By Doug Miller
The Army Corps' project leader, Cliff Jones, said this week that his office is evaluating whether a smaller project that would repair Point Lookout alone is economically or scientifically feasible. Meanwhile, tens of millions of dollars earmarked for the barrier island's beach repair sit in an account in Albany, waiting for somebody to figure out how and if they will be spent.
"Now we have to evaluate the Point Lookout portion of the previous plan, to see if it can stand alone," Jones said. "We need to evaluate if it can stand alone without having adverse impacts to Long Beach, and whether or not there is economic justification based on our criteria for Point Lookout to have the features it had in the Long Beach project."
Gerald Ottavino, who chairs the environmental committee of the Point Lookout Civic Association and has lobbied extensively for a re-engineered beach for his community, said the community's best Plan B would be for the Army Corps - or somebody else - to dredge Jones Inlet and the eastern reaches of Reynolds Channel and rebuild Point Lookout's beach with that sand. But Ottavino added that the Long Beach vote meant that any relief for his community has been delayed by at least three years. Meanwhile, every high tide under a new moon brings the ocean literally to the community's doorsteps.
"It's no secret we would have embraced a Long Beach yes" on the project, said Ottavino. "But we have on the not-so-far-back burner a plan to bring the sand from these clogged inlets ... to Point Lookout."
Ottavino said there is somewhere between 450,000 and 600,000 cubic yards of sand impeding navigation in and out of the channel as a result of the expansion in the 1980s of the Jones Inlet jetty.
Whether that jetty is the root of all of Point Lookout's problems is open for debate. "That has been heard here, also," Jones said. "The jetty is providing safe navigation [for boats] through Jones inlet. To what degree that jetty is stopping the transport [of sand] going west or having some adverse impact on Point Lookout, we really haven't tied the two together."
Ottavino suggested that the real expert on the matter is the Town of Hempstead's commissioner of conservation and waterways, Ronald Masters. In a sign of how politically important this project has become, a reporter's call to Masters on Tuesday morning was returned a few hours later by his boss, Town of Hempstead Supervisor Kate Murray, who offered an upbeat assessment of the area's future.
"There's been a huge buildup of sand in that channel, and we'd love to get it back onto our beaches," Murray said. "So it's a perfect solution, in my opinion, to dredge that inlet and make that corridor much safer for boaters and commercial fishermen, and taking that sand and literally dumping it on the beaches of Point Lookout and Lido."
Murray said she expects any action by the town to be taken in cooperation with the Army Corps, and that Hempstead's projected share of the original Long Beach plan, about $3 million, is still available to be spent on a Point Lookout-centric project.
Whatever winds up happening, Ottavino said, the trick is to get the ball rolling. "We're holding our breath," he said. "Every agency and every politician you speak to says they are committed to getting a project done for Point Lookout."
He paused. "I can't fight that. Everybody appears to be on our side, but it's a matter of expediting it."
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