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Re-Nourishment is on life support

By Staff | Jun 24, 2009

To the Editor:

At the last Fort Myers Beach Town Council meeting, the FMB town manager announced that the Lee County re-nourishment project manager informed him that he would not accept signed easements. As reported, the rt-nourishment project manager said he would not expend county resources until re-nouishment was a viable project.

The council directed FMB Mayor (Larry Kiker) to meet with all five Lee County Board of County Commissioners to understand what was happening.

Let’s look at what has happened in the past.

In January, the combined number of signed easements for both business and private property owners was 49 percent of the total requested easements.

Currently, the numbers have not changed since May 29, with signed easements of business and resident private property owners being at just 28 percent of the total requested easements.

From 49 percent to the current 28 percent, what a telling drop in private property owners’ support, despite valiant town education efforts.

County has tried for 10 years to get the necessary 90 percent of the owners that they said were needed to proceed. That campaign was kicked off by the 14 percent of county and town property easements dropped into the ballot box so to speak.

There are approximately 200 private property owners in the 4.5 miles of beach to be renourished. It stands to reason that the beach front private property owners should gain the most direct benefit from this project. They should want it most if there were a net benefit to them.

However, these beach front owners have come to realize that Renourishment was really just an artificial beach with sand dunes and vegetation added for good measure. They wanted neither.

What is sad and now better understood is that re-nourishment was never designed to prevent and correct erosion in the two modest actual erosion spots. County refused to consider really addressing the two erosion problems in a preventive and a corrective way.

The town had set aside $400,000 for “betterments” for our beaches. That money could be applied to prevention of erosion and new technology to control erosion correction..but county just grabbed that money and applied it to their project.

With beach front private property owners disenchanted, why would the vast amount of private property owners island wide want to be continuously taxed to subsidize this artifical beach widening. This is especially true when county acknowledges that this artificial beach will all wash away as it has for eight re-nourishments in the last 48 years atour pier erosion spot.

Without question, re-nourishment largely places sand where it has never existed as far back as 1927 by official county data. Data from that point forward to today is accepted as being valid engineering data. These facts have never been challenged! To the contrary they are supported by two independent engineering studies.

Yet, Lee County has publicly acknowledged that they never used an existing erosion map in designing their largely artificial beach. The only question is why did they do this.

It is time to pull the plug on this fiasco and assign accountability where it belongs. It is Lee County’s responsibility.

Time for council and town staff to go back to work full time on the many serious town issues. That’s whatwe taxpayers pay for.

Frank Schilling

Fort Myers Beach