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Hi, and welcome to my "Editor's Blog"! In this space I'll be attempting to keep our readers informed on fast-breaking news and issues affecting our islands. Visit often. There's a lot going on!
Here we are at 2 p.m. just watching and waiting.
It’s hard to believe that there is a Category 3 hurricane just a little more than 100 miles off our coast.
It’s breezy here now – northeast about 15 to 25. We’ve just had our first brief rain shower, but for most of the day, skies have been just overcast, with the sun occasionally peeking out.
Not a bad day, but we are all wondering what is coming next.
The expected media release from the environmental groups that sued the National Park Service over its management of the Cape Hatteras National Seashore arrived today.
The headline is as expected also: “Nesting birds and turtles break records at Cape Hatteras National Seashore.”
And it’s all true.
As of today, there were 147 turtle nests on the seashore, the most ever documented here.
Fifteen piping plovers fledged this summer, the highest since record keeping began in 1992. And 30 oystercatcher chicks fledged including four on Green Island in Oregon Inlet.
Earlier this week a federal judge in Washington, D.C., upheld the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s designation of four areas in the Cape Hatteras National Seashore as critical habitat for wintering piping plovers.
The ruling came in a lawsuit filed by the Cape Hatteras Preservation Alliance (CHAPA) against the Fish Wildlife Service’s second attempt at critical habitat designation at the seashore.
The first attempt also resulted in a lawsuit by CHAPA, but the access advocacy group won that one, and the court told Fish and Wildlife to clean up its act on the critical habitat designation.
This time, the Fish and Wildlife Service came out ahead – along with the defendant-intervenors in the court action. And you know them well – Defenders of Wildlife and the National Audubon Society, represented by the Southern Environmental Law Center.
While Hatteras Island residents and visitors have been preoccupied this year with public hearings on ORV rulemaking and the Bonner Bridge replacement, folks on the northern beaches of Dare County have been having a robust debate about beach nourishment.
Specifically, they have been debating the pros and cons of a proposed 1 percent increase in county occupancy taxes to further fund beach nourishment.
Though perhaps we haven’t paid much attention, this tax will affect Hatteras Island businesses and visitors also.
Earlier this year, at the request of the Dare County Board of Commissioners, the North Carolina General Assembly gave the county the ability to raise the current 1 percent occupancy tax by another 1 percent.
Cape Hatteras National Seashore has already broken a record this year for sea turtle nests – 131 as of Thursday, Aug. 5.
The previous record was 112 nests in 2008. In 2009, nests were slightly down, but still above average at 104.
You need not jump to the conclusion that nesting is up because of the court-sanctioned consent decree under which the seashore has been managed since 2008. That decree banned night driving on the beach during the nesting season and spelled out the closures for nests.
The fact is that sea turtle nesting is up all along the southeast coast in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia on beaches that are not operating under the decree.
It’s just a good year for turtle nesting.
“This is the most studied project in the history of U.S. transportation,” Jim Trogdon, chief operating officer for the North Carolina Department of Transportation, said last week.
He added that there are employees in the department who have been working on the bridge replacement since they were hired and they are now ready to retire.
Trogdon was talking on a conference call with The Dare County Citizens’ Action Committee to Replace the Bonner Bridge Now. The committee met in Frisco on Thursday, July 22, for the first time in almost a year.
Committee members posed questions, and Trogdon answered them for almost an hour.
There were not any surprises in his comments.
During the 1996 presidential campaign, we got the Soccer Moms.
During the 2008 presidential campaign, we got the Hockey Moms.
Now, as the 20-year campaign to get the aging Bonner Bridge over Oregon Inlet replaced drags on and on, we have the Bridge Moms.
Just as the Hockey Moms and Soccer Moms did, the Bridge Moms have an agenda.
Their agenda is the safety of the children.
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That sounds like a rather ludicrous statement, doesn’t it?
Well, Southern Environmental Law Center and friends, as the proverb says, turn about is fair play.
This statement is no more ludicrous than SELC’s media releases.
SELC has sent out media releases since 2008, noting that bird and sea turtle nesting on the Cape Hatteras National Seashore has increased greatly under the terms of a consent decree that settled a lawsuit by Defenders of Wildlife and National Audubon Society over the Park Service’s lack of a long-range, off-road vehicle regulation on the Cape Hatteras National Seashore.