Pinellas County says a $125 million emergency beach nourishment project is nearly complete.
Crews are placing sand on Sunset Beach in Treasure Island, the final step in replenishing nine beaches devastated during hurricanes in 2024.
The other beaches are "fully open and ready for residents and visitors to enjoy this holiday season," according to the county.
Those beaches are Sand Key Beach, Belleair Beach, Indian Rocks Beach, Indian Shores, North Redington Beach, Redington Shores, Sunshine Beach and Upham Beach.
“We’ll be doing some vegetation planting early next year,” the county said on the project web page.
The project is being funded through the county’s Tourist Development Tax.
The money had been slated to help build a stadium for the Tampa Bay Rays.
In June, Kelli Hammer Levy, the county's public works director, said nearly 150 beachfront property owners declined to give a temporary easement for the life of the project. Levy said those parcels would be renourished only to the edge of the public beach, at the high-water mark.
“But there are areas where it's like, yes, yes, no, yes, yes, no, a bunch of no's and then a yes,” she said. “And we can't build a beach in such a way that we're placing sand on one parcel that's a yes and then just skipping a no. We just can't construct that way.”
"So what we're going to do in those areas where we cannot fully fill is we're going to come out to the erosion control line and we're going to fill the public beach from the erosion control line west to the Gulf," she added. "And that area behind the erosion control line may be a little lower for some folks, so they'll have a lower area adjacent to their seawall where they could have been fully filled."
“If somebody's just walking down the beach far away from the parcels and they're just walking near the water, they will visually see no difference because it's going to be wide everywhere where we've nourished,” she told commissioners. “It's just going to be up near their parcels where they're going to see a dip.
This is separate from the renourishment projects with the Army Corps of Engineers. Those have been stalled over a requirement that all beachfront property owners have to sign over their easement permanently before it can begin.
Previous projects benefited from a 65% federal cost-share through the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, but without easements from all property owners, the county is no longer eligible for federal funding.
WUSF's Steve Newborn contributed to this report.
