This old house
To the editor:
So let’s say you have a house on the beach. It’s old but it’s basically a great place and has survived many a hurricane and tropical storm. It has been handed down in the family to you. The rest of your extended family likes to visit a lot. And, they want you to expand the place to make it more comfortable for all.
A few members of the family have offered to kick in with bucks for the expansion but they don’t want to deal with any repairs. Their plan also ties your future to a lot of future costs but whenever you bring that subject up nobody wants to talk about it. To add to your dilemma, the plumbing is just plain crumbling away.
So far, they only want to make the place bigger and are leaving the rest up to you. Times are tight and you just don’t have enough funds to both fix the plumbing and to expand the house. This has been going on for over ten years but the pressure is really on now to simply close your eyes to the future, make a few in your family happy, and go on with life. What do you do?
Well, this is beach renourishment versus our town infrastructure in a nutshell.
Our water system is crumbling and needs big bucks to fix it. But certain forces want to fund a big beach. Priorities logically would force us to analyze the big picture and figure out how funding could handle both situations or, at minimum, decide which one is most important.
Instead, the issue has been slipped over to beachfront owners to decide the fate of this town in the form of immense pressure to sign easements that give up some of their property rights to expand our beach. Beachfront owners are being squeezed like never before to just close their eyes and sign easements so our town can appease some powerful interests. Costs and how to fund our water system are far from fully disclosed while future costs for beach renourishment have not been included in all the hoopla, let alone all the final details of what our town, property owners and islanders may be tied into even now.
Tom Merrill
Fort Myers Beach