The New York Times
Small town, big decision: what are we willing to pay to fight the rising sea?
AVON, NC – Bobby Outten, county manager at Outer Banks, gave two bad news at a recent public meeting. Avon, a city with a few hundred full-time residents, desperately needed at least $ 11 million to prevent its main road from being destroyed. And to help pay for it, Dare County wanted to raise Avon’s property taxes, in some cases by almost 50%. The owners mainly agreed with the urgency of the first part. They were considerably less interested in the second. People gave Outten their own ideas about who should pay to protect their city: the federal government. The state government. The rest of the county. Tourists. People who rent to tourists. The sight for many seemed to be, anyone but them. Subscribe to the New York Times newsletter The Morning. Outten continued to respond with the same message: There is no one coming to your rescue. We have only ourselves. “We need to act now,” he said. The risk of climate change for tiny Avon is particularly dire – after all, it is located on a mere sandbar in a chain of islands, in an ever-rising Atlantic. But people in the city are facing an issue that begins to echo off the coast of the United States as the seas rise and the storms intensify. How much does it cost to save a city, a neighborhood, a house where generations built their lives? Communities large and small are looking for different answers. Officials in Miami, Tampa, Houston, San Francisco and elsewhere have borrowed money, raised taxes or raised water bills to help pay for efforts to protect their homes, schools and roads. Along Outer Banks – where tourist-oriented beaches are shrinking by more than 4 meters a year in some places, according to the North Carolina Coastal Management Division – other cities have imposed tax increases similar to what Avon is considering. On Monday, county officials will vote whether Avon will join them. This is despite the reality that Avon’s battle is probably a lost one. At its highest point, the city is only a few dozen meters above sea level, but most houses, like the main road, are on the waterfront. “Based on the science I saw for rising sea levels, at some point, Outer Banks – the way they are today – are not forever,” said David Hallac, superintendent of national parks in eastern North Carolina, including the Cape Hatteras National Seashore, which covers the lands around Avon. “It is not clear exactly when that happens.” The Outer Banks have a rich past. Hatteras Island, originally home to members of the Algonquin tribe, is close to the site of the so-called lost Roanoke colony. A few kilometers to the north and several centuries later, the Wright brothers flew on their first plane. And it’s the vulnerability to the sea – the very threat Avon is grappling with today – that, in a twist of destiny, helped turn Outer Banks into a tourist spot, according to Larry Tise, a former director of the Archives Division. of North Carolina and history. In 1899, a terrible hurricane almost destroyed the islands, and the state decided not to spend money to develop them. Later, land speculators invaded the site, snatching up properties and selling the curious local history to attract tourists. Today, tourism dominates Avon, a village of T-shirt shops and cedar mansions on stilts by the sea. A few blocks inland is a cluster of older, modest houses, called the Village, shaded by live oaks, oriental red cedars and wax myrtle. This is where most of Avon’s residents live throughout their lives. Audrey Farrow’s grandmother grew up in Avon and met Farrow’s grandfather when he moved to the city as a fisherman in the late 19th century. Farrow, 74, lives on the same piece of land where she and her mother grew up. Standing on his porch last week, Farrow talked about how Avon had changed in his life. Vacationers and second home buyers brought money, but expelled the locals. And the ocean itself has changed. The water is now closer, she said, and the flood more constant. The wind alone now pushes water down the small road where she lives and onto the lawn. “If it rained together, then you feel like you have a property by the sea,” she said. From any angle, the reckoning for Avon appears to be approaching. In the past decade, hurricanes have caused $ 65 million in damage on Highway 12, the two-lane road that runs along the Outer Banks and connects Avon and other cities to the continent. The federal and state governments are spending an additional $ 155 million to replace a stretch of Highway 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 have resorted to what is called beach nutrition, which involves dredging sand from the ocean floor a few kilometers from the coast and then pushing it to the coast by through a pipeline and spread it on the beach. But these projects can cost tens of millions of dollars. And the county’s requests for federal or state money to pay for them have gone nowhere. So the county started using local money, dividing the cost between two sources: revenue from a tourist tax and a property tax surcharge on local homes. In 2011, Nags Head became the first city on the Outer Banks to receive a new beach with this 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 all the beachfront homes that, otherwise, they would fall into the sea. He said he could imagine two or three more beach feeding cycles, buying his city another 20 or 25 years. After that, he said, it is difficult to guess what the future holds. “Beach food is a great solution, as long as you can afford it,” said Cahoon. “The alternative options are very strict.” Now the county says it’s Avon’s turn. Its beach is disappearing at a rate of more than 6 feet a year in some places. During the meeting last month, Outten described Avon’s needs. As the beach disappears, even a small storm sends water from the ocean over Highway 12. Eventually, a hurricane will push enough water over the road to destroy it, leaving the city inaccessible for weeks or more. In response, the county wants to put about 1 million cubic meters of sand on the beach. The project would cost between $ 11 million and $ 14 million and, according to Outten, would need to be repeated every five years. This impermanence, combined with the high cost, has led some in Avon to question whether beach nutrition is worth the money. They point to Buxton, the next town south of Avon, whose beach received new sand in 2018, pays through higher taxes. Now most of the sand has been washed away, leaving a seaside motel and rental houses swaying over the water. “Everything is gone,” said Michael David, who grew up at Avon and owns a garage in Buxton, during last month’s meeting. “We are just masking a problem that is never resolved.” Speaking after the meeting, Outten defended the feeding of the beach, despite being temporary. “I don’t think we can stop erosion. I think we can only slow down, ”he said. In interviews with more than a dozen homeowners in Avon, a frequent concern was how the county wants to share the cost. People who own properties along the beach will benefit the most, said Outten, because the extra sand will protect their homes from falling into the ocean. But he said that everyone in the city would benefit from saving the road. To reflect this difference, the county is proposing two tax rates. Homeowners on the ocean side of the road would pay an extra 25 cents for every $ 100 of the assessed value – an increase of 45% over the current tax rate. On the entry side, the extra tax would be just one fifth of that amount. Sam Eggleston, a retired optometrist who moved to Avon three years ago from outside Raleigh, North Carolina, and bought a house on the west side of the city, said that even that small amount was too much. He said that since Highway 12 is owned by the state, the state must pay to protect it. If the government wants to help, Eggleston argued, it should pay people to move their homes elsewhere – a solution he said would be at least permanent. “To keep spending millions and millions of dollars on the beach, it doesn’t make sense to me,” he said. This view was not shared by those who live on the beach. When Carole and Bob Peterson bought a house by the sea in 1997, it was protected from water by two rows of huge dunes, Peterson said. Years of storms have washed away these dunes, leaving their 2,800 square meter home exposed to water. Peterson acknowledged that she and her neighbors would benefit the most from rebuilding the beach. But the rest of the city should be willing to pay for it too, she said, because it protects the jobs and services on which they depend. “Those who live there, on that side, don’t understand that the beach is what keeps them alive,” she said, pointing across the street. “If you don’t have that beach, people are not going to come here.” Audrey Farrow’s son, Matthew, a commercial fisherman, said he cares about the future of the place where he grew up. Between the flood and the demand for vacation homes, which continues to raise property prices, he said, it is getting harder to have a good life at Avon. “I’m already telling my kids,” said Farrow, “go somewhere else.” This article was originally published in The New York Times. © 2021 The New York Times Company