Sands of time running out for Holiday Isle (PHOTOS)

Parts of Holiday Isle may have to face hurricane season with neither a beach nor a berm to protect them.

Destin had hoped it could transfer sand deposited on Steve Bunyard’s Holiday Isle property to build a protective berm for Destin Pointe and Jetty East, which have lost their beaches and previous protective berms to erosion. City Manager Greg Kisela said Thursday that Bunyard has refused and the state Department of Environmental Protection wouldn’t allow the sand transfer even if he changed his mind.

Plan B?
“There’s not one at this point,” Kisela said. “The only thing that’s doable is to purchase sand from an upland source and be out of pocket $200,000 to $300,000 — and I’m not comfortable recommending that.”

A further problem is that work on the beach has to stop May 15, when turtle nesting begins, and it would be difficult to have the sand dredged and moved by then.

“Unless something out of the ordinary would happen, we won’t have an emergency berm,” Jerry Stalnaker of Jetty East told The Log. “It means we have to go through another hurricane season with no protection and very little beach for our guests. We’re not happy about it.”

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has an easement to deposit sand on Bunyard’s property, but not to remove it without his permission. When the Corps dredged East Pass last year, 16,000 cubic yards of sand went into a berm, but the rest of the 30,000 to 50,000 cubic yards remained on Bunyard’s land.

Kisela said Bunyard doesn’t think moving the sand would produce much benefit since it would be gone within three or four months.

Bunyard did not return calls to The Log.

“A Destin Problem”
While erosion at Jetty East and Destin Pointe is severe, Scott Sanders of Holiday Surf and Racquet Club said the problem affects many properties besides those two.

“I’ve been here since I was one year old,” Sanders told The Log last week. “I walked on the dunes as a kid.” Pointing to the condos stretching up and down the beach beside Holiday Surf, he added that “each of these places used to have 20-foot dunes in front of them ... It’s not just one complex, it’s becoming a Destin problem.

“Anything the city can do in the short term to help us, we’ll certainly appreciate. I know a lot of people are working on the long-term solution.”

The long-term solution is a full-scale beach restoration project. Okaloosa County Beach Projects Coordinator Jim Trifilio told the county Tourist Development Council this week that the DEP requires only two items before making a final decision on the Destin permit: The $10,000 to $15,000 fee and a “biological opinion” that nothing in the restoration project imperils any endangered species.

Trifilio said he doesn’t see a problem proving that: Eglin Air Force Base has received a permit  for a restoration project in the same area and using the same sand source, so “we’ve no reason to think it’s going to be an issue.”

The dissenters
Lawsuits against the project do remain an issue.

Property owners have filed suit against restoration over whether the special assessment levied on them to help pay for the project is legal. They also say they don’t need or want sand behind their property and contend that the quality of the sand, which some owners say will be too dark for local beaches, is inferior.

All added sand beyond a DEP-set “erosion control line” becomes public property. Many owners don’t welcome the idea of having their private beach open to the public and some say restoration amounts to an illegal confiscation of their property rights.

“We totally support the areas that do need sand and want sand .... if they’re willing to risk inferior sand,” Roland Guidry of Oceania Condominiums said, but Oceania and other properties between the badly eroded areas of Holiday Isle don’t need or want to participate. “Those projects were built 35 years ago when coastal setback line was much further south. Oceania and the Gulf-front homes are landward of the current line.”

Guidry said the Department of Environmental Protection has already said that the area from Holiday Isle Towers to the end of the Gulf-front home lots doesn’t meet the “critically-eroded” standard for beach restoration. However, the agency wants the beach included for continuity with the restoration on either side.

Beaches and the economy
Sanders told The Log that people off Holiday Isle need to realize the economic damage that will be caused by losing more beach. He said 90 percent of Destin rental condos are on unrestored beaches so the fewer people staying there, the less money tourism puts into the community.

On the home front, Kelly Hooten of Destin’s Code Enforcement Department said that Holiday Isle has 60 single-family homes available for short-term rental — about 7.5 percent of Destin’s total — with 37 of them in the Destin Pointe subdivision.

“No way as a community we’re not going to feel this fiscally,” Sanders said. “It will affect stores and restaurants on the west side of Destin ... We’re trying to stay competitive, but it’s hard competing with areas that have 10 times more sand than you’ve got.”

At the TDC meeting Wednesday, Destin resident Larry Hines said the TDC should do a study on the economic benefits of the beaches.

“I think the average citizen in the county does not appreciate the value of our beaches,” Hines said. Too many Destinites, he said, think people come to town for “fishing and golf” and don’t realize how the loss of beach will hurt the town.

TDC Chair Ken Paine said surveys consistently show beaches are the area’s No. 1 draw.

“Quite a distance back you see shopping, then golf, then fishing.”

He said they should wait and see what an upcoming tourism study has to say, however, before paying for a new one.

The federal option
The TDC is also working to bring Okaloosa Island and Destin beaches into the Federal Shore Protection Program, which would put the national government behind local restoration. The federal government has approved spending $96,000 to survey the area and decide if the project is worth doing; Trifilio said he’s asked Florida’s congressional delegation to support a $600,000 appropriation for the next step, a feasibility study.

The drawback, he said, is that the program requires 50/50 local participation, so if the county receives $600,000, it will have to contribute the same amount.

“If we don’t have the money available to cost share, we’re not going to get it,” Trifilio said. “If we get in the federal shore program, it’s money easily well spent.”