At that meeting if one listened to Mr. Woodruff, from the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, he stated that one way to lower costs is to approach beach management on a regional level instead of going it alone, which is what we are presently doing. I have been advocating the regional concept for over five years after reading the following article about such an approach on the east coast of Florida.
http://gene248.web.officelive.com/Coastal_Engineering.aspx
If there are enough municipalities participating in a regional program then things such as owning a medium sized cutter-head dredge, along with a small cutter-head dredge for maintaining canals, become economically feasible due to economies of scale, where there are enough beaches and canals to keep a dredge busy on a continuing basis. Hillsboro Inlet taxing district spends $1 million annually to maintain Pompano Beach, which has not requird dredging since 1985. Longboat Key will spend $50 million to maintain our beaches for the next 7 or 8 years, followed by who knows what. The Hillsboro Inlet taxing district has contained costs while Longboat's costs continue to double periodically.
Perhaps the only rational for conducting island-wide dredging projects, which frequently place sand on beaches that do not need sand, is the millions of dollars required to setup and dismantle a large dredge operation, along with the high cost of paying beach engineering companies to permit each separate renourishment project. If Siesta, Lido, Longboat and Anna Maria beach taxing districts owned a dredge the logistical costs could be greatly reduced and spot dredging would become economically viable. Spot dredging would most likely require far less sand and maintain a consistent beach profile as opposed the feast followed by famine cycle we presently support.
The various taxing districts would pay for their share of costs. The regional program would work under a ten year renewable permit from the state, just like other beach districts such as Hillsboro Inlet and others, creating an aggregate savings of tens of millions of dollars over a decade.
We can only hope that the town manager and the town's beach engineering company will at least encourage the town commission to look into the advice offered by Mr. Woodruff from FDEP. I suspect that a regional beach maintenance program would be more attractive to Federal and state funding. Other regional beach efforts in Florida have been successful.
Perhaps the commissioners might retain an independent engineering company to research possible ways our community might reduce spending on beach maintenance. Longboat Key's "go it alone" approach may have been financially supportable when dredging projects cost less than $20 million. Those times appear to have vanished and our community is facing doubling cost increases every 7 or 8 years.
The commission seems unable to add $28 million to the pension funds, so that the town can transfer our unsuccessful pension plans into the Florida Retirement System and be done with the problem, while still offering our employees a fair retirement. The pension plan funding is a one time fix. The beaches are an ongoing problem that has doubled in size each replenishment cycle. It should be noted that the town and the commissioners have spent magnitudes more time on the pension fund dilemma than the far more expensive, and still uncontrolled, beach maintenance cost problem.
If the commission approves advancing the beach maintenance schedule, then our community will be ignoring the possibilities of controlling our beach maintenance costs for another eight years. The town's beach engineering consultants have stated that our beaches do not presently need any sand except for the north end. What's the hurry?
I believe our community needs to explore all possible ways to reduce beach maintenance costs and not wait until the last minute, again, 8 years from now. Waiting until the last minute is no way to spend $50 million tax dollars on a temporary fix.
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