More beach sand means another $26M bill for some residents in Southampton Town

Beaches in Sagaponack and Bridgehampton have held up well since a major sand nourishment in 2014, but now homeowners there will need to pay approximately $26 million more to again pump sand along the shore, environmental consultants told the Southampton Town Board last week.

Voters in the Sagaponack and Bridgehampton erosion-control districts approved a plan in 2013 to spend $26.5 million, about $1.5 million of which was covered by the town, to pump roughly 2.5 million cubic yards of sand on the shore. Most of the approximately 130 property owners in the two erosion-control districts are each taxed between $10,000 and $30,000 per year, with at least one paying more than $200,000 annually, to repay a 10-year bond.

Environmental consultants, making a presentation during a Southampton Town Board work session Jan. 27, said the project had retained almost all that sand through 2020, but then lost about one-third of it between 2020 and 2021. The consultants noted that much of the sand loss was under water and said the reason why was unclear.

"This is the immeasurable way the ocean works," Aram Terchunian of Westhampton Beach-based First Coastal Corp. told Newsday this week. "We don’t have great visibility of what is going on below the surface."

An outline presented by Terchunian and Columbia, South Carolina-based Coastal Science & Engineering president Tim Kana, who together designed and oversaw the original project, calls for between 1.7 million and 2 million cubic yards of sand placed along 5.63 miles. The projected timeline called for work on the $26 million project to begin in late 2023 and be completed in early 2024, 10 years after the original replenishment.

Southampton officials will decide whether to contribute financially, as the project includes four town beaches, said Town Supervisor Jay Schneiderman.

The project could also be extended east to Georgica Pond in Wainscott, but the consultants said they have not had formal talks with officials in neighboring East Hampton Town.

The work is not included in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ $1.7 billion Fire Island to Montauk Point plan because the sparsely populated oceanfront did not meet the criteria in a cost/benefit analysis, Terchunian said.

The tax impact would be similar to the original project, which by all accounts appears to have held up well.

The project as a whole was named a best restored beach in 2018 by the American Shore & Beach Preservation Association, a national erosion control advocacy group, in part because it was a strong example of work completed without federal funds.

Kevin McAllister of the Sag Harbor-based nonprofit Defend H2O, a frequent critic of such work, said the nourishment was a success when compared to the average lifespan of similar projects. But McAllister, who has called for a managed retreat in coastal areas, noted that any additional sand pumped on the shore will eventually be gone.

"Artificial beaches are environmentally and economically unsustainable, and the Sag-Bridge project will prove to be no different over the long run," McAllister wrote in an email to Newsday.

By Vera Chinese

vera.chinese@newsday.com@VeraChinese

Vera Chinese joined Newsday in 2017 after working as an editor for the East End lifestyle publication northforker and a general assignment reporter for the New York Daily News.