Community Corner

City Council to Vote on Beach Recovery Amendment

Resolution calls for measures to help restore dunes.

City Manager Jack Schnriman on Tuesday will ask the City Council to amend a contract with Coastal Planning and Engineering to help restore the city’s dunes that were washed away in Hurricane Sandy. 

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The proposed project would have the Florida-based consulting firm help prepare plans and specifications for dune restoration, including rebuilding dunes walk-overs and plant grass, according to Tuesday’s council agenda

The city hired Coastal Planning and Engineering last December to help the Department of Public Works with post-storm recovery efforts that included services to document the extent of beach loss and coastal damage and to restore sand to the beach to shore up coastal protection for winter.

The proposed amendment would also ask the firm to assist with the bidding process, construction administration services and the acquisition of permits from the Department of Environmental Conservation for these projects.

The additional services are an effort to expedite these engineering services, according to the city, and would cost $94,500, an amount to be paid for with a public assistance grant the city is requesting from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Tuesday’s resolution comes after U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer last Tuesday announced that the federal government would fund in full a $150 million U.S. Army Corps of Engineers plan to protect the barrier island from future storms on the scale of Sandy.

“Homeowners and residents in Lido Beach, Point Lookout, East Atlantic Beach and Long Beach can feel a little more secure knowing that vital protections, in the form of dunes, will now be constructed,” Schumer said in a statement last week.

The funding will come from the $60 billion federal Hurricane Sandy aid package the U.S. Senate and Congress approved in January to protect coastal communities from the New Jersey shore to Long Beach to Montauk.

Schumer explained that the Sany aid bill required only that the federal government fund 65 percent of the project cost, but that amount could increase if the projects met the criteria of “on-going construction” and are updated to make them stronger, more resilient, and offer better protection against storms. The Army Corps of Engineers deemed that Long Beach met that criteria.

The proposed plan would provide dune protection against a 100-year storm event for 7 of the 9 miles of public shoreline between Jones Inlet and East Rockaway Inlet, including the communities of Point Lookout, Lido Beach, and the City of Long Beach.

Asked if the Army Corps project would include a plan for the bayside of Long Beach, Schumer’s office said: “The senator has pushed the Corps to examine and include protections for the bay side as part of the long term coastal protection plan that will [be] developed by the Army Corps.”

Chris Gardner, an Army Corps spokesman, told Patch earlier in March that the agency is updating a $98 million plan from 2006 that the City Council at the time rejected, in part because it failed to address bayside protection.

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