimated, the landscape on the north end of the wooded trail is blooming (see above). Both trends strike The Beacon as disturbing.

The old growth on South Dogwood Trail that has been destroyed will never be replaced. On the north end, however, more flowers, seduced by the unseasonable warmth, may soon burst forth. Temperatures today through Thursday are forecasted to be in the mid- to high-60s.

The sidewalk construction is well under way. The Beacon has heard from one homeowner that an eight-foot-tall camellia bush in his South Dogwood Trail yard was removed, contrary to sidewalk-design plans he had seen and without any notice to him. Upon complaining to the Town, the homeowner was referred to “Town Engineer” Joe Anlauf, who was less than sympathetic.

In its motion to approve the plans for the South Dogwood Trail sidewalk, the Town Council specifically designated the “Town Manager” to do construction oversight. That person now would be Interim Town Manager Wes Haskett. The Beacon believes that Mr. Haskett should be receiving, investigating, and resolving all homeowner complaints. No homeowner should have to speak directly with Mr. Anlauf, whose public demeanor is often brusque.

The Beacon would like to hear from any South Dogwood Trail homeowners who have concerns or complaints about the sidewalk construction project. Please write to us at ssbeaconeditor@gmail.com. If you have contacted the Town about your concern(s), please include the names of the people with whom you spoke and how they handled the matter.

The Beacon would advise anyone who has an issue with the sidewalk construction to contact all members of the Town Council at their collective email address of council@southernshores-nc.gov. Mr. Anlauf is a working partner of the engineering firm with which the Town has independently contracted. He does not represent Southern Shores homeowners.

PUBLIC FORUM ON BEACH NOURISHMENT ALSO SCHEDULED JAN. 21

The Town announced yesterday that a public forum on a potential beach nourishment project in Southern Shores will be held at the Council’s Jan. 21 workshop meeting, which starts at 9 a.m., immediately after two presentations:

The first by Ken Willson, of APTIM Coastal Planning and Engineering of N.C., about the modifications that the Council requested to its “Beach Management Plan,” and the second by financial consultant, DEC Associates, Inc., which has advised other Dare County beach towns about how to distribute the tax-increase burden on property owners to pay for their nourishment projects.

The Beacon will preview these two presentations as much as is possible based on documents posted on the Town website.

We are very disappointed that the Town Council is asking property owners either to give up/rearrange a busy week-day morning of work, child care, and other activities in order to comment in an important public forum, whose time will not be determined until just before it begins, or else to inform themselves by reading documents online before Jan. 21 and sending written comments to the Town. We will try to ease your burden with an assessment/analysis beforehand.

At the very least, the Town Council should indicate in its Jan. 21 agenda whether it will be making any decisions at its so-called workshop. Workshops are commonly understood to be for study and discussion, not for votes on major decisions.

Ann G. Sjoerdsma, 1/11/20