The tent protecting against a stifling sun was oriented in such a way that as speakers extolled the ceremonial groundbreaking of the county’s first-ever beach-renourishment project this morning, it wasn’t the beach that was behind them, but a gift shop, a tattoo parlor and a bar. It was just as well: the $27 million beach project isn’t intended to rebuild the beach for its own sake alone, but to protect the homes, roads and small businesses behind it, bars and tattoo parlors among them.
The beach, as critically eroded as ever, was a small distance to the right of the audience, past the greens of Flagler Beach’s Veterans Park, down that dip of dunes recent storms have all but ripped off. The vanishing dunes required the dumping of an emergency rock berm there last year, to keep the ocean from carving into State Road A1A next, as it has on two occasions since 2016 south of the pier.
That same sun pounding the throng of federal state and county officials under the tent has been warming the ocean, melting glaciers, causing the sea to rise and powering that erosion behind intensifying storms. But in keeping with state policy, which denies climate change to the point of banning the terminology, not one of the officials who spoke today made a single reference to climate change, though they dropped the more vacuous word “resiliency” a few times.
U.S. Rep Mike Waltz, whose votes on environmental policy earned him a rating of zero from the League of Conservation Voters in 2023, and a lifetime rating of 15 percent, understandably devoted a third of his speech to boasting about his recent parachute jump over Normandy and the lipstick all over the cheek of veterans there: he couldn’t very well talk about climate policy.
The two people who had the most to do with shepherding the 3.4-mile beach renourishment project to its start date sometime in the next few weeks weren’t even invited to speak: Jason Harrah, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ project manager who’s been involved in it for 14 years, and County Attorney Al Hadeed, who had his own Omaha Beach experience for three years as he secured some 140 easements from private property owners, some of them as obstinate as the rock at Pointe du Hoc, to enable the Corps to do its work. Waltz gave Hadeed a challenge coin for his toils.
“I’m very humbled by the challenge coin the congressman gave me,” Hadeed said afterward. “It should have gone to the whole community.”
There was plenty of mutual applause, everyone thanking everyone for their cooperation, with many references to the “awesome amounts of collaboration to bring us to this point,” in the words of Flagler Beach Commission Chair Scott Spradley. He recalled his own role in getting the final necessary easement signed.
Kevin Guthrie, the former local emergency management director who now holds the top spot in Gov. DeSantis’s emergency management division, was in Flagler County as attempts to ramp up this phase of the renourishment took place 11 years ago. “It’s nice to see it coming to fruition now 10-11 years later,” he said. “This continues to be an investment by this governor and the Senate and the House leadership on investing in the environment for not just Flagler County, but the state of Florida.”
Guthrie was on his way to South Florida right after this morning’s groundbreaking, to take stock of the latest round of flooding there. In a brief interview after the speeches, he said he did not see Florida’s struggles against the elements as a losing battle. Rather, he said, areas that have been flooding were built with 1950s and 60s and 70s infrastructure that now was catching up to more current standards. “At some point in time, cities and counties and communities are going to have to invest in that stormwater infrastructure,” Guthrie said. “How do we do that? That’s not a losing battle. We’ve got to be able to do that at the state, federal and city level.”
Flagler County has not been a good example: Palm Coast earlier this year rejected a utility plan to raise water fees in part to build more infrastructure. The county just took a beating over its belated beach-management plan and preliminary feelers about imposing a new tax to raise money for beach protection. So despite the gathering of officials from every level of government, there was an element of unearned parochialism in today’s groundbreaking: Flagler County extending its lucky streak of spending other people’s money.
While the state has consistently opposed addressing climate change at its source–both DeSantis and Rep. Paul Renner, the Speaker of the House and Flagler County’s representative, have been hostile to any attempt to shift from fossil fuels to renewables–it has promiscuous amounts of money on containing the consequences of climate change, including close to $100 million in Flagler County alone on dune-rebuilding and road-rebuilding, with the federal government throwing in a small share of that: to date, Flagler County has not had to spend a dime of local general funds on beach protection. It’s all been Department of Transportation, Division of Environmental Protection and other sources.
