San Clemente leaders are struggling with a vanishing beach and multiple recent landslides, but it’s starting to impact something else – the city budget.
“We’ve had to dip into our reserves pretty heavily this year,” said city manager Andy Hall in a Monday interview. “We have had the fortune to set aside some funding for some of these things, but if they were to continue to happen we’ll find ourselves in a challenging position in a hurry.”
The city has already spent around $8 million out of its reserves according to Hall, compared to the city’s $85 million general fund spending over the past fiscal year.
“That’s around 10%,” Hall said. “It’s been significant, no doubt about it.”
While city leaders have yet to run out of reserves, dipping into the rainy day fund has threatened to potentially upset some of the projects they have in the works to save the beach.
Currently, the city is struggling to get sand back on the beach in a sand replenishment program planned with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which was set to use one of their dredgers to help place more sand along the shoreline.
But the project has frequently started and stopped and is currently stalled again after the Army told the city they need to chip in an estimated extra $2.7 million for the project because the original place they planned to pull sand from didn’t work.
City leaders say they can’t afford that.
“We’ve argued that the city shouldn’t be held responsible for these cost overruns. Where that will end up I don’t know,” Hall said. “We’re kind of in a holding pattern.”
The project is set to start in either late April or early May, and it’s unclear what would happen if the city can’t find the money in time.
“As of right now, that’s the only information we have,” Hall said, regarding the $2.7 million fee. “We haven’t heard they’re not planning to do the project.”
Dena O’Dell, a spokesperson for the Army Corps of Engineers’ Los Angeles branch, said the cost overruns shouldn’t delay the project, but it was still unclear.
“It shouldn’t delay the project,” O’Dell wrote in a statement. “We are considering our options once we receive the response to our request for proposal from the contractor.”
The city is also currently trying to negotiate with the OC Transportation Authority on how it will protect the Pacific Surfliner train tracks, with city leaders calling for them not to throw down rocks that could potentially damage the shoreline even further.
When asked about possible solutions, Hall said the city would inevitably have to speak with residents to ask what they wanted to prioritize in future spending.
“At some point you have to let residents decide what they’d like to see. If they want to see more sand on the beach, then we might need some new funding sources,” Hall said. “If they’re more inclined to let it happen over a long period of time and be patient that’s what we’ll allow.”
“That’s a discussion we need to have with our community and they’ll let us know.”
Noah Biesiada is a Voice of OC reporter and corps member with Report for America, a GroundTruth initiative. Contact him at nbiesiada@voiceofoc.org or on Twitter @NBiesiada.
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