Eroding Management Plan, Cities Bluntly Tell Flagler County: Not One Extra Dime for Beach Protection,

Palm Coast, Beverly Beach and Bunnell officials told Flagler County in blunt, at times almost belligerent terms Wednesday evening that their constituents will not accept any new tax or fee to pay for beach management, whether it’s renourishing beaches or maintaining them.

“I hate the word fair, because life’s not fair,” Palm Coast Mayor Mike Norris said. “We’re not a beach city, and I’d be hard-pressed to go back to my city council and say, Here, here’s another fee we want to tack on you.” He went on to describe the municipal boundaries within the county as “gerrymandered.”




“I’d gladly contribute to beach renourishment if we un-gerrymandered our county and include that barrier island in my city limits, so our city residents can benefit from that taxation,” Norris said.

Flagler Beach officials were more measured, to the extent that they want proportional costs shared mostly by beach users. That would be Palm Coast’s, whose residents leave by far the biggest footprint on Flagler Beach’s sands.

The 45-minute discussion during a joint meeting of local governments at the Government Services Building Wednesday evening left county officials reeling, even though the responses from the cities to the county’s earnest call for help were not unexpected. The tone, which reverberated with the sound of a door slamming, was.

“I heard a couple comments that I didn’t particularly care for. I don’t think you should be close-minded on this issue, that it does need discussing,” County Commissioner Greg Hansen said at the end of the discussion. “We have a plan to make this all happen without raising your taxes. So I just encourage you not to leave this room saying I’m not going to do it. I think you should go leave this room and saying, Well, let’s see what they have to say. Let’s see what the plan looks like.”




There is a plan. It’s complicated and it’s not finalized. But it doesn’t involve Palm Coast, Bunnell, Beverly Beach or Marineland. It involves only the unincorporated parts of the barrier island, whose residents would pay more taxes or fees.

If there is a broader plan that involves the cities, the county has not made it public. So it’s not clear what Hansen was referring to when he included the other cities in the plan. He had laid out the importance of a beach-management plan that involved all communities, if it is to be successful, summarizing a packet of information disseminated to the city officials.

After Hurricane Matthew opened the county’s eyes to a loss of 70 feet of beach, Hansen said, the county got to work on a beach management plan. The county’s consultant, Olsen and Associates, repeatedly stressed that the county couldn’t rely on federal and state grants to pay for beach management every year. “You have to show that you’ve got something in the game yourself,” Hansen said.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers continued what turned into a 20-year plan to renourish 2.7 miles of shore in Flagler Beach (slightly more, when including portions the county paid for). That culminated with the renourishment that took place last summer. No sooner was the sand rebuilt than hurricane Milton struck, shearing off a significant portion of the new sand. That’s why a beach-management plan is essential: erosion is inevitable. Losing the beach is not–unless nothing is done.




Doing nothing is an option, said County Commission Chair Andy Dance, who also chaired Wednesday’s meeting, but not a desirable or wise option. “We had federal and state money that paid almost entirely for that first stage of nourishment,” he said. “You do the one and done, and you may lose that partner in the future.”

The county puts future renourishment costs for all 18 miles of beaches at $120 million, with the ongoing local share of that at $72 million (federal and state sources would pay the rest). The county has only a fraction of that money in hand, with several ways to raise more: property taxes, sales taxes (including possibly raising the county’s half cent sales tax by another half cent), tourist tax revenue, special taxing districts, user fees–including beach-access and parking fees–and state and federal grants.

Flagler Beach is responsible for paying for the maintenance of the beach the Army Corps rebuilt. So far, it has no money and no plan on how to do that.

“If you get a big storm, the C section and the F section and Palm Coast are going to flood, and the homes along the Intracoastal are all going to flood, and that’s not our determination. That’s NOAA,” the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Hansen said. “Their charts show that. So we’re putting all this together and trying to figure out what to do.” Hansen appeared to be mixing apples and oranges: a grave storm could very well flood Palm Coast’s canal neighborhood, but as a result of a massive storm surge. Dunes and renourished beaches would have not prevent that.




Hansen continued: “Now we’ve got a plan. We know what we’re going to do. We’ve got a plan to get it done. We know how to fund it and take care of it, but we need some help. That’s why we’re doing this meeting. We need some help. If we have to do it ourselves, we’ll do it. But that’s not fair.”

It was to that statement about fairness that Norris replied with his dislike of the word.

