1. Great editorial, Jim Sutton! Thank you for dogged research and for finding sea oats farming -- a cheaper and sustainable alternative to St. Augustine Beach City "Manager" Bruce Max Royle's latest dumb project -- wasting $100,000 for 1.25 miles of sea oats!
2. Typical clueless local government boondoggle. Time for economic royalist Royle to go. As Jimmy Carter said, the American people deserve "a government that's as good and decent and honest and truthful and open and compassionate and as filled with love as are the American people. I know it by heart. And I believe if our Government can measure up to the people, we can do that." Yes we can!
3. We need wise, competent. compassionate government managers. Enough of legendary corruption in St. Johns County and Flori-DUH-- enough one-party Republican misrule and resulting waste, fraud, abuse, misfeasance, malfeasance, nonfeasance, flummery, dupery, nincompoopery, nepotism, discrimination, favoritism and no-bid contracts.
4. The City of St. Augustine Beach's silly, seedy, $100,000 sea oats boondoggle reminds me of a louche longtime Boston Mayor, who was finally tossed out on his ear due to corruption, including $20 office trashcans circa 1946.
5. This silly, seedy $100,000 sea oats boondoggle is a pet project of controversial St. Augustine Beach "Mayor" Undine Celeste Pawlowski George, a lawyer educated in Boston.
6. Mayor George's e-mails on her private e-mail accounts for government business need to be scrutinized.
7. (The St. Augustine Beach City Commission has even discussed a "go fund me" project for its sea oats.)
8. To SAB Commissioners: please read and heed Jim Sutton's editorial.
9. Do what Jim Sutton suggests.
10. As my mother would advise, "Save your money!"
RECORD EDITORIAL: Beach takes the easy way out for disappearing dunes
Posted at 5:23 AM
Updated at 5:23 AM
October 17, 2018
St. Augustine Record
Most of us are aware of the phrase, “there are a two ways to skin a cat.” We’re not certain who coined that phrase, or why one might need even one way to accomplish the task. But, that notwithstanding, the metaphor works for our purposes here.
The City of St. Augustine Beach has set aside $100,000 to plant sea oats this season on a stretch of beach — roughly from 10th Street, south to the northern border of Ocean Hammock Park.
We called Beach City Manager Max Royle to ask the approximate distance that translated into, figuring he’d give us something like “a mile and a quarter, give or take.” But he didn’t miss a beat, with his answer, “6,400 feet.”
We countered, “Can you be more specific?”
At any rate, we wonder if there might be a better way to skin that particular feline. Governments these days are too quick on the trigger to throw money at challenges and allow outsiders to fix the problems.
Every time we turn around, our cities and county are hiring consultants to do work that could conceivably be done at home. And the Beach is now looking for someone to poke seedlings in sand.
Or is this something the Beach and its people might handle on their own?
North Carolina has plenty in common with Florida — both in our beaches’ dependence on healthy sea oats, and the weather that so endangers them. We both have an excess of wind and water and not nearly enough sea oats holding down the fort on beaches dunes up and down our coasts.
David Nash is pursuing his doctorate at North Carolina State University’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. He recently took home a national Best of Coast award from Coastal Living magazine for his work on dune revegetation.
His work has produced a better, cheaper method of growing sea oats on what’s called a float system. The technique is based on tobacco cultivation and Nash believes sea oats can become an alternative income source for the state’s tobacco farmers. But, above that, his research has found that Carolinas’ indigenous sea oats are much more successful than seedlings grown from Florida stocks.
North Carolina also has a Master Dune Conservation Program, along the same lines as our county’s Master Gardener program. Its research shows that more than one plant is optimum for beach stabilization. North Carolina is now growing three: sea oats, bitter panicum and American beach grass.
All along the U.S. Southeast coast, dozens of volunteer sea oat planting programs are in place. If St. Augustine Beach doesn’t feel like looking too far, it might phone Dr. Michael Shirley, director of the GTM National Estuarine Research Reserve.
His crew there knows sea oats and recently completed a local volunteer program, reseeding an area along South Ponte Vedra Beach, east of the former Gate Station.
Our turtle watches and beach cleanups locally attract good numbers of volunteers. The Beach could easily establish volunteer efforts, perhaps in conjunction with its By the Sea Concert series — seed the beach from 3 to 6 p.m. and party on it from 6 to 9 p.m.
The options are wide open. Planting $100,000 worth of sea oat seedlings seems an awful lot like writing a check and wiping your hands of it — a temporary and expensive issue that may never go away.
We have farmers here, looking for alternate crops to seed or grow. They’re doing some crazy cultivating out west in the tri-county area,
We can grow the best seeds here — then use imagination and our communities to establish an ongoing effort to keep the beaches strong. We have an Ag Center, we have an FFA, we have the Extension office, we have IFAS, we have the GTM Research Reserve, we have the Whitney Lab and we have a St. Johns County Environmental Division. We have the means and we have the talent.
The alternative is a never-ending succession of multi-million dollar efforts at pumping sand onto our beaches. We may never see the end of that, but armoring our dunes naturally seems a common sense approach to an increasingly commonplace challenge.
Comments:
Edward Adelbert Slavin
1. Great editorial, Jim Sutton! Thank you for dogged research and for finding sea oats farming -- a cheaper and sustainable alternative than St. Augustine Beach City "Manager" Bruce Max Royle's latest dumb project -- wasting $100,000 for 1.25 miles of sea oats!
2. Typical clueless local government boondoggle. Time for economic royalist Royle to go. As Jimmy Carter said, the American people deserve "a government that's as good and decent and honest and truthful and open and compassionate and as filled with love as are the American people. I know it by heart. And I believe if our Government can measure up to the people, we can do that." Yes we can!
3. We need wise, competent. compassionate government managers. Enough of legendary corruption in St. Johns County and Flori-DUH-- enough one-party Republican misrule and resulting waste, fraud, abuse, misfeasance, malfeasance, nonfeasance, flummery, dupery, nincompoopery, nepotism, discrimination, favoritism and no-bid contracts.
4. The City of St. Augustine Beach's silly, seedy, $100,000 sea oats boondoggle reminds me of a louche longtime Boston Mayor, who was finally tossed out on his ear due to corruption, including $20 office trashcans circa 1946.
5. This silly, seedy $100,000 sea oats boondoggle is a pet project of controversial St. Augustine Beach "Mayor" Undine Celeste Pawlowski George, a lawyer educated in Boston.
6. Mayor George's e-mails on her private e-mail accounts for government business need to be scrutinized.
7. (The St. Augustine Beach City Commission has even discussed a "go fund me" project for its sea oats.)
8. To SAB Commissioners: please read and heed Jim Sutton's editorial.
9. Do what Jim Sutton suggests.
10. As my mother would advise, "Save your money!"
Tony D'andrea
I was involved in a beach restoration/erosion prevention project in my small oceanfront town in New Jersey back in the 80's.
Detailed every facet of the project, inclusive of every type of material needed, cost of each, installation plan, etc. for a near two mile stretch of beachfront.
We signed up volunteer town residents to do a portion of the installation of snow fencing and planting of dune grass. Other residents brought lunch to their neighbors working on the project. Went to the County Sheriff with our project plan and asked if he would supply inmates to do a lot of the heavy work. He said they had never done such a thing, but felt it was a great idea and wanted to partake. Arranged for all the restaurants in the town to provide lunch and soft drinks daily for the inmates. Before the project got started, went to the State of NJ with detailed project plan and grant request submission. Pitched it to them and got the entire requested funds. Residents were involved in various ways and the inmates were smiling and proud of having participated in such a unique endeavor. « less
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