No. CS/SB 636
Filed under Environment & Water.
Beach Management; Requiring the Department of Environmental Protection to review certain data when designating certain beaches as critically eroded and in need of restoration and nourishment; requiring that certain beaches, whose local government preserved funds for a certain purpose and which possess specified features, be designated as critically eroded; revising the list of areas that may receive designation as an area of critical state concern, etc.
Plain English Summary
AI-GENERATEDA beach whose local government has a funding plan, a shoreline-maintenance easement, and specific flooding-prone geology must now be designated critically eroded, unlocking eligibility for up to 75 percent state-funded restoration.
Before designating any beach as critically eroded, the department must now review whether it has been repeatedly repaired using private, local, or federal money to hold back erosion.
The department's secretary can now require coastal local governments to write strategic beach management plans covering flooding risk, property values, sensitive lands, and engineering recommendations; those plans count toward state funding decisions.
Low-lying land behind the dune system that keeps flooding from stormwater backflow, or that has sat under a long local emergency declaration, can now be designated an area of critical state concern.
AIA beach is automatically designated critically eroded -- no departmental discretion involved -- if its local government has a funding plan for the state strategic beach management plan and holds a qualifying shoreline-maintenance easement over land with the specified flood-prone geology.
AIThe department's secretary gains new authority to require any coastal local government to write a local strategic beach management plan covering flooding risk, property values, sensitive lands and waters, and coastal-engineering recommendations.
AILow-lying land just inland of the beach-dune system that has been repeatedly breached or overtopped by seawater entering the stormwater system becomes newly eligible for designation as an area of critical state concern, a stricter state land-use status.
AIBefore designating any beach as critically eroded, the department must now review data on whether that beach has been repeatedly and preemptively repaired using private, local, or federal money to hold back erosion.
AIThe new local strategic beach management plans are folded into the state's planning process, and the requirement that only regional-level plans serve as the basis for state funding decisions is dropped so local plans count too.