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Mount Pleasant SC Homes for Sale, Mount Pleasant SC Real Estate for sale, Mount Pleasant SC Condos, Mount Pleasant SC Homes for Sale Listings, Charleston SC Fractional Homes for Sale
S.C. Beaches Enviromental Policy"Beach retreat" isn't a cabin under the palmettos in the dunes. It's a state policy restricting beachfront building that raises hackles on both environmentalists and developers up and down the booming coast. The policy is a state goal to build smaller homes set farther back from the surf. It came after an extremely high tide in January 1987 flooded a fire station on Isle of Palms, put the roads to Pawleys Island underwater, shattered boardwalks on Myrtle Beach and swamped hotels and homes along the coast.
Inundated with applications to build seawalls, the state responded with the Beach Management Act and one of the nation's first bans on the walls. The idea is to protect the "natural beach." Seawalls exacerbate beach erosion. Two decades later, opinions are divided on what has retreated: development or enforcing the state's policy. Regulators are facing what one environmentalist called their first real test ? the Wild Dunes sandbag fiasco. Six oceanfront condominium complexes and the two signature holes of the resort's prestigious ocean golf course are literally hanging over the edge of the ocean after a few years of heavy erosion. S.C. Ocean and Coastal Resource Management regulators must balance protecting the beach with protecting millions of dollars in taxpayer and tourism revenue. The regulators are addressing environmentalists' criticism that the agency skirted the policy and the act by allowing large sandbags ? essentially temporary walls ? to protect those properties. They are facing appeals and lawsuits over the property owners' beach re-nourishment proposals. "One way or another, somebody is going to feel pain" attorney Jimmy Chandler of the South Carolina Environmental Law Project said. "Either the private property owners are going to lose property or the public is going to lose beach." The beachfront act's retreat policy draws a line along the dunes based on the dunes' erosion during the past 40 years ? the more erosion, the farther back the line. The state moves the line in or out every decade or so, using the latest 40 years worth of numbers. The original retreat policy said nothing could be built seaward of the line. The state was sued successfully by a Wild Dunes property owner who called that an uncompensated "takings" of his property. The rule was reworked to say that seaward of the line, new structures must be built as far back along the line as possible and only as big as 5,000 square feet of heated space. That's about twice as big as what the real estate industry considered the average American home in 2004. Those restrictions can be and are appealed for individual properties. A North Myrtle Beach resort last summer won an administrative court ruling to allow a water slide on the beach side of the dunes. Except for the setback rule and the seawall ban, the policy is mostly a set of guidelines, using words like "encourages," "discourages" and "promotes." The problem is, the policy was established after miles of beach already had been built up with hotels, condominiums and homes that were larger and closer to the beach than desired. Structures like the half-dozen or so Wild Dunes condominiums on Isle of Palms, now being swept by high tides, were built before the act was passed. Property owners say they should be allowed to do what they can to protect their property. Environmentalists say state "emergency orders" to allow sand bags or other temporary barriers sidestep the law. State regulators like to say it would take a catastrophic storm ? essentially destroying those properties ? before beach retreat could be implemented. "We're about 30 or 40 years too late to use (retreat) as a solution to the problem," said Bill Eiser, S.C. Ocean and Coastal Resources Management oceanographer. Not everyone agrees. "There's enough there to regulate (building) if the agency has will to do it," said Chandler. "I always felt we would find out whether it was effective when we had a major bout of erosion at a wealthy beach." Paul Gayes, director of The Center for Marine and Wetlands Studies at Coastal Carolina University, considers the state's idea of a managed, controlled pull back of development from fragile beaches "cutting edge" policy even today. But it's up against an economic and cultural boom of beachfront development as large and wide as the row of high-rise hotels and condominiums that wall the Grand Strand in Horry County. "How are you going to move a place like Myrtle Beach? Can you really do that? It's going to go to court, you know that," he said. With the setback line scheduled to be redrawn in 2008, S.C. Ocean and Coastal Resources Management is launching an initiative this summer to open a dialogue to analyze state beachfront policies, spokesman Dan Burger wrote in an e-mail.
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