03-27-08: Regulators to decide fate of beach sandbags

Where to draw the line in the sand, and balance personal property rights and millions of dollars of vital tax base, with the state's long-standing and popular ban on hardened oceanfront structures.

That's the dilemma coastal regulators are wrestling with as they push a May 1 deadline to clear North Carolina's beaches of most of its exposed sandbags, erosion-control devices that have increasingly morphed from a supposed temporary stopgap to a permanent fix in many areas.

The initiative is being watched nervously by beachfront property owners and local officials worried about what will happen to pricey oceanfront homes if the fabric bags are pulled.

"I think its going to be very tough to pull out these sandbags knowing that after the first good high tide you're going to have houses dropping in the ocean," said Debbie Smith, mayor of Ocean Isle Beach and chair of the N.C. Beach, Inlet and Waterway Association.

Already several oceanfront property owners have applied for extensions from the N.C. Coastal Resources Commission and others have threatened legal action if the state forces the issue.

Coastal regulators also are expecting an earful of complaints about the sandbag removal deadline at the CRC meeting that starts today in Kill Devil Hills.

Regulators estimate that of the sandbags deployed from the roughly 369 permits issued prior to 2006, as many as 150 remain exposed and need to be pulled. Bags covered by sand and stable vegetation may remain.

But that still leaves the possibility that rows of swanky oceanfront homes in North Topsail Beach, Figure Eight Island and Ocean Isle Beach teetering on the edge of the beach will face the pounding Atlantic with no protection.

Coastal regulators said they have been lenient in the past, noting that they have repeatedly extended deadlines for the removal of sandbags to accommodate community efforts to nourish their disappearing beaches.

But last year, with criticism mounting about sandbag structures that had begun to dominate beaches in many areas, the CRC said there would be no more extensions.

State regulations allow sandbags to remain in place for two years for structures smaller than 5,000 square feet, which includes most beach homes, and five years for larger buildings.

The idea was to buy time for property owners to develop long-term solutions, primarily a beach-building project or relocation of the threatened structure.

But a slew of hurricanes in the 1990s and lobbying by beach towns for extra time to develop and win regulatory approval for nourishment projects prompted a series of extensions by the CRC.

At the same time, the size of many sandbag structures grew as officials granted permission for property owners to exceed bag size and height limits.

That grated on environmentalists and many beachgoers, who suddenly faced the de facto "hardening" of the beach in many places, limiting access and use to the public resource as the beach eroded up to the bags.

Jim Stephenson, coastal policy analyst with the N.C. Coastal Federation, said it's obvious that the state's sandbag policy is broken and has been for a long time.

But fixing it will require some difficult decisions by state and local officials.

"It's never easy to convince people that it's time for a white flag," Stephenson said.

Worried coastal property owners might have a powerful ally in state Sen. Marc Basnight, D-Dare.

The head of the N.C. Senate said he doesn't support a blanket order to pull out all exposed sandbags.

"If it's a case where they're sitting in a beach area blocking someone from swimming or creating an obstacle course on the beach, then they should be removed," he said Tuesday. "I personally feel like that's wrong."

But if the bags are out of the surf zone and protecting property, whether covered or not, Basnight said they shouldn't have to come out.

The latest salvo in the brewing sandbag battle is a proposal by an Outer Banks hotel group to allow commercial structures, including hotels, to keep sandbags in place indefinitely.

But state regulators said size, not use, should determine rules for oceanfront structures. They also argue that modifying the sandbags rules would severely weaken the state's long-standing ban on hardened structures along the oceanfront.

One thing the state won't do is force buried, stable sandbags to be dug up and removed.

That's just sound policy, said Jean Beasley, who installed sandbags to protect her Surf City beach house after the pounding Topsail Island took from Hurricane Fran in 1996.

Today the bags are 12 feet back from the escarpment, buried and covered with vegetation.

"It would be a pretty horrible ecological thing to tear those things out at this point," said Beasley, executive director of the Karen Beasley Sea Turtle Rescue and Rehabilitation Center in Topsail Beach.

Gareth McGrath: 343-2384

gareth.mcgrath@starnewsonline.com