THE LAST-DITCH EFFORT: Sand saga reaches zero hour as parties stake their hope on mediation (with AERIAL PHOTOS)

The last chance for Holiday Isle to get sand from the upcoming dredging of Destin harbor is if Isle homeowners, Okaloosa Island homeowners and local government all work out a compromise, attorney Steve Hall says.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Florida Department of Environmental Protection “have heard both sides of the argument in more detail than they can bear,” Hall, told the Okaloosa County Commission Dec. 15.

“The only hope (for sand) is if all the parties came together immediately.”

Hall — the attorney for Okaloosa County’s Tourist Development Council, which oversees local beach renourishment — told the commissioners that the DEP has rejected a Holiday Isle challenge to the Corps’ dredging permit, which means all the sand from the Corps’ harbor dredging will be placed on Okaloosa Island’s beaches unless next week’s mediation meeting produces a compromise.

Without unity, Hall said, the DEP and the Corps would ignore any recommendation that came out of the Commission’s meeting. Even so, the discussion took up more than an hour.

Holiday Isle homeowners have proposed that some of the sand be used to rebuild their severely eroded beaches, but four Okaloosa Island homeowners, the Sherrys and the Donovans — who claim to represent a much larger group — say that if the Corps doesn’t move the sand west as required by the DEP’s Inlet Management Plan, their beach will eventually erode away.

The quartet challenged the Corps’ DEP permit earlier this year, so the DEP rewrote it to specify that all the dredged sand would go east. The Holiday Isle owners responded with their own permit challenge, which has now failed.

Holiday Isle’s Larry Hines said the Okaloosa Islanders’ position was unreasonable: “If your neighbor is starving, would you tell him ‘I can’t give you any bread because I might need it in 50 years?’ ”

“There’s right and there’s legal,” Commissioner Wayne Harris said, making it clear he thought the DEP’s and the Sherry’s positions fell in the latter category. “This is reprehensible,” he said.

Various speakers raised possible solutions: The DEP might provide money for emergency restoration on Holiday Isle; the sand could be stockpiled on the waterfront west of East Pass rather than being immediately placed in the water to expand those beaches. Hall said nothing the county requested or recommended was going to make a difference if the players didn’t all agree on a fix.

City Manager Greg Kisela said mediation is scheduled for Dec. 21. Sherry said his attorney has been taking depositions, and couldn’t be back any earlier.

[EDITED in response to David Sherry's comments]

COVERAGE CONTINUES
To read The Log’s take on the issue, click here.

To read a letter writer's differing opinion, click here.

To see photos of the setup, click here.