Short-Term Beach Fix An Opportunity Lost

At this point it is unlikely that anything would influence in a positive way the work about to begin on the downtown Montauk beach. This is the wing-and-a-prayer $9 million effort by the United States Army Corps of Engineers intended to save the 10 private houses, motels, and condominiums there from falling into the Atlantic. The plan is for some 3,100 feet of beach to be excavated to make room for thousands of plastic-fabric sandbags, with the sand that is removed stockpiled temporarily in the Kirk Park parking lot and then used to cover them.

So many things are wrong with this undertaking that contemplating them is exhausting. However, in broad strokes, the project is flatly illegal under multiple state and town laws, and it could add millions of dollars in maintenance costs for East Hampton Town and Suffolk County taxpayers. Making this all the more distressing is that the work was predicated on a massaged economic analysis and false assertions that the situation was not the fault of long-term erosion patterns.

In the grand scheme, the Montauk plan represents a tragically missed opportunity. Following Hurricane Sandy, there was both the will and the money to think big about the coast. East Hampton Town officials should have led the way in promoting a strategy of retreat. This might have included buying out the row of valuable structures closest to the ocean, redeveloping a portion of downtown Montauk to accommodate new motels built to modern standards, and creating a revegetated, natural-functioning dune where they once stood. This is what should have happened. In the long run, it may also have cost taxpayers less than the project under way. Instead, those involved took the easy, if misguided, road.

What will happen now seems clear enough. The beach where the sandbags will go is very narrow and the sand used to cover them will wind up in the ocean. As a result, there will be no beach, and water will before long lap at the sandbags themselves. One of the town’s most extraordinary assets, the Montauk beach, will be gone, with a devastating effect on visitor revenue.

To call this effort shortsighted would be kind. We believe the long-term result will be a disaster, predicated on lies and green-lighted in the airy hope of future federal money that will make everything okay in the end. Allowing construction on the ocean dunes was a mistake in the first place. Now, town, county, state, and federal agencies are compounding the error, wasting public money in the process. None of this needed to happen. Don’t say we didn’t tell you so.