DATE: Saturday, March 29, 1997              TAG: 9703290004

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B7   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Opinion 

SOURCE: Kerry Dougherty 
                                            LENGTH:   75 lines

DAMN THE POOR PEOPLE, FULL SPEED AHEAD

Come heck or high water, the seawall is going to be built. Beginning next week, a chunk of the North End is going to be transformed from a quiet beach community into a tableau from Dante's Inferno - without the fire.

Adding insult to injury is the fact that no one in city government or in the Army Corps of Engineers seems to care whether we who live at the North End want this seawall or not. Federal dollars were dangled in front of the City Council that can't say no, and the next thing we know, trucks are lining up on 49th Street revving their engines.

I think I speak for many of my neighbors when I say all this makes me feel impotent.

City officials are determined to forge ahead with this project, even though some of the federal money has not yet been appropriated. They are pinning their hopes - and our future - on a steadfast belief that Sen. John Warner and Rep. Owen Pickett will bring home the pork.

There is a word some of us would use for this behavior: reckless. Embarking on the largest public-works project in the history of the city with uncertain finances doesn't seem like good - or smart - government to me. If the federal funds never materialize, Virginia Beach taxpayers will be on the hook for tens of millions of dollars to complete the project. When the school system came up $12 million short a couple of years ago, City Council was outraged. If the federal money for this so-called Hurricane Protection Plan evaporates, the school shortfall will look like pocket change by comparison.

But the really galling part of the project is that it can't wait until autumn as originally planned because . . . well, just because. The rationale public officials were citing back in December - that the few federal funds already in hand would revert to the feds if not spent by October - turned out to be bogus.

I am not alone in wondering why there is such urgency to leap into this project.

Last Wednesday night I met with the directors of the North Beach Civic League. For months they and most of their members have opposed the construction of the North End Seawall.

Despite their opposition and admissions from various city officials who have met privately with them to say they were ``hoodwinked'' into supporting the deal, these community leaders say they too are feeling helpless on the seawall issue.

It makes me queasy. And I feel even queasier when I think of my hard-earned tax dollars - federal and local - going for a scheme to keep the mighty Atlantic Ocean out of hotel lobbies and millionaires' back yards.

But the Army Corps of Engineers is in charge, and it is now heavily into the business of building seawalls and sand dunes up and down the East Coast.

The engineers proudly boast of the Ocean City, Md., seawall that apparently stood fast during a big Northeaster last year. But they don't talk much about the mess at Monmouth Beach, and Sea Bright, N.J., - one of the nation's largest beach replacement projects. After work by the Army Corps there, the beach has been left with ``hot spots'' where sand washes away faster than it can be pumped back onto the beach.

Has anyone been wondering why the U.S. Army cares about the coastline to begin with? Shouldn't it be busy with national defense or building better bunkers?

I asked the director of the American Littoral Society, a coastal environmental group that is a major thorn in the side of the Army Corps of Engineers, why the Corps has become fixated with sand.

``That's easy,'' replied D. W. Bennett. ``The Corps has run out of rivers to dam.''

Bennett chuckles when he contemplates Virginia Beach's future.

``If you go ahead with the seawall you are guaranteed that your beach will wash away, unless you're prepared to keep pumping sand back onto it forever and that will cost hundreds of millions of dollars.''

That's exactly what the city plans to do.

I'm reminded of the Myth of Sisyphus, the tale of the unfortunate fellow condemned to push a boulder up a hill for eternity. Every time he neared the summit, the boulder would roll back down.

The Virginia Beach version of this fable is a city furiously pumping sand onto its eroding beaches, and helpless taxpayers underwriting the folly.

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