Islandkeeper

Charlie Brown, Lucy, and a football

by Islandkeeper

Feb 15, 2023

At this link on the Town of Dauphin Island website, you can see that there are five (5) fact sheets about projects for the East End over the last several years.  There was a major beach buildout on the gulf-front shoreline of the East End several years back.

On the “West End Project” page are links to two documents:

(1)  The Project Management Plan

This is a Bird Conservation & Management Plan for the Far West End property - all the land west of the West End Beach.  It's a worthy project and it’s great they're doing that.

But for those who tout this as a project to help the West End, note that the project will do nothing for the inhabited West End, where properties are owned and/or inhabited by taxpayers, who help contribute to funding projects for the conservation areas, as well as the East End beaches which have seen restoration efforts more than once, while the West End beaches have seen none.  Ever.

(2)  The Project Fact Sheet 

This outlines a plan for study, investigation, modeling, and so on, for restoration of the West Surf Beach, which is the gulf-front shoreline between Pirates Cove and the West End Beach.  

It is not funding for actual restoration work.  It is funding only for a study and a plan.  

The Town has done this numerous times over the years - sought funding which pays out hundreds of thousands of dollars to coastal engineers (mainly Scott Douglass) to do studies, investigations, modeling, etc. with the same conclusions - that it will cost tens of millions to restore the West Surf Beach.  (In other words, saying that it's pretty much hopeless to expect any restoration there.)

The reaction to each of these repeated-ad-nauseum studies is always the same - we can’t afford it, we can’t get the funding to do it, etc.  So everything goes into hiatus until such time as funding is again sought for, you guessed it, yet another study.

Ironically, there are people who complain that we should not spend money helping to restore the gulf-front beaches on the inhabited West End, that we should “let nature take its course,” yet they remain hypocritically silent about restoration on the East End.

Perhaps this time it will be different?  Perhaps this time, this will not be just another vehicle to provide income for Douglass or another coastal engineer to do what has already been done over and over and over and over again?  (This sounds familiar... something about a couple of cartoon kids and a football...)

The first such study that we at Islandkeeper are aware of was done by an engineer in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in 1979, with a simple solution - have the Corps deposit channel-dredged sand closer to the island where it could accrete onto the beaches, rather than dumping it out by the Sand Island Lighthouse where it just sits there or washes out to sea.  

But the Corps does not want to pay to move the dredged sand to shallow-draft barges to get close to the island.  So nothing ever happens.  The Dauphin Island Restoration Task Force spent years trying to get that done, even lobbying as far up the chain as the Alabama State Legislature.  

Two bills were proposed in two different years, but they never made it out of committee, squashed by the powerful lobby of the deep-pockets known as the Alabama State Docks and their partner in money, the Corps.  

In sum:

• The powers-that-be at the State Docks have no intention of sharing their profits to help restore the erosion caused, at least in part, by their perpetual channel dredging, which starves the island of sand attempting to migrate from east to west but gets caught in the ship channel and never makes it to the island.  

• The powers-that-be in our state government seem to find funding for beach restoration in various locations on the Eastern Shore, but never Dauphin Island.  At least not for the inhabited (tax-paying) West End.

• The Town of Dauphin Island continues to pay for studies that have already been done.

Maybe this funding for yet another study will result in a real solution that will be funded!  

Maybe this time Lucy won’t snatch the football away at the last minute, so that Charlie Brown falls flat on his back!  

Odds are on Lucy doing the same thing she always does.'