Beach erosion study delayed again

BRIDGEHAMPTON—The forces of nature created Long Island’s iconic sand beaches over tens of thousands of years, a snap of the fingers in geologic time.

After 30 years and counting, some on the East End are starting to think that the federal agencies developing the Fire Island to Montauk Point Reformulation Study, a plan for managing those beaches, might be operating on the same glacial time frame.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers last week cancelled three of four public meetings scheduled for this month that would have been the first open discussions of the myriad action plans they are considering for the dynamic expanse of sand beaches and barrier islands stretching from Fire Island to Montauk Point—yet another delay in a project that is already a decade overdue.

Local officials have gotten glimpses of portions of the study’s draft report and some of the recommendations being considered for maintaining the beaches—including a sand bypass system for Shinnecock Inlet, alterations to groins in East Hampton and Westhampton Beach, and beach rebuilding at several points along the shorefront.

On Saturday morning, U.S. Representative Tim Bishop of Southampton told a gathering of public officials and local residents at the Bridgehampton National Bank’s community meeting room that he and some state lawmakers will continue pressing for the completion of the long-awaited study, which may allow large-scale rebuilding of Southampton Town’s eroded beaches. But he also said town governments and individual neighborhoods should be working on their own smaller-scale efforts to bolster their beaches as an alternative to the perpetually far-off federal effort.

Rep. Bishop, who lobbied through years of the Bush administration’s efforts to kill funding for the Fire Island to Montauk Point Reformulation Study, also known as FIMPS, told a handful of Sagaponack homeowners that the proposed creation of a special tax district for their properties to help pay for smaller-scale beach rebuilding projects might still be their best bet for securing the kind of work they need to protect their homes from major storms.

“There’s two ways to get sand on the beach, FIMPS and erosion control districts,” the congressman told residents on Saturday morning. “Dealing with the Army Corps is a mixed blessing: they have the deepest pockets, but they also have far and away the most laborious process.”

Until the FIMPS recommendations can be vetted and a comprehensive program of beach rebuilding implemented, the erosion control districts and the Federal Emergency Management Agency may be the best hope for spurring beach rebuilding in severely eroded stretches of Sagaponack and Bridgehampton, Mr. Bishop said.

By creating the special tax districts, which are proposed in Sagaponack and Bridgehampton, residents will be able to raise their own funding for beach nourishment projects. But, more important, they will have an official footing on which to approach FEMA and the Army Corps about assistance with specific projects.

Through the creation of an erosion control district in Hampton Bays in 2005, residents were able to secure federal and state funding for a project that placed thousands of tons of sand on beaches there last winter.

“I have people come to me every day and ask why we are cleaning up a mess the Army Corps made,” said Gary Ireland, the Sagaponack resident who organized Saturday’s meeting and who has circulated a petition calling on the Army Corps to complete the FIMPS work immediately. “It’s a valid point, but there’s no way around it—that’s what we have to do.”

A lawsuit Mr. Ireland filed against Suffolk County and the Army Corps of Engineers, blaming four stone groins built at the county’s urging in East Hampton in the 1950s and 1960s for erosion in Sagaponack and Bridgehampton, was dismissed by a state judge last year.

The FIMPS project was begun in 1980 as an ambitious effort to develop a comprehensive database of the forces at work along eastern Long Island’s economically critical ocean beaches and a catalog of potential efforts that would ensure their survival while protecting the private property interests of the residents and businesses that occupy the beachfront. After years of compiling an increasingly complicated analysis of conditions along the beaches and bays of the South Shore, originally scheduled to be completed in 2002, Mr. Bishop said the study’s completion was nearly killed by funding cuts in the Army Corps budgets. Lobbying from Mr. Bishop and other Long Island politicians kept the project alive, if handicapped by tightened purse strings. The realization that the effects of global warming would have to be accounted for in the analysis added another year to the data compilation.

“The Bush administration was prepared to walk away from this—they said the local governments can handle it,” Mr. Bishop said. “We know that local governments cannot handle this on their own.”

Despite the long delays, Mr. Bishop said the FIMPS is in its final stages—and not a moment too soon, as federal lawmakers are champing at the bit to slash government spending in the face of mountainous deficits, and the Army Corps’s robust budget is likely to be on the cutting board.

Mr. Bishop told the Sagaponack residents that he is pushing for broadening the scope of beach rebuilding efforts and the alteration of the East Hampton groins, commonly known as the “Georgica Jetties” a sentiment met with approval.

“The groins have destroyed a process that nature spent thousands of years creating,” Mr. Ireland said, “and anything we can do to expedite their removal we should pursue.”

Perhaps the biggest obstacle now facing the completion of the study is the competing interests of the two federal agencies most involved in it, the Army Corps and the Department of the Interior.

“Until we get Interior and the Army Corps to agree, we will not move forward,” said coastal geologist Aram Terchunian of Westhampton. “The Department of the Interior’s mission is to maintain a natural system, that means washovers of the barrier islands during storms. The problem is they are trying to accomplish that within a system that has been monkeyed with by humans. The Army Corps’s mission is to engineer the beach to protect from storms. So now we have the worst possible situation: a partially engineered beach with no maintenance happening.”

Mr. Bishop said that he will continue to press for the public meetings to be rescheduled as soon as possible and said he is still positive that the marathon effort will come to a conclusion soon and will be a major benefit to the East End for years to come.

“It’s frustrating that it took so long to get here,” he said. “But now we’re here.”