Despite pushback from some residents, Dare commissioners OK tax to fight off rising sea
The risk to tiny Avon from climate change is particularly dire -- it is, after all, located on a mere sandbar of an island chain, in a relentlessly rising Atlantic.
Posted — UpdatedHomeowners mostly agreed on the urgency of the first part. They were considerably less keen on the second.
People gave Outten their own ideas about who should pay to protect their town: the federal government, the state government, the rest of the county, tourists, people who rent to tourists. The view for many seemed to be anyone but them.
Outten kept responding with the same message: There’s nobody coming to the rescue. We have only ourselves.
"If we don't do this, then Highway 12 floods, and it's impassable for days," Outten told WRAL News on Monday, shortly before county officials voted to create a special tax district to pay for a long-term beach renourishment project. "We either allow erosion to continue, allow the highway to continue and be overrun with water, or we do something about it."
The risk to tiny Avon from climate change is particularly dire — it is, after all, located on a mere sandbar of an island chain, in a relentlessly rising Atlantic Ocean. But residents are facing a question that is starting to echo along the U.S. coastline as seas rise and storms intensify. What price can be put on saving a town, a neighborhood, a home where generations have built their lives?
Communities large and small are reaching for different answers. Officials in Miami, Tampa, Houston, San Francisco and elsewhere have borrowed money, raised taxes or increased water bills to help pay for efforts to shield their homes, schools and roads.
Along the Outer Banks — where tourist-friendly beaches are shrinking by more than 14 feet a year in some places, according to the North Carolina Division of Coastal Management — other towns have imposed tax increases similar to the one Avon is considering.
This despite the reality that Avon’s battle is most likely a losing one. At its highest point, it is just a couple dozen feet above sea level, but most houses, as well as the main road, are along the beachfront.
“Based on the science that I’ve seen for sea-level rise, at some point, the Outer Banks — the way they are today — are not forever,” said David Hallac, superintendent of the national parks in eastern North Carolina, including the Cape Hatteras National Seashore, which encompasses the land around Avon. “Exactly when that happens is not clear.”
The Outer Banks have a rich past. Hatteras Island, originally home to members of the Algonquin tribe, is near the site of the so-called lost colony of Roanoke. A few miles north and several centuries later, the Wright brothers flew their first airplane.
It is the vulnerability to the sea — the very threat Avon is wrestling with — that, in a twist of fate, helped transform the Outer Banks into a tourist spot, according to Larry Tise, a former director of North Carolina’s Division of Archives and History.
In 1899, a terrible hurricane all but destroyed the islands, and the state decided not to spend money developing them. Land speculators later swooped in, snapping up property and marketing the curious local history to attract tourists.
Today, tourism dominates Avon, a hamlet of T-shirt shops and cedar-shake mansions on stilts lining the oceanfront. A few blocks inland sits a cluster of modest older houses, called the Village, shaded by live oaks, Eastern red cedars and wax myrtles. This is where most of the remaining lifelong Avon residents live.
Audrey Farrow’s grandmother grew up in Avon and met Farrow’s grandfather when he moved to town as a fisherman in the late 1800s. Farrow, who is 74, lives on the same piece of land she, and her mother before her, grew up on.
Farrow has seen Avon change during her lifetime. Vacationers and buyers of second homes have brought new money but have pushed out locals. The ocean has changed as well, she said, with the water now closer and the flooding more constant.
"We need that road," Farrow said of N.C. 12. "I've seen days when we couldn't get to the store."
Over the past decade, hurricanes have caused $65 million in damage to the two-lane highway that runs along the Outer Banks and connects Avon and other towns to the mainland. The federal and state governments are spending an additional $155 million to replace a section of N.C. 12 with a 2.4-mile bridge, as the road can no longer be protected from the ocean. Hatteras Island has been evacuated five times since 2010.
County officials turned to what is called beach nourishment, which involves dredging sand from the ocean floor a few miles off the coast and then pushing it to shore through a pipeline and layering it on the beach. But those projects can cost tens of millions of dollars, and the county’s requests for federal or state money to pay for them went nowhere.
So the county began using local money instead, splitting the cost between two sources: revenue from a tax on tourists, and a property tax surcharge on local homes. In 2011, Nags Head became the first municipality in the Outer Banks to get a new beach under that formula. Others followed, including Kitty Hawk in 2017.
Ben Cahoon, the mayor of Nags Head, said that paying $20 million to rebuild the beach every few years was cheaper than buying out all the beachfront homes that would otherwise fall into the sea.
He said he could imagine another two or three cycles of beach nourishment, buying his city 20 or 25 more years. After that, he said, it’s hard to guess what the future holds.
“Beach nourishment is a great solution, as long as you can afford it,” Cahoon said. “The alternative choices are pretty stark.”
Now the county says it’s Avon’s turn. Its beach is disappearing at a rate of more than 6 feet per year in some places.
Dare County wants to put about 1 million cubic yards of sand on the beach. The project, scheduled to begin in 2022, would cost between $11 million and $14 million and, according to Outten, would need to be repeated about every five years.
That impermanence, combined with the high cost, has led some in Avon to question whether beach nourishment is worth the money. They point to Buxton, the next town south of Avon, whose beach got new sand in 2018, paid for through higher taxes. Now, most of that sand has washed away, leaving a beachfront motel and vacation rentals teetering over the water.
“Every bit of it’s gone,” Michael David, who grew up in Avon and owns a garage in Buxton, said during last month’s meeting. “We’re just masking a problem that never gets fixed.”
"In North Carolina, the only tool we have in our toolbox to stabilize beaches is beach nourishment. and beach nourishment works, and it has worked for us," Outten said Monday.
The county is proposing two tax rates to generate the revenue to pay for half of the project. Homeowners on the ocean side of N.C. 12 would pay an extra 25 cents for every $100 of assessed value — an increase of 45% over their current tax rate.
"If you live on the oceanfront and you're having to do a beach push every year and you're having to rebuild your deck, they're spending way more than $2,000 or $3,000 or $4,000 a year already to protect what they've got," Outten said Monday. "This tax may help them and save them some money."
On the sound side, the extra tax would be 5 cents per $100 value.
Sam Eggleston, a retired optometrist who moved to Avon three years ago from outside Raleigh, North Carolina, and bought a house on the western side of N.C. 12, said even that smaller amount was too much. He said that because Highway 12 is owned by the state, the state should pay to protect it.
If the government wants to help, Eggleston argued, it should pay people to move their houses somewhere else — a solution he said would at least be permanent.
“To keep spending millions and millions of dollars on the beach, to me doesn’t make sense,” he said.
That view was not shared by people who live on the beach.
When Carole and Bob Peterson bought a house on the ocean in 1997, it was protected from the water by two rows of huge dunes, Peterson said. Years of storms have washed away those dunes, leaving their 2,800-square-foot home exposed to the water.
Carole Peterson acknowledged that she and her neighbors would benefit the most from rebuilding the beach. But the rest of the town should be willing to pay for it too, she said, because it protects the jobs and services they depend on.
“People that live over there, on that side, don’t understand that the beach is what keeps them alive,” she said, pointing across the highway. “If you don’t have this beach, people aren’t going to come here.”
Farrow is one sound-side resident willing to pay the higher tax, but she still questions whether the beach renourishment project is worth the money.
"I just feel that nature is going to take its course anyway, and how do we stop it? I don't know. I don't have that answer," she said. 11:17:01
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