Council adopts beach cleaning policy
BY PHIL REYNOLDS SOUTH JETTY REPORTER

They fussed, they debated and they grumbled, but in the end - after more than three hours - city council members on Wednesday, May 30, agreed to a city policy on beach maintenance.

They refused to pick only one of the options offered by a beach maintenance committee the council first appointed in February of last year, electing instead to tell the city staff to "use all the options in the staff report" to choose sites to dispose of seaweed that washes ashore, plus to explore the chance of contracting with Nueces County to put seaweed in unused portions of the I.B. Magee Beach Park.

The final motion, made by Councilman Mike Hall, included minimizing scraping of the beach by using frontend loaders to move sand instead of a maintainer; using common sense in maintaining the beach roadway; and developing a series of changeable signs that would advise motorists of beach driving conditions.

That motion passed with only Councilman Charles Bujan voting against it. Bujan said he was unalterably opposed to scraping the beach roadway because doing so lowers the level of the beach at that point, leading to puddling of rainwater and other undesirable effects.

"I feel that any blading is digging a trench, and if we get a storm, you're going to have a beach out by itself, isolated from the island," Bujan said. "I think wetting is an alternative. It's been done in the past but not efficiently."

Councilman Bubba Jensen was not at the special council meeting.

The beach committee didn't directly address the disposal of seaweed in its report to the council in October of last year. In looking at the committee recommendations, however, the city staff put seaweed options in this order, from least expensive to most expensive:

+ Leave the beach alone, letting seaweed accumulate and allowing blown sand to drift as it pleases

+ Deposit sand (and accumulated seaweed) along the foredune ridges next to the beach, the practice the city has used for the past several years

+ Deposit seaweed in the area behind the foredunes, which would require permits from the Texas General Land Office

+ Taking seaweed off the beach, perhaps to a 67-acre piece of property the city owns on the Corpus Christi Ship Channel, and allowing it to compost

+ Burning the seaweed, a process deemed not suitable because the equipment the staff investigated couldn't handle burning wet seaweed

+ Hauling the seaweed to the Corpus Christi landfill.

City Manager Michael Kovacs warned the council that the city is having problems finding areas in front of the dunes where it can dispose of the sand and seaweed. The reason is that property owners are objecting - and property south of Beach Access Road 1A is privately owned to the high water line. (In fact, the city has received letters of protest from the property owners, who are developers of Newport Beach and Golf North.)

Also, Kovacs said, the earlier practice of using a road maintainer to blade seaweed off the beach has been stopped by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

"The Corps of Engineers has put a strict interpretation on blading that they haven't used in the past," Kovacs said. "Because we haven't been able to blade, we're finding issues with sand content (in the seaweed)."

While neither the Corps of Engineers nor the General Land Of- objects to removing seaweed from the beach, the city's coastal management plan requires that no beach sand be moved away from the beach itself. That means if seaweed is transported, it has to be free of beach sand first.

Although the council discussed a committee recommendation that posts between the dunes and the roadway be moved 20 feet closer to the water to give more space to the dunes, it took no action on that recommendation.