[Durham INC] NC General Assembly takes on terminal groins (jetties)

[Pat Carstensen]

Let's put this in neighborhood terms.  Terminal groins are $10,000,000 speed tables that cost $2,000,000 a year to maintain.  Only they are $10,000,000 speed tables built on sink-holes.  How are they like speed tables?  With speed tables, the traffic moves to the next street and so once you put one in, you keep needing to add them in neighboring street.  Similarly, jetties capture sand in one place by getting it to move off other places, so once you have one jetty, you need them all up and down the coast.  The sinkhole?  The oceans are rising so the houses on the sand (isn't there something in the Bible about this) aren't going to stand there very long anyhow. 
How many teachers could be pay with the cost of one jetty?

And don't get me started on the insurance.  It totally sticks in my craw that I have a surcharge on MY home insurance because some idiot down on the coast with a house worth 6 times mine can't pay the full cost of his hurricane insurance.  
Below is an editorial from the John Locke Foundation against the current bill.  The Coastal Federation has a lot of information on it:  http://www.nccoast.org/  If you missed the N&O story, http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2011/02/27/2095721/as-beaches-erode-debate-rises.html
Bob Atwater is on the Senate Ag Committee so please write him. Bob.Atwater at ncleg.net
Regards, pat


Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2011 08:05:08 -0500
From: molly.diggins at sierraclub.org
Subject: next up: vote on terminal groins (jetties)
To: NC-LEADERS at LISTS.SIERRACLUB.ORG

The Senate will take up S 110, Permit Terminal Groins in the Agriculture and Environment Committee on Tuesday.  S 110 would allow terminal groins (jetties) at the ends of islands.

NC has had a landmark policy in place for 25 years to keep our beaches natural by banning hardened structures.  Hardened structures like terminal groins stop erosion in one place (to protect beachfront property) only to accelerate it elsewhere. 



Please contact your Senator TODAY and ask him or her to vote against S 110.  Tell them you don't want your tax dollars used to harden our beaches.  Don't know who your senator is? Plug in your zip code on http://www.ncga.state.nc.us/GIS/RandR07/Representation.html.  It is fine, desirable even, to leave voice mail messages at their offices today.



Given the speed with which this legislature is moving, don't worry if your senator is on the committee or not. The bill could be on the Senate floor this week.

Op Ed from today's Charlotte Observer from the conservative John Lock Foundation and our friends at the NC Coastal Federation. 



FOR THE RECORD










Legislature should reject beach mansion bailouts in N.C.




Posted: Sunday, Feb. 27, 2011 




 













 
        

    


  






Hood










 










 





 

        From John Hood, president of the John Locke
 Foundation in Raleigh, and Todd Miller, executive director of the N.C. 
Coastal Federation, a non-profit dedicated to protecting the N.C. coast:
    Our country's economic system is based on the belief that the free market is a lot smarter than any government program.
    If you have a good idea and you think it will make money, you are welcome and encouraged to make a go of it.
    But if your idea fails, you're not supposed to ask the government to bail you out.
    That can be hard medicine to take, but it is the only way to 
prevent people from making more bad decisions and asking the government 
to bail them out too.
    That's why taxpayers ought to be skeptical about a bill, Senate Bill 110, that is likely to come up in the N.C. Senate this week.
    For years, our state has banned expensive structures on our 
beaches called groins. They are like jetties - big, usually built out of
 rock and on the beach for decades.
    The folks who want to repeal the ban say groins are needed to 
protect private homes from erosion. Scientists and environmentalists say
 groins don't work and will hurt habitat and other parts of the 
environment, and could cause increased erosion on down-drift private 
property.
    But everyone agrees groins are expensive. A state study put the 
price tag of building a groin at as much as $10.8 million. Regular 
maintenance and monitoring can cost as much as $2.25 million per year.
    And for what? To protect a small number of investors - people who bought homes built on sand.
    It's hard not to feel sympathy for folks who are trying to beat 
back the sea to save their beachfront homes. But it should not be the 
taxpayers' responsibility to bail them out.
    But that is what a groin is - a multimillion-dollar bailout. 
Repealing the ban on groins will shift responsibility for a private 
sector economic decision - buying a home in a high-value but potentially
 risky area like the beachfront - to the public sector.
    Think about it: What will happen if beachfront homeowners and 
builders know that the government can build a groin to protect their 
home in the event the sands start shifting the wrong way? You got it - 
they will keep building homes where they don't belong. And they will 
keep coming back to taxpayers to bail them out.
    That is exactly what has happened in New Jersey, where the 
coastline is crowded with groins and other hard structures. Not 
surprisingly New Jersey also has one of the biggest shore-line 
"protection" budgets in the country - more than $25 million annually.
    Taxpayers already pay millions to protect beachfront property. 
According to the N.C. Division of Water Resources, taxpayers have paid 
$85.9 million in local, state and federal funds to move sand on to N.C. 
beaches over the past 10 years - mostly to protect private property 
owners. We don't need to add to that bill by building groins, which also
 require regular beach "renourishment."
    As the legislature debates the cost of groins, we hope the new 
Republican majorities in the legislature will see groins for what they 
are: a beach mansion bailout funded - now or in the future - with our 
tax dollars.    


- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
To unsubscribe from the NC-LEADERS list, send any message to:
NC-LEADERS-signoff-request at LISTS.SIERRACLUB.ORG

Check out our Listserv Lists support site for more information:
http://www.sierraclub.org/lists/faq.asp

To view the Sierra Club List Terms & Conditions, see:
 http://www.sierraclub.org/lists/terms.asp 		 	   		  
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://rtpnet.org/pipermail/inc-list/attachments/20110227/08f99887/attachment.html>