KISS IT GOODBYE
Renourishment is a wash out
By Lee Melsek
Tidelines Editor
lmelsek@gmail.com

It's over, even if the local politicians hesitate to declare it so. The decade-old plan to renourish our shoreline is a wash out.

It's long saga leaves a tortured trail of broken campaign promises, misleading claims and landowner revolt.

When the official death notice will come is anybody's guess but one thing is certain: The August deadline County Commissioner Ray Judah set last month for obtaining the easements needed for this job is here. But the project has only about 43 percent of the easements it needs, far from the 90 percent Lee County and federal officials said was necessary to do an effective job.

Fifteen percent of the easements the county has obtained are public accesses owned by the town, meaning only about a quarter of the private property owners in the project's path have consented to letting the project come across their land. Many who once agreed to do so - 49 of them - withdrew their consent in a landowner revolt triggered by changing county government regulations.

How much the failed project has cost taxpayers after more than 10 years of planning and coordinating may never be known. But it is less than the $11 million of state, federal, county and town money the controversial project would have cost at its completion.

For almost every easement the county can't obtain the federal government decreases it's generous financial contribution. That means more financial burden is placed on the county, state and town at at time when all three governments are struggling to overcome the failing economy.

The question lingering in its wake is this: How could it have failed after a decade of planning and all of those town council campaigns that promised it?

One thing now seems clear in hindsight: The county's eleventh hour imposition of mandatory dunes and vegetation along the shoreline as a condition for its share of the renourishment dollars caused grave concerns among Gulf front property owners. those concerns have, for the most part, remained irreconcilable.

Our town must ante up a little contrition of its own in all of this.
It was this council that developed a compromise dunes and vegetation plan loaded with regulations that became a laughing stock among property owners who took a good look at the plan. In the end, even businesses and homeowners who had been sticking to their easement agreements suddenly began rescinding them when they, and/or their lawyers, took a gander at some of the weird regulations in the plan.

An example of one of those weird regulations: Property owners would be allowed to trim a maximum of only one-quarter of the leaves on any given plant per year.

Some of those who read the plan privately have been asking a common question: Who thinks up this stuff? The council also stopped referring to the project as renourishment and began calling it nourishment, perhaps in an attempt to avoid any reference to the fact that earlier renourishmment projects had eventually washed out to sea.

But it was the county's failure to collect enough easements after years of trying that is the major reason the project has failed. When the county dumped the responsibility of collecting easements onto the town, it created animosity between town officials.

Former Town Manager Scott Janke protested that he had neither the staff nor the time to do the county's job of persuading property owners not to rescind their easement agreements. But his complaints were cut off by Mayor Larry Kiker who earlier this year assured commissioners that Janke and his staff would assist the county's staff in doing that job.
Janke and his staff spent hundreds of hours on that assignment, time some complained should have been devoted to more important issues facing the town like drainage problems, the deteriorating water system and the default on the loan to buy that system.

There were indications county officials had given up on the project even as Janke and his staff continued their time-consuming attempts to obtain more easements Steve Boutelle, the county official who had failed for 10 years to obtain enough easements to do the job, suddenly refused to collect the few new easement agreements Janke and his staff had lined up. Boutelle said he didn't want any more work done on easements until he could decide whether the project was still viable, a move that further inflamed Janke's growing frustrations with the county.

In the end, the Janke team's pleas to property owners not to rescind the agreements weren't persuasive enough in most cases to overcome years of the county's deceptions.

Asked by Tidelines in May if we could write the project's obituary, Janke said it might be time to at least write the draft of it. Much earlier, Janke had had high hopes for the renourishment project even after the county's bombshell mandating the dunes and vegetation.

In the early summer of 2008 Janke expressed confidence that he could persuade the county to give our island a pass on it's mandatory dunes and vegetation requirement. He failed to get such a exemption as commissioners said they could not give us a waiver that they did not give others.

Even as more and more land owners became disenchanted with the county's renourishment requirements, Councilman Herb Acken spent his first two years in office fighting hard for the project, sometimes angering his colleagues on the council with radical suggestions. He once suggested condemning people's property if they didn't sign the easements. The council quickly distanced itself from such an idea.

Acken also suggested doing the expensive job without all the easements, even after county and federal officials had said doing the job with limited easements would create a shoreline residents and visitors wouldn't like and would essentially be ineffective.

The project became more controversial over the past two years. Two islanders, Joanne Shamp and former General Electric Vice-President Frank Shilling, became the faces of the opposition. They spent much of their own time countering nearly every claim made by the local government officials who were pushing for the project, writing letters to the editor and standing to be heard at council meetings.

As more and more Gulf front property owners began listening to them, and even sought their advise, Acken accused them of spreading lies and suggested the council should ask for a sheriff's department investigation of them. The rest of the council, in animated disbelief of such a thought, rejected the suggestion as fast as it had his plea for condemning property.

Now, as beach residents await the final word on the project, acting Town Manager Jack Green must handle not only all of the things Janke had to do but also his own job as Public Works Director. How well that works out could become yet another angle to this saga of dysfunctional governing.



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