NEW PORT -- North Carolina's Coastal Resources Commission has embarked on a study that will determine the future of our beaches. The commission must report its findings to the General Assembly by April 1, 2010.
The study is looking at the feasibility of allowing small jetties, called groins, to be built along our beaches at inlets to protect private property from erosion. Such structures are currently illegal in North Carolina because too often they destroy the beach by increasing erosion elsewhere. The commission hired Moffitt and Nichol, a consulting firm that has built jetties and groins in other states, to help with the study. The state will pay the firm nearly $300,000.
All North Carolinians, whether they live at the beach or atop a mountain in Murphy, have a stake in the outcome of this study.
The beaches in North Carolina are held in public trust for everyone. It's the state's policy to do everything possible to protect the beach. When it's possible to protect the beach and private oceanfront property without harming either, that's encouraged by existing state policy. It's not acceptable, however, to damage the public's beach in the quest, sometimes panic, to save eroding private oceanfront investments.
Projects to control oceanfront erosion are subject to the whims of nature, and a high percentage of them fail to perform as predicted and result in unanticipated consequences.
It was the uncertainty involved with these projects that resulted in the current ban on seawalls and groins, which was enacted in 1984. The Coastal Resources Commission decided that trying to regulate such structures was like playing with fire, and sooner or later it would get seriously burned. The legislature strengthened the regulatory ban, turning it into a state law in 2003.
The bottom line is that if it becomes possible to issue permits for groins, permits will be granted, and problem structures won't be removed until the sea takes them out.
Geology, engineering, biology and economics are all critical elements of this study. But the most important thing to evaluate is whether the commission can effectively regulate groins if it is allowed to accept permit applications for their construction.
Proving harm upfront in the permit review process will be an impossible challenge for the commission. Positive and negative consequences of projects will be hotly debated by opposing experts, and the commission will face a lot of uncertainty. When the commission can't prove upfront that a proposed project will violate one of its specific development standards, the Coastal Area Management Act gives it no choice but to issue permits. When uncertainty about compliance with development standards exists, the law requires the commission to err on the side of development over beaches.
This leaves the commission to rely on performance standards and permit conditions with promises that if things don't work out as promised, corrective actions are required. Then, when these conditions are later violated, it will go about a prolonged and expensive process of trying to fix the situation.
Meanwhile beaches become increasingly degraded and public trust rights will be lost, just as has already occurred on our beaches with the spreading use of now seemingly permanent sandbags that were originally intended to provide short-term, temporary protection for highly threatened houses.
That's why it was such a prudent decision by the commission in 1984 to simply ban groins and seawalls. That approach has worked remarkably well to protect the beach for all the citizens of North Carolina for the past 25 years.
Now the commission is required to study this obvious regulatory conundrum once again. Once again, a meaningful evaluation of how coastal development permits are granted and enforced in North Carolina should reaffirm the wisdom of the existing simple and easy-to-enforce prohibition on seawalls and groins along our oceanfront.
Any conclusion to the contrary that finds the commission can adequately predict the impact of these proposed structures on a case-by-case basis, consistently make entirely correct permit decisions and fix problems once they are created would be a wicked April Fool's joke on the people of North Carolina who love our beaches.
