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Issues >
Water
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This proposed jetty construction project, intended to provide commercial and private fishing boats better access to the ocean, would cost $108 million total to construct, more than $80 million of which would be paid for by federal taxpayers. In addition, the Corps says that federal taxpayers would be stuck with project maintenance costs that are more than $4 million each year. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Park Service oppose this U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Corps) project, because it would cause severe damage to barrier islands near the inlet. Moreover, decades of scientific criticism and more than half a dozen independent reviews have determined that the jetties are not economically justified and will do ecological harm the nearby Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge and Cape Hatteras National Seashore. Green
Scissors Proposal Current Status The project continues to be mired in controversy. A General Accounting Office review of this project, requested by Senators John Edwards (D-NC) and Max Baucus (D-MT), is due May 2002. The President's Council on Environmental Quality is seeking to resolve a dispute between the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers over concerns that the environmental impact statement failed to adequately disclose the project's adverse impacts on fisheries habitats and fish stocks. Project Hurts Taxpayers Six distinguished economists have each conducted independent reviews of this project since 1979, and all have found that the project's costs outweigh the benefits. The Corps claims that only jetties will guarantee ocean access to a small fleet of 215 charter and commercial fishing boats, even though routine channel dredging has allowed fishing to continue in the area for more than 30 years. Construction costs for the jetties would amount to a subsidy of greater than $500,000 for each of the boats that would purportedly benefit from the program; if annual maintenance costs are added, the subsidy balloons to $3 million a boat. Maintenance dredging is cheaper than jetties for maintaining access to the open ocean for fishermen. Congress specifically directed the Corps to evaluate these differences in cost in the fiscal year 2001 Agriculture Appropriations bill (H.R. 4461). Other potential incidental costs from building the jetties include downshore erosion that would require spending millions of dollars to raise a highway along Hatteras Island. Project Hurts the Environment Three major scientific studies have indicated that the jetties would interrupt the natural flow of sand and further erode beaches on both sides of the inlet. A National Park Service panel of outside experts has repeatedly noted that the sand bypass system proposed by the Corps will not appreciably reduce the erosion problem. In the likely event that the system fails, it will result in increased erosion rates that could adversely affect other communities to the south. Agencies and environmental analyses have concluded that Highway 12, the national seashore, and several communities would be affected by erosion. Construction of the jetties would reduce transport of larval and juvenile fish and shellfish between the ocean and the sound, damaging the populations of fish species that are important to commercial and recreational anglers. The
jetties would damage 153 acres of Cape Hatteras National Seashore
and 33 acres of Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge; destroy
high quality wetlands; adversely affect important shorebird and
wading bird habitat, including the winter range critical habitat
and breeding habitat for the threatened piping plover; adversely
impact threatened sea turtle nesting; and reduce sand entering
the Pamlico Sound from the ocean, which is critical for the formation
and maintenance of tidal flats, coastal wetlands, and submerged
aquatic vegetation beds. The jetties would be completely antithetical
to the natural values of a dynamic, barrier island ecosystem,
and blatantly inconsistent with the provisions establishing the
National Seashore and National Wildlife Refuge systems.
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