County officials have begun preparing to move forward with a plan for beach renourishment on Wrightsville Beach, even if federal funding disappears, the county’s shoreline protection coordinator told elected and government officials at the quarterly meeting of beach towns that was hosted in Wrightsville Beach on Friday morning.
Layton Bedsole, New Hanover County shore protection coordinator, told the officials that regardless of whether or in what levels funding was approved, the county needed to have all permitting and plans in place in order to move forward with the project.
“We need to be in a position to do it ourselves,” Bedsole said. “It’s a parallel path. It’s our plan B.”
Wrightsville Beach has used $18 million of its $24 million federal cost capacity limit, Bedsole said, meaning there could only be funding left for one or possibly two cycles, though county officials are working to extend that spending limit. Representatives of local federal legislators said that U.S. House or Representatives was still working on passing Water Resources Development Act, which includes legislative language favorable for local beach towns, though the U.S. Senate version of the bill didn’t include the same provisions. The House could pass the bill within weeks, but it’s unlikely that any differences with the Senate version would be negotiated before the November election.
Meanwhile, county lobbyist Tom Fetzer said that efforts to secure state funding for beach renourishment could be strengthened from a state legislative report due in February. One goal of the report was to identify the properties near the ocean owned by state residents who make their home in the inland counties of the state.
“That way they’ll know they have skin in the game,” Fetzer said. “It will help the legislators who don’t live around here understand what we’re trying to do.”
Another point of business discussed at the meeting was the collection of room occupancy tax.
Kure Beach Commissioner David Heglar said that town officials surveyed rooms for rent on online booking sites and discovered more rooms available rooms in the town than weren’t on the county’s logs.
However, Wrightsville Beach Mayor Bill Blair said he didn’t think that Wrightsville Beach needed to examine whether room rentals were being properly reported, since the county collects and has enforcement authority over the tax.
“We know that Wrightsville Beach produces half of the room occupancy taxes collected from the beach towns,” Blair said.
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