THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 10, 1994 TAG: 9407070199
SECTION: CAROLINA COAST PAGE: 48 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Real Estate
SOURCE: Chris Kidder
LENGTH: Long : 111 lines
Outer Banks towns aren't just towns, they're resorts. The beach is their biggest natural and economic resource. Getting folks to come to the ocean is easy. What a town does with the people once they're here is the hard part.
In North Carolina, enjoyment of the beach is a given right: the beaches are public. North Carolina does not mandate public access to its beaches. In fact, Dave Owens of the Institute for Government at the University of North Carolina says, the state didn't develop a beach access plan until 1981.
The state plan was the proverbial carrot on the stick, providing state funds to augment federal grants for access projects. With such incentives, most beach towns have taken responsibility for providing residents and visitors with equal access to the public beach. In doing so, they struggle to balance the rights of individuals with the good of the public.
Kill Devil Hills, the Outer Banks' most populous town, provides 31 public access sites along its 4.5 miles of oceanfront, including the area's first handicapped-accessible beach ramp.
But all of the access sites at the north end of town are local accesses, defined by the town's 1992 Shoreline Access Plan as ``a way to the ocean or sound for people who reside within walking distance of the water.'' While some local access sites provide parking for four or five cars, most - by definition - provide no parking at all.
The town believes it needs more parking. ``We're in desperate need of parking in that area of town,'' town manager Debbie Diaz says. ``Take a ride down the beach road on any summer weekend and you'll see the need.''
She's right. The need is there: Not just for day trippers who drive into town for the day, not just for folks who are staying elsewhere but prefer the Kill Devil Hills beach, but for the thousands of folks who own or rent houses on the town's heavily developed westside and must drive to the oceanfront.
And, yes, those westside folks must drive to the ocean. North of Third Street, Kill Devil Hills is, at most, a mile wide. But five lanes of 50 mph traffic barrel through the middle. Walking to the beach - with children, loaded down with beach paraphernalia - is foolhardy. There are no traffic lights, no crosswalks, at this end of town.
Few beach towns have an inventory of property that can be converted into parking for beach access. Buying property near or on the oceanfront for parking is prohibitively expensive. Historically, our beach towns have relied on public rights of way and prescriptive easements to provide parking spaces.
But if acquiring land is difficult and expensive, turning the property into parking is even more so. It's not just a simple matter of paving a lot. Impact on the environment and the neighborhood must be considered. Adjacent property owners may - and usually do - object.
This is where the issue of beach access gets thorny. A case in point is East Hayman Boulevard in Kill Devil Hills.
Today, East Hayman Boulevard is a quiet, dead-end street of 13 modest homes. It's unpaved: a gravely lane of rutted sand running less than two blocks from the oceanfront toward the sound, stopped short of U.S. Route 158 by a drainage culvert.
Because the street is narrow with deep, sandy shoulders, no parking signs are erected down both sides of the street. There's little traffic. At night, the street is dark.
At its ocean end, Hayman Boulevard has a public path to the beach and parking for five cars. The small parking lot was probably built by the developer of Virginia Dare Shores, an ocean-to-sound subdivision, in the 1960s.
The paved lot had been covered with sand for years and was recently rediscovered, says Gene Worrell, an East Hayman Boulevard homeowner. The town now keeps the lot cleared of sand.
East Hayman Boulevard looks just as it did when he bought his house in 1970, Worrell says, except that the oceanfront dunes were once higher and new homes have been built on adjoining streets.
By this winter, East Hayman Boulevard may look a lot different.
The town is planning to improve East Hayman Boulevard, one of the only streets in town with a 100-foot right of way. The drawings for this improvement call for paving the street from Route 158 to N.C. Route 12.
The contract for the improvement work was signed this spring and work is scheduled to begin at the end of September.
In the first block east of Route 158, the roadway would be 42 feet wide with a landscaped island running down the middle.
In the second block, in front of East Hayman Boulevard's 13 houses, the street will widen to 75 feet. A parking island with 44 diagonal spaces, a sidewalk, street lights and landscaping will be in the center of the street, with one-way traffic flowing on each side.
This isn't the first time such a project has been proposed for their street. Two years ago a similar parking plan was unveiled; and in the 1980s, the town's plans included a bathhouse for this access site. Both times homeowners hired a lawyer and warded off proposed improvements.
According to Hayman Boulevard homeowner Tom Salph, when the homeowners negotiated with the town in 1992, they believed they had reached a binding compromise. The new plan removed the mid-street parking and replaced it with parallel parking along the curb, something Salph insists is more in keeping with the residential character of the neighborhood. Salph says town officials are now ignoring this agreement.
The East Hayman situation raised many questions: What determines neighborhood character? Does a town have the legal right to change that character? What recourse do out-of-area property owners have when they can't vote?
We'll look at these issues in the next two weeks, as well as at the planning processes that set improvement projects such as East Hayman Boulevard in motion and how property owners can participate. MEMO: Chris Kidder covers Outer Banks real estate for The Carolina Coast. Send
comments and questions to her at P.O. Box 10, Nags Head, N.C. 27959.
ILLUSTRATION: Photo by CHRIS KIDDER
Homeowner Tom Salph stands in the middle of East Hayman Boulevard,
the same place where the town of Kill Devil Hills has contracted to
put in 44 parking spaces.
by CNB