Army Corps Tells East Hampton Its Plans For Montauk Beach Are Being Trimmed

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has told East Hampton Town officials that it has pared back the scope of its planned beach replenishment project along Montauk’s oceanfront, which is part of a $1 billion effort to bolster all of Long Island’s coastal areas against storms like Superstorm Sandy.

The Army Corps had told the town in the fall of 2016, after appeals from state and federal lawmakers and reports by consultants for the town, that it planned to endorse a broad reengineering of the Montauk oceanfront with close to 1 million tons of sand dredged from the ocean floor.

But in a report to town officials earlier this summer, the Army Corps said the project has now been trimmed again, to about two-thirds of its previously planned scope.

“We told them we need a lot more than that,” Supervisor Peter Van Scoyoc said on Tuesday. “Our report by First Coastal in 2016 recommended 750,000 cubic yards,” he said, referring to the Westhampton Beach firm. “They’d said they were generally in agreement with that and were at about 600,000 to 650,000 cubic yards. Now, they’re saying 400,000 to 450,000. We asked them to take another look at that.”

Whatever the scope of the project the Army Corps agrees to, it will be almost entirely paid for with federal Superstorm Sandy aid earmarked for the Fire Island to Montauk Point Reformulation Project, or FIMP, that the Army Corps now says is due to begin funding projects in 2022.

The shift by the Army Corps comes as the town begins its own effort to figure out how to address the long-term health of the beaches in Montauk, either as a supplement to the work the Army Corps undertakes, or in its place if there are continued delays to the completion of FIMP.

Laura Tooman, president of the Concerned Citizens of Montauk and the chairwoman of a newly created Montauk Beach Preservation Committee, said on Tuesday that the town plans to conduct a feasibility study of a self-funded beach replenishment project, preferably as an add-on to an Army Corps project, to save on millions of dollars of mobilization costs for such projects.

The study will explore the options in paying for a $12 million to $15 million project, including the possibility of creating a localized sales tax of sorts on hotel rooms or creating a special taxing district in Montauk to spread out the costs of a beach nourishment project among all of those who benefit from it.

The second step in the process, she said, will be actually determining the scope of the project that will be needed, based largely on what extent of the work the Army Corps ultimately says it will be willing to do and fund. The town could then try to fund a tag-along project that would take advantage of the heavy equipment already being on-site and simply pay for more time and materials to be dedicated to the additional work.

“Doing it on our own would be much more expensive,” Ms. Tooman said, but she added that the town also cannot rely on the notoriously glacial federal agency entirely: “Doing so would be setting ourselves up for failure.”