More than 120 million tourist development tax dollars are going towards restoring the beaches.<\/p>\n
PINELLAS COUNTY, Fla. \u2014 Crews on Belleair and Upham beaches are pushing forward in a critical phase of Pinellas County’s emergency beach renourishment project.<\/p>\n
The county said they finished placing sand on Clearwater and work is steadily moving down the coast.<\/p>\n
More than 120 million tourist development tax dollars are going towards restoring the beaches.<\/p>\n
Zach Westfall is a coastal scientist with the county.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen we take sand out of those inlets and put them on the beaches, we call that regional sediment management. So, what we’re doing is we’re clearing out inlets and allowing that sand as a resource and putting it back on the beaches where it actually came from,\u201d Westfall said.<\/p>\n
Before the county added to Clearwater Beach, several feet of what is the beach now was submerged in water.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt’s helping to basically create a nice buffer between our properties up on the upland and our coastline,\u201d Westfall said. \u00a0<\/p>\n
But some neighbors like Vincent Tormenia said officials should be looking at other projects.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey need to dredge the intercoastal,\u201d Tormenia said.<\/p>\n
Tormenia lives near McPherson Bayou. He said he lost decades of precious items following Hurricane Helene.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf this was done before the storm, we probably wouldn’t have had the problems that we had, and we do need the seawalls higher,\u201d Tormenia said.<\/p>\n
Right now, crews are moving south to Belleair and Upham beach.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you don’t replenish the beach, if you’re not good stewards of this incredible landscape that God’s given us, then we can’t complain when things are destroyed and economies are ruined and people move away and there’s no tourists to stay in our hotels,\u201d Diane Pemelton, who lives in St. Pete Beach, said.<\/p>\n
The county said this beach renourishment project is scheduled to be done by March. The last place on the list is Indian Rocks Beach, where people can still apply for easements.<\/p>\n
Dredging for the intercoastal waterway would fall under the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers\u2019 Jacksonville district. 10 Tampa Bay News reached out to them to see if there’s any projects in the works and have not heard back yet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"More than 120 million tourist development tax dollars are going towards restoring the beaches. PINELLAS COUNTY, Fla. \u2014…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":16446,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[202,204,203,199,201,200],"class_list":["post-16445","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-st-petersburg","tag-st-pete","tag-st-pete-headlines","tag-st-pete-news","tag-st-petersburg","tag-st-petersburg-headlines","tag-st-petersburg-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16445","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16445"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16445\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16446"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16445"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16445"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16445"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}