Walton revisiting massive beach nourishment proposal. Will the sand be an exact match?

SANTA ROSA BEACH — Eight years after it was authorized, and two years before federal funding authorization is set to expire, Walton County is working to revitalize a potentially massive beach nourishment program.

At Tuesday's meeting of the Walton County Board of County Commissioners, the county Tourism Department's interim director, Brian Kellenberger, got authorization to schedule public workshops on the proposal. Additionally, commissioners agreed to write a letter to the U.S. Congress asking that federal funding continue to be available for the program beyond its currently scheduled 2024 expiration.

No dates had been set for the workshops as of Friday, but Kellenberger said they will be held sometime in early July.

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Commissioners were a bit reluctant Tuesday to commit any county funding to the project just yet, voting to make a $2.2 million outlay for preconstruction, engineering and design of the nourishment project contingent on getting sufficient buy-in from the private property owners who hold the vast majority of the county's beachfront.

In a Thursday interview, Kellenberger explained that the aim of the beach nourishment program would be to protect upland structures from hurricane damage.

Those structures, which include short-term vacation rental housing, restaurants and other beachfront businesses, are critical to the county in that they generate a massive percentage of the revenue the county government receives from property taxes, sales taxes, the 5% "bed tax" charged to visitors staying in accommodations in the southern end of the county and other levies, Kellenberger said.

The county claims just a couple of miles of beachfront for public use, and the state parks along the shores of the Gulf of Mexico account for another five or so miles of the county's 26 miles of beaches.

Hurricane Storm Damage Reduction effort

As such, the private beachfront property owners, who would have to grant construction easements to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers — which would oversee the beach sand replenishment — hold the key as to whether pursuing beach nourishment would be worthwhile. The construction easements would not be permanent, according to Kellenberger.

Nonetheless, the county's record on that score is not encouraging. The local Hurricane Storm Damage Reduction effort began in the early 2000s, and was authorized by the federal government in 2014. The county committed some funds to the project at that time, but "unfortunately ... did not get very good participation" in terms of acquiring easements needed for the project, Kellenberger said.

Eventually, Kellenberger said, the county tabled any further pursuit of the program until the recent move to revive it.

Overlaying the beach nourishment proposal is the county's ongoing legal action with beachfront property owners over the issue of "customary use." Customary use, which the county favors, is the view that beaches have been available to the public as a matter of practice in the state over a long period of time, and should be so today.

According to Kellenberger, the issue was very much in the forefront of the county's previous effort to get a beach nourishment program started. That earlier effort had progressed to the point that the Corps of Engineers was ready to get preliminary work underway, the county had identified a "borrow site" for the needed sand, and plans had been drawn up. The effort stalled, though, amid beachfront property owners' concerns that "it was a land grab" on the county's part, Kellenberger said.

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Kellenberger said he is expecting that same dynamic to emerge in connection with the renewed effort to shore up the county's beachfront.

"I expect them to immediately ramp up their campaign" against the proposed project, he said.

Additionally, Kellenberger said, he expects a second issue that hobbled the prior effort to put a beach nourishment operation in place — the compatibility of sand from borrow pits in the Gulf of Mexico with the sugar-white sands of the county's coastline — to resurface.

Sand 'is white, white, white'

There was a hint of that at Tuesday's commission meeting, when Lisa Boushy, a Santa Rosa Beach resident and former member of the Walton County Tourist Development Council, told commissioners the sand for which the county's beaches are prized "is pure quartz, it is without shells for the most part ... and it is white, white, white, and you can't duplicate that in a borrow pit out in the Gulf."

Kellenberger conceded Thursday that the sand in the county's previously identified borrow pit isn't an exact match for the existing beach sand, but the differences are negligible. While the grains of sand on the beaches measure .008-inch, he said, the grains from the borrow pit measure .009-inch. Also according to Kellenberger, the sand from the borrow pit, located 3.5 miles out in the gulf, matches the tolerances of the Munsell Color Chart, a widely used method of quantifying soil colors.

