Tourists trash Hilton Head Island beaches, and it throws the community out of balance

Our beaches need a major clean-up

Where is the core value of Hilton Head Island headed? U.S. 278 has signs that say, “No littering — $3,000 fine.“ Yet who knows how much is spent to clean up and remove the actual tons of trash left on our beaches every day by tourists because we lack a no-trash or no-littering tolerance enforcement policy?

Day tripper visitors are not enough of a revenue producer to satisfy town politicos, so let’s make beach access inconvenient for them. Our road conditions are breaking down and being neglected.

Yet the home sales boom has the town reaping nice sums of money from sale transfer fees, in addition to the infusion of tourist dollars.

So what is all this money being spent on?

Hopefully our new town manager can reestablish a core value of “community“ back to Hilton Head island. We need a balance that works for both tourism and residents.

- Lyn Piwko Bullard, Hilton Head Island

Compare our needs to the Florida Keys’

I can’t get the image of the South Carolina Department of Transportation’s bridge rendering out of my mind: three lanes in each direction, two pull-off lanes and a 10-foot bike/pedestrian lane. That adds up to more than 100 feet in a ribbon of concrete as our “gateway” experience. It is inconsistent with what the island professes to be and should be rejected until changes are made. SCDOT’s criteria are too narrow and do not consider other equally important factors.

The Florida Keys have 74,000 residents, 5.1 million visitors and are subjected to hurricanes. (Hilton Head Island has 40,000 residents and 2.6 million visitors) Its Dixie Highway, the only road interconnecting the islands, has just two lanes with periodic parallel roads in congested areas. There are eight Florida DOT projects in the Keys, all of which are classified as maintenance. I could find no plans to expand the roadway.

Cape Cod has 213,000 residents, 5.2 million visitors, and the Bourne and Sagamore bridges have about 120,000 trips daily. As part of state plans to replace the bridges, the Massachusetts Department of Transportation concluded that retaining two lanes in each direction would suffice. Clearly, Florida and Massachusetts have evaluated their options in ways very different from South Carolina.

These two examples beg the Hilton Head Island Town Council’s greater scrutiny into the ultimate cost of rush-hour convenience, variables in evacuation timing, road capacity in relation to island limitations (environmental, social, economic, financial), road design (lane width, speed, and so on) and potential to achieve a truly Hilton Head Island gateway experience. I fear SCDOT’s timeline will persuade the Town Council to acquiesce at a moment when it really can’t for the sake of the island’s future. We must insist on better answers and postpone our approval until we get them.

- David Ames, Ward 3 councilman, Hilton Head Island

We don’t know what we don’t know about bridges

There are two major areas of concern with the present bridge replacement plan: First, there are too many unknowns, and second, it does not address, and may even make worse, some of our present community problems.

As to the first problem, how many of us realized that the Cross Island Parkway, for all its obvious benefits, would devastate our mid-island businesses, and turn the area into the self storage/gas station center of the island? How many of us realized that when the airport runway was lengthened, there would almost immediately be a need for a much bigger terminal and parking area?

The answers to these questions probably were thought about by someone in the course of the underlying projects, but it would have been inconvenient at the time to bring them into the public discussion.

With the bridge project we have to deal with many issues of no left turns, traffic lights (or not), native islander areas, and more. The project has too many questions for most of us to understand how everything will work out.

As to the second issue, our biggest community problem today is lack of workforce housing. More broadly, it is an economy that has outgrown our infrastructure. If the traffic volumes that underlie the new bridge designs come to pass, where are we going to put everyone, and who will serve them their meals? Why are we paying for something justified by further growth of the economy when we are having trouble supporting our economy today?

The answer: Replace the bridge segment that must be replaced, and save our money to do the rest of the job after we solve our housing problem.

- Keith C. Moore, Jr., Hilton Head Island

Medical marijuana is a necessity to many

In response to a rant in the July 18 letters against medical marijuana (9A): Tobacco is widely available. It adorns and completely covers the wall behind every pantry or gas station across this state. Vaping is catching fire. Everyone demands tobacco. And yet you are against legalizing marijuana? That’s hypocritical and foolish. Nicotine is OK in that reality?

THC assuages some pain. It’s acceptable treatment. Opposing medical marijuana is a position of a dinosaur from the 1950s.

- Sandon Preston, Hilton Head

This story was originally published July 25, 2021 at 6:00 AM.