RALEIGH – The Wilmington Star-News published a fascinating piece Saturday discussing the feasibility of large-scale, long-term renourishment of North Carolina’s beaches. Reporter Gareth McGrath points out that while much of the political debate on the issue in recent years has centered on questions of finance, there are also important questions of sand and water science to consider. Where are renourishment projects to get their sand? Who owns it? How are competing claims on the sand to be adjudicated?
I’ve never considered the financial questions to be that hard to answer. Property owners along beaches ought to pay for the protection of their own property. Rental and vacation properties ought to charge prices to visitors that reflect the real cost of enjoying a beachfront room or restaurant, including the cost of replenishing those beaches. No taxpayers from Raleigh, Charlotte, or Asheville ought to be forced to pay for beach renourishment.
Indeed, as Orrin Pilkey has long explained, there will always be beaches. The coastline shifts over time, but it’s false to suggest that saving a particular resort or home from erosion is the same as “saving” the beach. It moves. Property owners need to shoulder the real cost of their decisions, rather than having the ability to export those costs to others. This will generate the outcome with the greatest benefits and lowest costs.
Even if the financial issue were settled, however, there would still be the matter of finding and transporting the sand. Taking it from inlets and offshore doesn’t exactly end the controversy, as McGrath reports:
Historically, for practical and financial reasons, beach towns have looked to inshore sand sources.
Those are largely inlets and the Intracoastal Waterway, sand sources that are renewable because the waterways require constant dredging to stay navigable.
But towns can’t simply dredge massive amounts of sand from an inlet without significantly altering its hydrology, potentially causing more erosion problems.
“It would be hungry for sand, and if an inlet’s hungry for sand, there’s generally one place to get if from, and that’s the adjacent beaches,” Rudolph said.
That leaves offshore deposits, which may or may not be renewable.
It’s an issue well worth continued scrutiny and consideration. Basic economics tells us that any resource over which it is difficult or impossible to apply private property rights is subject to a potential tragedy of the commons. There are incentives to get their first and use as much of the resource as possible before someone else can, because of the lack of any secure title in future claims on the resource. In the original commons example, the result was an overgrazed pasture. In the case of sand management along the coast, the tragedy of the commons could well lead to less-valuable uses of the scarce resource, uses that bear no relationship to relative costs and benefits.
Sure, some may decide to denigrate market pricing of sand, just as some denigrate market pricing of water. See how that’s turning out?
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.