Dan's Papers - May 23, 2008 - Twentysomething...By David Lion Rattiner

In the Middle East there is a popular city called Dubai located within the United Arab Emirates. Tourism there is off the charts, thanks to luxury hotels, beach side villas, health spas, sports arenas, shopping malls, restaurants and total over-the-top-ness.

A great technological achievement in Dubai is the Palm Islands, which are manmade islands in the process of being built. The islands are estimated to cost over $15 billion and will be larger than Paris. Using a process called rainbowing and dredging, they also will add 320 miles of beachfront real estate.

Here in the Hamptons, beginning in Montauk and stretching out to Brooklyn, there are 118 miles of beach. In Suffolk County, there are roughly 70 miles of beach, and the beaches here are the heart and soul of the tourist economy.

You may have noticed this already, but erosion from the last Nor'easter was pretty significant. The beaches took a hit.

I was born in Southampton and grew up in East Hampton and have been here for every summer since then. I can tell you I've seen erosion like this before, and the sand from the beaches always seems to come and go. According to the Army Corps of Engineers, however, there is now more erosion overall. How depressing.

Well, we shouldn't be depressed because in anger I looked for an answer to this problem. I learned quickly that there is an ultimate solution to the erosion issue, much like there is a solution to just about every major environmental issue. The answer is not to build jetties or plant grass on the dunes, but dredging.

I found out that for $10 million we could have a machine park off the coast of Montauk and dig sand up from the bottom of the ocean and pump it out onto the beaches in Montauk, where, thanks to the movement of water, sand will be carried down to the all the beaches on the south shore of Long Island. Ten million bucks is the real number it would cost to do such a project, which I had verified with several politicians, one of whom is Jay Schniederman, who has a history of fixing things that are dumb (like adding more lanes on County Road 39). Ten million would bring back sand that has been eroded over the last 50 years. In other words, we wouldn't have to do this project again for another 50 years.

The notion that we shouldn't do a dredging project because it doesn't solve erosion forever is bananas to me. Of course if you add more sand, erosion will continue. It's called planet Earth. Sand is soft, that's why it feels good between your toes. Find me some magical sand that won't get swept away by water and I'll be pro that. But for now, I'm comfortable with coming up with a solution that will last 50 years and that can be repeated 50 years from now.

Replenishing the beaches is important and you have to be an idiot to think that it isn't. We should fix this problem in the most over-the-top fashion way possible. In other words, we should completely blow this issue off the map because the bottom line is that the beaches here are everything. Dredging is a permanent solution. Just because you have to do something more than once doesn't mean it isn't permanent. It means it works. All other options, in my opinion, make little sense. Building an artificial reef big enough to have a significant impact on erosion has problems written all over it. The cost is impossible to determine, the materials and labor to construct something like that are endless. Dredging just requires a pump and a giant hose.

As with every environmental issue, money is what gets in the way. Ten million bucks is ten million bucks. Who's going to pay for it? The State? The County? The CPF? I better not say CPF. I might be banished from the Town as a miserable, greedy human being who probably kills puppies for fun and hates everybody.

Come on, folks, we got a lot of money out here and are good at finding ways to take care of things that are important. Look at the fundraising that we do, look at the thousands of acres we preserve. Ten million dollars to bring our beaches back to the way they were 50 years ago seems worth it to me.