Pass-a-Grille Beach renourishment gets federal approval, will continue

Pinellas County will move forward with plans to fully renourish eroded Pass-a-Grille Beach this summer after the county said Wednesday it had received federal approval for the project.

In June, the county renourished a section of the beach between Fourth Avenue and Ninth Avenue with about 10,000 cubic yards of sand from the nearby Grand Canal dredging project. Now, authorization from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will let the county begin restoring the rest of the beach, from its southern tip at First Avenue to 22nd Avenue — a plan that entails pumping another 140,000 cubic yards of sand from Pass-a-Grille Inlet onto the beach.

Though the project approval comes from the Army Corps, it doesn’t mark an end to the years-long standoff between the agency and the county over beach renourishment. Historically, the Army Corps has renourished Pinellas beaches at regular intervals, with the federal government footing most of the bill.

But renourishment projects all along the Pinellas coast have been put on hold, with the two parties at odds over an Army Corps policy. With no end to that dispute in sight, Pinellas is funding renourishment on its own with money collected through its tourist development tax, which it collects on hotel stays and short-term rentals.

At the heart of the standoff is an Army Corps policy that requires public access to the entirety of its renourishment project areas. In Pinellas, most of the project area is public land — all the beaches that benefit from renourishment are public and have public access points — but it includes some small portions of private beachfront property. Though the Army Corps once required temporary access to this land while it did the work, it changed its policy interpretation a decade ago to require perpetual public access. Pinellas has been unable to get consent from about half of the landowners in the area.

County officials and federal representatives have sought a resolution to the dispute with no success, and the county has started taking on renourishment — a costly task made possible by high tourist-tax income and reserves — by itself. That has included $30 million to restore sand dunes, which are key to protecting barrier islands’ buildings and infrastructure in storms and provide critical natural habitats, after they were battered by Hurricane Idalia.

The county in May allocated $4.4 million in tourist tax funding for the Pass-a-Grille project, which is expected to last into November. Beach access points from Pass-a-Grille’s southern tip to Sixth Avenue are currently closed, according to the county, and are expected to reopen in mid-September. Updates on the project are available here.