Collier County’s Park Shore Beach Renourishment Project is scheduled to finish this month. The Board of County Commissioners approved the project last December, designating funds from the county’s Tourist Development Tax to cover the expense; the anticipated cost is $5.5 million.

The Park Shore Beach Park is in good company. Across Lee and Collier counties, multiple beach renourishment projects are ongoing. Some are the result of major hurricanes Ian, Helene and Milton, while others are a response to the natural ongoing erosion process. Whatever the cause, they come with hefty price tags — but can hardly be considered optional.

A Post-Ian World

In the past, island-wide beach renourishment hadn’t been a necessary part of Sanibel’s plan, city of Sanibel’s Natural Resources Director Holly Milbrandt said. But in the wake of Hurricane Ian — and, more recently, hurricanes Helene and Milton — beach renourishment has become a fact of island life.

Historically, Sanibel’s east-west orientation has protected the island from the longshore current, a north-south running current along the Gulf Coast of Florida that has long affected neighboring barrier islands including Captiva and Fort Myers Beach. Those islands, with their north-south orientation, experience continuous erosion from the north end of the island and accretion at the south end. This calls for an ongoing beach renourishment process in order to maintain the width of those beaches. The longshore current, by contrast, has had a diminished effect on Sanibel’s beaches, which means it’s been possible to let nature take its course.

“The Sanibel Plan and our associated beach management plan and land development code are really quite explicit in their philosophy,” Milbrandt says. “We’ve had minimal intervention on Sanibel’s beaches. We’ve had erosional hotspots we’ve had to address as they occurred, but Sanibel’s beaches weren’t subject to the routine beach renourishment that other beaches in the area are used to. But now we’re living in a post-Ian world.”

Hurricane Ian — which made landfall Sept. 28, 2022, as a Category 4 and caused an estimated $112 billion worth of damage, making it the costliest hurricane in Florida’s history at the time, according to the National Hurricane Center — demanded more direct intervention in order to restore Sanibel’s beaches. 

“Ian’s magnitude created such a severe impact that it would take an extremely long time for the beaches to return to their pre-storm condition [on their own] — if they ever returned at all,” Milbrandt says.

Ian’s tidal surge reached a height of nearly 13 feet on Sanibel and pulled enormous amounts of sand out to sea, following the path of least resistance along pedestrian beach access paths and scouring these already exposed tracts, creating deep gullies. And it didn’t stop with Ian. In late 2022, the city surveyed Sanibel’s beaches as part of its post-Ian renourishment plan and identified 75 scoured gullies. After Hurricane Milton in October 2024, the city identified 23 areas where the same scouring damage had reoccurred. “Those kinds of features would likely not self-repair in any sort of reasonable time frame,” Milbrandt says.

For millennia, barrier islands like Sanibel, Captiva and Fort Myers Beach have shifted with currents and storms. But today, the necessity of maintaining these beaches for human habitation — and, more to the point, a tourism economy — means dedicated measures must be taken to restore the beaches. Letting nature take its course is no longer an option. On Sanibel, that translated to a cost of more than $23 million.

“While the amount of money seems significant, it’s greatly outweighed by the returns in tax revenue generated by tourists,” Milbrandt says. “It’s important to us and our citizens that we look at the available dollars and use that money to get sand back onto the beach.”

Florida’s Most Valuable Asset

The state of Florida is a brand, and its white-sand beaches are its defining feature, according to a landmark study released by the Florida Legislature’s Office of Economic and Demographic Research. The 2015 study is often used as a benchmark during state and county budget meetings to determine how much money should be allocated to ongoing beach nourishment projects. The report’s analysis of data from self-conducted surveys determined that Florida’s beaches accounted for 25.5% of the state’s attractiveness to visitors, claiming the top spot over theme parks, retail/dining/nightlife, outdoor recreation, access to international ports or airports, sports, festivals, parks and historical significance.

The study determined that the state’s investment in its Beach Management Program generated a consistent positive return on investment. Between fiscal years 2010 and 2013, that return on investment was 5.4, which means that for every $1 the state spent to restore its beaches, a little more than $5.40 in tourist dollars was generated. This placed beach renourishment programs third on the list of the state’s ROI-rankings, just behind the Qualified Target Industry program at 6.4% and the Florida Sports Foundation Grant Program at 5.6%. It beat out other programs such as Visit Florida advertising (3.2% ROI) and Enterprise Zones (-0.05% ROI).

Pepper Uchino, president of the Tallahassee-based Florida Shore & Beach Preservation Association, puts it succinctly: “Is the money spent on beach renourishment justified? Look at the numbers. What drives the Florida economy is tourism, and what drives tourism is our beaches. They’re Florida’s most valuable asset.”

The Florida Shore & Beach Preservation Association is a consortium of representatives from universities, municipal governments, coastal engineering firms and other associated industries across the state. Founded in 1957, the group is committed to addressing the problem of beach erosion along Florida’s coastline. This includes hosting conferences dedicated to presenting the latest findings on beach nourishment and erosion, as well as lobbying the state Legislature to provide funding for ongoing beach nourishment projects.

Uchino holds both a law degree from the University of Miami School of Law and a master’s in marine affairs and policy from Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric and Earth Science. He served as staff attorney and then staff director for the Florida Senate’s Environmental Preservation and Conservation Committee. He said that beach erosion wouldn’t be a problem if we didn’t have the built environment to protect, but because of the investment along the shoreline, the coast is now essentially static. That means it can’t go through the natural erosive and accretive cycles that it did for thousands of years. “Natural processes happen in geological time,” Uchino says, “not human time.”

Sea Turtles Need Sand Too

Human beachgoers aren’t the only ones to benefit from renourishment projects. Sea turtles and shore birds rely on wide, sandy beaches for their nests. When natural resource managers are making decisions about which beaches are critically eroded, they factor in wildlife habitats, as well. “Beach Bonita is a great example of that,” says Steve Boutelle, public works operations manager for Lee County Natural Resources.

Before the recent Bonita Beach renourishment project began, the beach had been eroded all the way to the seawall, which meant that at high tide there was no sandy beach. “No turtle nesting habitat there at all,” Boutelle says. 

Once the county had the go-ahead to begin building back the eroded beach, engineers were careful to schedule work around the sea turtle nesting season, which runs May 1 to Oct. 31. They also put in place a monitoring program where a sea turtle monitor would visit the site each morning at dawn to see if any turtle crawls had happened overnight. If a new nest was discovered in the work zone, the eggs were transferred to a new location, out of the way of the renourishment project. “We’ve had good success on those relocations,” Boutelle says. “If done by the appropriately trained people on correct timelines, they work well.”

These “appropriately trained people” are part of Turtle Time Inc., the Southwest Florida-based nonprofit dedicated to protecting the sea turtle population. Founded in 1989, Turtle Time is the state-permitted sea turtle monitoring organization for the coastline that runs between Fort Myers Beach and the Collier County line. Eve Haverfield, founder and director of Turtle Time, acknowledged the importance of beach nourishment projects to nesting turtles, especially now.

“Recent hurricanes along the west coast of Florida have resulted in significant erosion of beaches that provide necessary nesting habitat for endangered and threatened sea turtles,” Haverfield says. “A beach renourishment project, while only temporary, plays an important role by replacing lost sand, thereby creating a new and wider shoreline for turtles to successfully lay their nests.   

“It may take a couple of years for a newly renourished beach to reflect improved nesting success, but we are looking forward to a successful sea turtle nesting season in 2025 on our newly renourished beaches.”