SHADES OF WHITE: Months after Holiday Isle restoration, debate over sand quality continues (PHOTOS)

Despite the grumblings of a few naysayers, Jerry Stalnaker says the beaches that sit behind Jetty East are big, beautiful and white.

“Nobody has complained to us,” Jetty East’s general manager told The Log Wednesday. “We have a considerable amount of shells on our berms… left over from the emergency beach renourishment plan. However, these shells help hold the sand in place.”

After an emergency beach renourishment project filled out the critically eroded beaches of Holiday Isle with about 140,000 cubic yards of sand in September, the letters to the editor began to pour in to the Northwest Florida Daily News and Destin Log. Some visitors and local restoration critics from nearby Okaloosa Island have complained about what they call “inferior sand” and excessive amount of shells that had been pumped along the 2,600-foot stretch of beach.

In November, Baton Rouge, La., resident Bruce Adams wrote a letter to The Log sharing his experience with the new beach on Holiday Isle.

“As I got closer to the jetties I could see the sand texture change color. My feet began to get scratched all up from the large rocks and sea shells in the sand,” Adams wrote. “I could tell that this is where the beach restoration project work had taken place.”

Adams went on to say that whoever wants the larger scale restoration project done needs to take a long hard walk to the jetties and “when their feet start bleeding, they’ll know to vote no on this travesty euphemistically called beach restoration.”

For his part, Stalnaker said that due to the tides and wind, there are very few shells left on the portion of the beach that people actually walk on.

“Mother Nature has made it so the shells are where they need to be and the sand is where it needs to be,” he said.

When asked for his thoughts on the sand quality and the shells along Holiday Isle, Okaloosa Island resident and long-time restoration opponent David Sherry wrote The Log and said that restoration on the island isn’t necessary.

“We don’t need or want bad, dark sand full of shell shards from a harmful offshore borrow site that the county’s engineers admit they selected only because it was the closest and cheapest,” Sherry wrote. “In contrast to the properties in the emergency project at the west end of Holiday Isle, beachfront properties on Okaloosa Island are not in imminent danger.”

When then governor-elect Rick Scott was at Magnolia Grill in December, Sherry and his wife Rebecca presented him with 441 petitions signed by owners at 41 different Okaloosa Island Condominiums opposing the beach renourishment project for the island.

It has even been suggested that Holiday Isle is the perfect example of why the bigger beach restoration project, which is currently held up in litigation, shouldn’t happen.

But when it comes to that thought, Stalnaker just shakes his head.

“Look, we have nice white sand out there,” Stalnaker said pointing to the beach. “The borrow area where they got this sand from is very small and they just so happened to pick an area with a lot of shells… now that we know that, they can go to a different area.”