A full-blown beach nourishment program will require 3.8 million cubic yards of sand, according to Kellenberger. And, he added, assembling anything less than a contiguous mile of beach property, in however many places that length of beach might be found, would not be practical for long-term beach nourishment.

Boushy also reminded commissioners Tuesday that the majority of beachfront property owners were against the last beach nourishment effort, and unless there has been a significant change in property ownership or attitudes in the intervening years, "it's going to be a tall order to get people to change their votes this time."

Nonetheless, Kellenberger said in the Thursday interview, "We feel as the county that it is our duty once again to hold public workshops" on beach nourishment and "hopefully helping Gulf-front property owners to see it's good for them, it's good for the community."

Under current terms, the initial sand placement for a local beach nourishment project would cost $62 million, according to Kellenberger, with the federal government covering 30% of the cost, the state contributing 20% of the needed funding, and the county paying 50% of the cost.

The county's share of the cost would come from the beach nourishment reserve fund connected with the 5% "bed tax" collected in the southern end of the county. That fund currently contains $25 million, with an additional $4 million set to be collected this year, Kellenberger said.

That would leave the county a couple of million dollars short of its share of the cost of beach nourishment, Kellenberger conceded, but the county would collect all of the needed funding over the next couple of years, as design and permitting work were ongoing, if the county decides to go ahead with the project, he said.

'No more mistakes'

On a somewhat related note, Walton County commissioners used part of their Tuesday meeting to criticize their Washington, D.C. consultant, Michael Willis of The Color Nine Group in Silver Spring, Maryland, for not making them aware of the potential for the county to have gotten at least a share of $120 million in federal assistance for beach renourishment following Hurricane Michael in 2018. Those funds are no longer available, Willis told commissioners on Tuesday.

Willis, on hand for a county decision on a one-year renewal of The Color Nine Group's contract with the firm, faced questions from commissioners on the issue. He told the commission he had made former Walton County Administrator Larry Jones and former Walton County Tourist Development Council Executive Director Jay Tusa aware of the federal funding availability. The two men asked him for time to talk it over and to meet with commissioners, Willis said, and a few days later, he got a message indicating the county wouldn't be moving forward on the possible funding, and there was no reason for him to contact the Corps of Engineers.

According to Commissioner Danny Glidewell, the sitting commission didn't become aware of the missed opportunity until earlier this year, during a lunch with Willis while Glidewell and Commissioner William "Boots" McCormick and county government staff members were in Washington, D.C., to meet with the county's congressional delegation.

Commissioners eventually decided Tuesday in favor of a one-year extension of the contract, after having had Willis as their federal consultant for more than a dozen years. They did, however, sternly remind Willis that he doesn't work for the county administration.

"We wanted to make sure Mr. Willis understood he works for the people of Walton County," Glidewell said Wednesday. The county's contract with The Color Nine Group has never provided for county administrators to unilaterally accept or reject federal funds, according to Glidewell.

"I would expect there would be no more mistakes," Glidewell told Willis at Tuesday's meeting. "If  $120 million comes up again, I would expect commissioners to know about it, (and) not four years later."

On Wednesday, Glidewell said Tuesday's frank talk with Willis wasn't an indication of any lingering dissatisfaction with his consulting work for the county.

"He's done us a good job," Glidewell said, noting that it was Willis who uncovered the beach renourishment funding opportunity in the first place. Willis "does a good job as far as finding money."

Asked about the issue in a Thursday interview, Kellenberger, who was not involved in any discussions of the availability of the federal dollars, suggested that being eligible for that kind of funding "doesn't necessarily mean you're going to get it."

Kellenberger, who did a damage assessment in the wake of Hurricane Michael, went on to say that the county's beaches did not sustain significant damage from the Category 5 storm, and he went on to suggest that anticipated difficulty in getting easements from private property owners for beach nourishment might have played a role in the county taking a pass on those federal dollars.

But, he added, "If it had been up to me, I probably would have run it by the county commissioners."

This article originally appeared on Northwest Florida Daily News: Beach renourishment: Walton considers sand replenishment project