I first met Doug some years ago when I had involved myself in sand loss and replenishment on our beach. At the time, we both served on our communities’ Homeowner Associations (HOAs), with his community just south of mine, both east of A1A.
The year was 2022, and Indian River County was planning and undertaking large-scale projects to replace sand on beaches damaged by storms. Federal monies significantly bolstered local coffers, and budgets for replenishing a mere few miles of shoreline could run into the tens of millions of dollars.
I wrote an article on this for Vero Beach Magazine, placing a positive frame on activities, skimming over a wall that we had run into in our own stretch of beach. For monitoring and engineering purposes, the County divides its roughly 25 miles of oceanfront into eight sectors. Notably, of these eight, only two are known to attract sand — termed an accreting beach: Sector 6 in Riomar, and southernmost Sector 8 abutting St. Lucie County. The rest lose sand at variable rates, generally pushed to the south.
The County imposed two requirements for depositing sand in front of a beachfront property. First, the homeowner would have to sign an easement for monitoring and construction interventions; its required duration would be perpetual. Second, at least 90 percent of beachfront homeowners in a given sector would have to sign, otherwise the integrity of placed sand would be undermined by too many unfilled plots.
Despite considerable controversy over the perpetuity clause, Sectors 1, 2, 3, and 5 managed to muster sufficient signatures to meet or breach the 90 percent threshold. Unfortunately, in our own Sector 7, certain recalcitrant signers left us short of the mark. And federal dollars would dissipate with failure to reach 90 percent in roughly a year’s time.
The dilemma for thousands of families in Sector 7 was that a small number of beachfront homeowners — say, 80 in number — controlled the fate of our common beach. Mathematically, if only nine refused to sign, no new sand would be gifted. Confronted with slightly more than this number of holdouts, Sector 7 replenishment stalled, while bulldozers crawled elsewhere.
I worked with Doug on solutions to our stalemate for a time, appearing before the County Commission together and meeting staffers. Eventually I peeled off to do other things. Doug, nevertheless, persisted. Recently, we saw each other at dinner. I thanked him for his dedication and work. Then asked if he would share where his efforts had taken him — and by extension, all of his neighbors.
JIM FIELD: Doug, thanks for agreeing to do this. I want others to know what you did, and in turn, why we ended up not getting new sand on our beach. It’s a particularly timely topic again, given recent storms that have taken five to eight feet of sand off our beach. Maybe it comes back, maybe it doesn’t. Still, it would have been nice to have more in reserve to give away. To start out, what was your own path towards getting involved in beach preservation?
DOUG DEMUTH: I live in the Sandpoint development, part of the Florida Department of Environment Protection’s (FDEP) “Critically Eroded Beach Area” designated for replenishment. [Jim: my community as well.] At one time Sandpoint actually had a point jutting into the ocean with quite a bit of sand. We now have little sand — there’s no point left. When I heard that the County Commissioners were considering returning Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) funds for Sector 7 replenishment, and also withdrawing appropriated County funding, I decided to investigate the issues.
JIM FIELD: Can you tell us about the few Sector 7 homeowners who wouldn’t sign? Was there a common theme? How did you try to deal with their concerns?
DOUG DEMUTH: The blame really lies with the County staff and Commissioners. To make future administrative efforts easy for themselves — getting easements signed, filed, managing them all, with differing durations and expiration dates, as it turned out, since there was no consistency with any of this in the past — the County staff required beachfront homeowners in each of its arbitrarily-defined sectors to provide perpetual easements.
While the County stated that the easements only applied to beach replenishment, vegetation replanting, and sea turtle restoration, some homeowners were skeptical. As you’ve said, the County then required 90 percent of the sector’s beachfront homeowners to sign these easements or otherwise lose their beach replenishment money. It appears in past replenishments that the County only required 15-year easements — although this was hard to confirm — a duration some Sector 7 holdouts would have accepted.
The County staff’s replenishment plan was equally flawed. It planned to distribute over 40 percent of all Sector 7 sand on just 14 northern-most properties, which, notably, were not included in FDEP’s Critically Eroded Beach Area. In this area sand accumulates naturally rather than in the south where it erodes — so you can see the dysfunction of their sector definitions, Sector 7 encompassing both accreting and eroding segments. Placing so much sand in the form of berms in such a confined area would have potentially obstructed residents’ beach access and ocean views, clearly unacceptable things the County staff didn’t consider.
To make things worse, County staff spent over $650,000 designing and gaining governmental permitting for their flawed plan without talking to the objecting residents. Stuck with the staff’s expensive plan and the perpetuity easements, the County Commissioners made yet another effort toward getting folks to sign perpetual easements. Without success they eventually wrung their hands, questioning why anyone would object to perpetual easements and decided to move on. Other homeowner considerations included potential harm to the off-shore reef and that replenishment isn’t a permanent fix but one requiring future sand replenishments and more money.
JIM FIELD: I know you also tried to get County Commissioners and staff to revise certain things, enabling a compromise solution. What happened with this?
DOUG DEMUTH: The County staff was so invested in their plan that they would not meet with us to discuss changes. On my own I proposed designing a project that would have eliminated the northern sand accumulating area from the Sector 7 project. The commissioners said that they would consider investing another $10,000 in such a plan redesign if the appropriate number of remaining residents would sign the easements. Unfortunately, there were a dozen or so south Sector 7 beachfront homeowners that continued to reject the perpetuity requirement and, in the end, we fell about four signers short of the required 90 percent.
JIM FIELD: So four beachfront owners determined the beach sustainability for a thousand neighbors in our area of the island. That strikes me as wrong — to structure any process that would allow this type of outcome. I can’t help but conclude that the County failed thousands of Sector 7 citizens — there was financing in place and overwhelming support, yet nothing got done. We were the only sector desperately in need of sand that got none. Is “fail” the right word?
DOUG DEMUTH: I’m sorry to say, but County staff complacency, Commissioner detachment, and regretfully, disdain by some mainland people involved for “wealthy” island residents are appropriate descriptions.
JIM FIELD: Denied new sand, many of our neighbors have opted to armor their beachfront — that is, erect steel retaining walls. What’s the downside of this?
DOUG DEMUTH: The County’s engineering consultant report states that armoring exacerbates the erosion of what beaches we have left. It would seem that further armoring might lead to renaming the area Vero Seawalls from Vero Beach.
JIM FIELD: What are the larger lessons to take away from the County’s replenishment efforts? Realistically, it’s only a matter of time until storms hit and we’re back to square one with severely eroded beaches.
DOUG DEMUTH: The main lesson is that our area residents must become involved in County
government, show up at Commissioner meetings, express their thoughts at these meetings, and challenge County staff when appropriate.
JIM FIELD: It’s lonely being a watchdog on County activities. What would you tell your fellow citizens for why they should get involved and care?
DOUG DEMUTH: Our barrier island doesn’t have any direct representation on the County Commission. Our area is coupled with a portion of the City of Vero Beach so typically we are saddled with representation having more interest in the City’s concerns than in our own. This is why our water and sewer rates are going through the roof.
To have an effectual say in issues impacting our island, two changes must be made in my opinion. First, County Commissioners must be elected by their district voters rather than by the County at large. Currently, the entire County votes for all Commissioners. Second, so that our interests and representation are not diluted, County representative districts must be redrawn so that the barrier island communities have their own elected Commissioner. Since we are subject to providing disproportionate County tax revenue, island residents are due a direct say in how our money is spent through direct representation. There appears to be enough island population to constitute a separate representative district.
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