Sandcastles In The Air

What are informed decisions? What are uninformed decisions?

What role does foresight play in our decision making?

The taxpayers of Longboat Key will soon be asked to once again approve a beach bond in the vicinity of $50 million to replenish ten miles of beach. I am reminded of George Santayana's admonition "Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it." If today's commission proceedings are any indication of the commissioners final decision concerning the scope of work on the island's shoreline, we are doomed to throwing an enormous amount of money into the Gulf of Mexico, again.

To view some of the erosion control solutions employed by other communities look at the link below.

http://www.lbkbeaches.com/

I honestly believe that any decision to repeat a process that has been shown to be temporary and increasingly costly is an uninformed decision if no attempt is made to seriously examine as many viable alternatives as possible.

I also believe that waiting until the last possible moment, when the town is between the devil and the deep blue sea, does not lead to a successful informed decision making process.

At the previous commission workshop, the town's beach consultants appeared to be ill-prepared at such a late date. They had no innovative and cost saving suggestions for the commission to consider. When commissioner Larson brought up the idea of geotex tubes as a means of retaining expensive sand, the consultants appeared to be caught off guard and had no immediate answers. One would think for what we pay the consultants, that they would have come to the deadline meetings with more than "the same old same old".

I believe the time has come, and the costs high enough, for the town commission to finally approach our beach problem with true due diligence. We need to seek solutions from more sources than just our current beach management consultants. If one takes the time and does the research it becomes apparent that communities use many different methods to control the costs of maintaining their beaches. If money were of no concern, then our present policy of replenishing our beaches ever seven or eight years might be the easiest approach. However, money is a concern and we need to attempt to find a permanent solution if one exists.

Informed decision making will require a great effort for an unpaid commission. It will also require that the commission instruct the town manager to bring in other coastal engineering companies from around the country and around the world if necessary. The projected cost of the upcoming beach project is $50,000,000.00 plus when interest is added to the $40,000,000.00 bond issue. That works out to over $5,000,000.00 a mile for sand replenishment that has been proven again and again to last only a few years.


False Economies: eventually taxpayers will tire of geometrically escalating beach management costs and insist that a permanent solution be found. As sand borrow areas become more difficult to find and competition for limited sand resources increases, so will the costs associated with our present sand replenishment policy.

The town commission can choose to remain passive and accept the advice of the town's beach consultants, or they can insist on input from a number of qualified engineering companies. I suspect that there will be no real effort to evaluate the many proven methods for erosion management used by communities around the world. Instead, and as usual, the commission will be willing accept the choices offered by our beach consultants, even in the face of launching the largest bond referendum in the history of Longboat Key.


The pending beach management project includes provisions for some sort of sand retaining structures at the north end to slow the loss of sand into Longboat Pass, depending on the outcome of an inlet management study. Inlets account for 86% of sand loss off our beaches.

Since the town has refrained from conducting a north end inlet management study for many years, until such a study was mandated by the state last year, the taxpayers of Longboat Key will be asked to "trust" the town to do the right thing, since the sorts of structures to be used at the north end may be undefined at the time of the bond referendum.

This week the town's beach consultants told the commissioners that they had stabilized Longboat's beaches with the exception of Longboat Pass and that sand replenishment was a prudent approach to maintaining the beach profile.


At the same time the consultants detailed the amount of yearly sand loss from the various sectors of the beach in terms of hundreds of thousands of cubic yards of sand. The stabilized beach they spoke of is still losing sand at a prodigious rate in terms of dollars that will soon be required to replenish that sand again.


I believe we need to explore means of keeping sand on the beach through the use of various technologies.

If the commission chooses poorly then some poor commissioners and many property owners will be faced with an even more enormous financial problem a scant ten years from now.

We cannot afford to continue throwing tax dollars into the Gulf of Mexico every few years if there is some way to retain the sand more effectively.