Hilton Head’s 2025 beach renourishment is the most expensive yet
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East Coast beaches are getting squeezed out of existence as sea level rise and erosion pushes them inland towards houses, roads and parking lots. Hilton Head spends a lot of money to stop this “coastal squeeze,” moving sand to stop a moving beach from moving and disappearing. So far, the town has spent $83.6 million on beach renourishment. They’ll soon spend $47.5 million more, and the cost of these projects will keep climbing.
Increased demand for beach renourishment and competition for contractors largely drives the increasing price of these projects. As costs continue to rise, experts believe that Hilton Head’s accommodations tax program that funds its beach renourishment project could be a useful model for some municipalities that currently rely on a pool of federal funding that is insufficient to meet current demand.
Those communities face a backlog of projects waiting for money, leaving coastal towns and cities waiting anxiously for a project that will restore an integral part of their economy.
The town embarked on a beach renourishment program shortly after incorporating in the early 1980s. The first renourishment restored a heavily eroded beachfront. At that point, about half of the island’s oceanfront was armored with seawalls and revetments. There was no real beach at North Forest Beach, as waves crashed directly into a rock wall.
According to a database maintained by the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines, the initial restoration of the shorefront placed 2.3 million cubic yards of sand, enough to fill about 700 Olympic swimming pools, for a cost of about $9.7 million. Adjusted for inflation, the cost of that project would be $24.6 million in 2025.
Hilton Head’s upcoming $47.5 million project will place about 2.2 million cubic yards of sand on the island’s beaches, a similar amount to the initial restoration in 1990. The project will also build breakwater structures off Hilton Head Plantation.
In October 2024, the town estimated the cost of the project would be around $42 million. In an update to the town council in February, the estimated cost was between $42.5 million and $48.5 million.
According to Heather Woolwine, a spokesperson for the Town of Hilton Head, rising equipment costs and competition between coastal towns for contractors are partly to blame for the high costs. There are also more requirements built into the project permits that require addressing potential environmental impacts. The cost of mitigation, labor and other educational programming adds to the total.
While Hilton Head largely pays for its own beach renourishment though the beach preservation fee, the town does sometimes apply for grants from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to offset some of the cost. For the last beach renourishment project, the town received about $3 million from FEMA. The renourishment totaled around $31.9 million, a number that includes parts of the project that had to be redone after a large storm. While the town intends to apply for FEMA funding this year, they are not yet certain if any grants will be awarded, Woolwine said.
An island doing things on its own
Beach preservation fees collected by the town are the main source of revenue funding beach renourishment. The town collects a three percent tax on the rentals of hotel rooms, short term rentals and other lodging on the island. Two thirds of that money goes to the beach preservation fee, which is used for nourishment and other beach related services. The rest of the money goes to other services, such as roads, water and sewer infrastructure and emergency services.
Annual beach preservation fee collections spiked from around $7 million a year in 2020 to $14 million in 2022. The town anticipates that those revenues will remain flat in the coming years. Over the past eight years, the beach preservation fund was increased from around $5 million following the last renourishment to almost $43 million in the 2024 fiscal year.
When Tim Kana, president of Coastal Science & Engineering in Columbia, first started consulting on beach renourishment projects in the 1980s, the cost of the average project was about $5 per cubic yard of sand placed on the beach. Today, when looking for bids on these projects, his firm looks for prices around $15 per cubic yard of sand.
Much of the cost for these projects comes from the mobilization of equipment, which includes large barges, miles of pipeline and a full time staff who often switch between two shifts, Kana said.
Project costs will continue to accelerate, according to Rob Young, director of the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines at Western Carolina University, said. At the same time, he said beach renourishment will need to occur more frequently as sea levels continue to rise and the shoreline wants to move more.
“Costs are going to continue to increase,” Young said. “The only question is, how fast?”
Kana said that while the cost of beach renourishment has increased, the property value that the beaches protect has risen even more. Furthermore, the cost of beach renourishment makes sense when taking into account inflation and the construction cost index.
He said that beach renourishment on Hilton Head and other places in South Carolina should keep pace with sea level rise for the next 80 to 100 years. Given that coastal property values have increased more than the costs of renourishment projects, he sees it was a worthwhile investment.
But for other places along the South Carolina coast, there is a shortage of federal funds to meet demand. Communities are also struggling to generate enough money to meet any necessary contribution or matches to the project, Kana said. The result is often municipalities flip flopping between running a renourishment program, which often requires extensive studies and monitoring between actual renourishment episodes, and stopping.
“I often point to Hilton Head as one of those communities that’s been taking care of it themselves,” Young said. “I really believe that that’s what everybody should be doing.”
Would more competition help with cost?
There are a small handful of companies that have the means to complete renourishment projects on a large scale. But as costs continue to rise, Young said that bringing in more companies who can do this work would drive the price down. A law called the Foreign Dredge Act of 1906 stipulates that dredges that operate in U.S. waters need to be built in and owned in the country.
Ultimately, the law stipulates that the only companies that can renourish beaches in the U.S. are organizations based in the country. Young believes that bringing in foreign competition for renourishment projects would lower the price and ease the capacity issue. According to Young, the dredges from European companies also tend to be larger and more efficient than those in the U.S.
“I understand that the main dredging companies in the U.S. would not like the competition, but certainly the coastal communities would be happy to pay less than half of what they’re paying, right?,” Young said. “I’m a little surprised that this hasn’t gotten a little bit more traction.”