The key voice was always going to be Palm Coast’s, the largest city and taxpayer in the county. “Currently we are facing a water crisis in our city,” Norris said. “And for me to go back to my residents and say, Here, here’s another fee, here’s another tax, I don’t see that in our future right now.” He described as “lopsided” the amount of money the city pays in county taxes as it is, the same word he used to described what he said was just $464,000 in Tourist Development Council grants over the last 13 years–an inaccurate figure: in 2022 alone, the city got a $739,000 TDC grant to help build the Southern Recreation Center.

Palm Coast City Council member Ty Miller said the city has its own funding challenges, and sees little appetite among Palm Coast residents for any additional fee or tax for the beach. He said he’d be willing to have a city workshop on the matter, but had little hope that the outcome would be different.

Bunnell Mayor Catherine Robinson put it in even starker terms: “I can tell you their appetite will be probably fasting,” she said of her own commission. “We’ll put it on the agenda and see how it flies.”




Then there was Beverly Beach Mayor Steve Emmett (who at a previous such joint meeting, when the discussion veered to homelessness, had said people are unhoused because they like it. It’s their “lifestyle.”)

Emmett spoke as if modern science, sea rise and climate change have no bearing on the beach. “The beach maintenance maintains itself. It gives and it takes,” he said, inaccurately: the ocean has not returned the 70 feet of beach Flagler’s shore lost over the last few decades.

“Yes, we have the hurricanes, we have the damage, we have the floods, and we always recover from it one way or another. We get through it,” Emmett continued. But taxes? “Taxes do not cut it. You will never control nature. Man cannot control it. The best that you can do is try to survive it and rebuild the best you can. We bought where we live. Nobody told me to buy on the ocean. I did it because I wanted to be next to it. I had an old Commissioner once told me, so if you don’t like it, move.” (Dance tried to say that it’s not fighting mother nature so much as “mitigating” some of its more damaging effects.)

Emmett was categorical about any proposed taxes: “When you talk tax, that taxation on us, I tell you right now, I will not support it.”

He added, “What do we get back to our people? Taxes. We give them taxes, spend more money on stuff that we don’t even need.” He did not explain how Beverly Beach residents don’t need the very beach they moved to be near. But he boasted of having the lowest property tax rate of any jurisdiction in the county, “maybe in the state.”

Flagler Beach Commission Chair Scott Spradley said his city supports renourishment and maintenance, but did not say how. Fellow-Flagler Beach Commissioner James Sherman said it’ll take “the whole community.” But then noted that almost three in four visitors to Flagler Beach are from Palm Coast. “We do want to be a part of this, but also we want to make sure everybody is paying their fair share into this. Because it’s not just Beverly Beach, Marineland, Flagler Beach and unincorporated parts of the Hammock to burden these costs.”

Local officials love to speak about “community,” cooperation and the meaninglessness of boundaries. Except when it involves sharing costs. Dance tried to bridge that gap.

“As a community,” Dance said, “we all need to understand the importance of the beach to each of us from Palm Coast and then out to the barrier islands. It’s integral to who we are, and we need to do what we can as a group to ensure the success.” The value is economic and environmental, with the barrier island representing “the single biggest area of tax revenue for the county.” He said the county needs to adapt to sea level rise and climate change.

“There’s been millions of dollars that have been spent and millions of dollars that will be spent, so we have to wrap our heads around the the dollar figures and the benefit,” Dance said. The federal government will repair the federalized beach in Flagler Beach at 100 percent after a named storm and a federal disaster declaration. But that’s not even certain anymore. “As we’ve seen with changes in the federal government in the last couple of weeks, some of those things may not be so secure after all,” Dance said. “We have to work on this ourselves, and make sure we do what we can locally.”

So the responsibility will be largely local. The county’s plan to manage the unincorporated part of the beach is a start. But “that’s a piecemeal approach that only protects certain areas of the community,” he said.

“We think this is a community wide effort from Bunnell, Flagler Beach, Beverly Beach, Palm Coast, all of us together need to make this beach nourishment work. And so the conversation now is, can are you willing to assist in this, to make it a county wide effort so that we aren’t going out on our own just to protect the unincorporated.”

The answer Dance heard Wednesday evening was a resounding No.

He’s not losing hope. “That just proves we’ve got work to do to be able to counter those arguments,” he said today. “It comes back to us to make a better case.”