The Transportation Department has spent the lion’s share of the money–building a pair of secant seawalls (the second is under construction at the south end of Flagler Beach–rebuilding rock revetments, and rebuilding State Road A1A itself more than once, with another revamp soon. Since Hurricane Matthew in 2016, A1A has had to be closed several times south of the pier, and a couple of times north of it. The north-side secant wall put an end to the closures.
John Tyler, who leads the nine-county District 5 of the Transportation Department, has become a familiar face locally as he’s overseen his department’s projects and the public engagement that preceded them. It’s resulted in the ongoing fusion of approaches between DOT, the Army Corps and Flagler County–that mixture of beach rebuilding and wall-building that preserves the shoreline’s character and attraction while building the more radically altering walls in select places, as protection for infrastructure.
Tyler is an engineer. The lenses on his glasses bear no hint of rosiness–not even today, a day otherwise devoted to back-patting and self-congratulation. Like Harrah–the Army Corps project manager–Tyler said the project is one step among ongoing steps, not a final destination. It was as close as anyone came to acknowledging the inevitable.
“It’s going to be a continuing work in progress,” Tyler said. “You can’t just build something and expect Mother Nature to be held at bay for decades. But these projects together are going to improve the resiliency of A1A. We’re still going to have things to do, before storms and after storms. But hopefully it’ll be less than we’ll have to do. And the roadways will be open for a longer period of time. Hopefully they won’t close at all. But we’re going to have to continue to have our presence here in Flagler County for the foreseeable future. This is a tremendous asset that we have, unlike any other in the state, with A1A running along the beach, along the Atlantic Ocean. We can’t just build a wall and forget it. We’re going to have to maintain it, we’re going to have to continue to have a presence in the community.”
One of the selling points of secant walls is that they are buried under massive dunes, and when the dunes wash out, they are buried again, lessening their unaesthetic impact–they’re ugly, spectral things, laid bare–and lessening the ecological impact, too: sea walls kill beaches unless the beach in front of them is constantly renourished.
Even with the new beach about to be rebuilt, don’t expect it to “take” right away: it could very well be washed away. “This is one of our newest beach programs,” Harrah said. “Some of the bigger projects that have a really, really wide beach like Duval County, Miami, St. Johns, they’ve been around since the 1970s and 80s. We’re going to build a really large, resilient beach. However, it’s eroded so much that it’s going to take time to build it to a satisfactory template.”
So the project ahead may take four months. But while it is scheduled to be “renourished” again in 11 years–with Flagler County billed for half that cost–it is unlikely to last nearly that long before it’ll need more sand.
After the speeches, which were blessedly cut shower when County Administrator Heidi Petito decided not to extend the broiling with remarks of her own, everyone troupe to the beach for what Commission Chair Andy Dance, who had emceed the proceedings, described as “this monumental groundbreaking.”
Typically at such things an array of gold-speckled shovels is prepared along a bank of sand for the ceremonial moment, with the contractor’s equipment as background. Curiously, Weeks Marine, the contractor on the job, was nowhere in sight: it’s still working a job on Ponte Vedra’s shore.
Faith al-Khatib, the former county engineer who had so much to do with the success of this and other beach-protection project, was also not here. She had not been invited, not after the county pushed her out under odd circumstances last year, but Commissioner Dave Sullivan reserved a few words of praise for her: Referring to the $100 million the county drew down since Matthew, he said al-Khatib “had an awful lot to do with that over the years, and we do miss her. I just didn’t want to let it go.”
The officials did their thing with their shovels as scattered beachgoers looked on, bemused, uncomprehending: what kind of groundbreaking was it that drew men and women in formalwear to turn sand over on a beach? The absurdity of it may have been lost on most, especially those turning over the sand, but not on all.
