Go pound sand? Eroding federal beach repair funds worry Georgia vacation mecca.
TYBEE ISLAND ― Twice each day, the outgoing tide on this beach near Savannah washes sand into the sea.
And every seven years, with the help of federal taxpayers and suction dredges, the sand has returned to the shore to be enjoyed by sunbathers, sandcastle builders and shell hunters.
For decades, beach towns across the country have relied on the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ nourishment programs to maintain the sandy shores their economies depend on. Nourishment also helps protect the towns from the ocean itself, increasingly important in an era of stronger storms and rising sea levels.
That cycle, though, is under threat. Federal budget cuts this fiscal year have slashed funds designated for beach renourishments. And Tybee’s $12 million is no longer a sure thing, leaving island elected officials, business owners and all those in the Savannah area who enjoy day trips to the beach thinking about the consequences of not restoring their shore.
“Dire? Catastrophic? Those are excellent choices in words for what we are facing,” said Tybee Mayor Brian West. “We depend on the visitors to come here, and they’re coming here first and foremost for the beach.”
The popular Georgia tourist destination has lost 54% of its sand since the last renourishment in 2020, with erosion accelerating at a 15% annual pace, according to researchers with the University of Georgia’s Skidaway Institute of Oceanography who track the beach’s erosion with aerial drones.
If Tybee’s renourishment is pushed from late this year to late 2027, the erosion is projected to top 70% — and any significant storm activity in the two hurricane seasons in between could breach the dunes that protect the island.
Tybee expects to learn next Monday if it will receive funds or be forced to wait a year. Congress and the Trump administration have trimmed 70% of the funds scheduled to go toward renourishing beaches across the country, leaving a handful of beach communities in need of sand hoping they’ll get part of the $30 million still uncommitted.
The situation has locales in Florida, New Jersey and New York competing with Tybee for inclusion in a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ work plan. The agency is working with the White House’s Office of Management and Budget to prioritize those projects.
Tybee officials recently traveled to Washington, D.C., to make their case. Their pitch? Tybee has already banked its matching dollars: $8 million, with $4 million from the state and $2 million each from county and city coffers. Tybee has a nearby and easily accessible dredge sand source less than a mile off the beach. And Tybee’s project requires a small investment relative to others, allowing the federal government to spread around the dollars geographically.
If Tybee doesn’t renourish and the dunes are breached in a storm, the high tide shoreline would push into the parking lots near the Tybee Pier, the island’s most popular stretch of sand, West said.
“You’d be putting property at risk during storm season, but you’d also be getting to the point where the economic health of the island is at risk,” said Alan Robertson, a consultant who leads Tybee’s beach renourishment projects.
Additionally, a narrowing beach can scare away visitors. Visit Tybee, the island’s destination marketing arm, recently reported strong booking numbers for this summer, a turnaround from a two-year slump many blame on inflationary pressures.
But City Manager Bret Bell is prepping for a down 2027 if the renourishment is delayed. Tourism is Tybee’s economic engine, and a drop would have an economic impact of up to $4 million, or a quarter of the island’s annual operating budget, Bell projects.
Officials from other beach towns say they’re used to having to claw for federal beach nourishment dollars. But they, too, are encountering more uncertainty as they vie for dwindling dollars.
In 35 years working for Maryland’s Ocean City, a popular Mid-Atlantic beach destination, Terry McGean said he could recall just one or two instances when the city’s nourishment funds were included in the president’s budget submitted to Congress. But with legislators’ help, McGean said Ocean City has always been able to find federal money to replenish their beaches, as scheduled.
Not so last year. For the first time since McGean joined Ocean City, they failed to secure federal dollars in 2025, delaying delivery of fresh sand by roughly a year. Ocean City has since received funding and its beaches will be nourished late this year or in early in 2027. Still, in a low-lying place where one strong Nor’easter can claim large chunks of beach, McGean said the town was “lucky” the delay wasn’t more damaging.
“We’ll be OK, but going through another year with another erosion cycle ... we would have had a problem,” McGean said.
Renourishment is Band-Aid not cure for beach erosion
Left to their own devices, scientists say it’s natural for shorelines to move.
But when homes, livelihoods and critical infrastructure depend on a beach staying in the same location, intervention is necessary.
Alex Robel, an associate professor of earth and atmospheric sciences at Georgia Tech, said pumping sand onshore is far from a perfect solution to stabilize a beach, but it’s “one of the best tools we have in our arsenal.”
“It’s been done in the United States for almost a century in different places and we know how to do it,” Robel said. “We’re good at it.”
But nourishment is only a Band-Aid for erosion. Once cities start replenishing sand, Robel said they have to keep doing it regularly.
Today, consistent maintenance is more pressing because of how fast sea levels are rising — especially on the Georgia coast and other parts of the Southeast.
Since 1935, a tide gauge on Georgia’s Cockspur Island, a tiny spit of sand at the mouth of the Savannah River, has captured data on the local sea levels. The data, maintained by the federal National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, shows the sea has risen about a foot in the last 100 years.
Scientists say human-caused climate change is largely to blame.
As the planet warms, the overwhelming majority of the excess heat has been absorbed by the world’s oceans. The resulting “thermal expansion” manifests in higher sea levels. Meanwhile, melting glaciers and ice sheets are sending more water pouring into the ocean, pushing sea levels higher.
At the same time, land on large portions of the Georgia coast is sinking, the product of excessive groundwater pumping and natural land settling that began at the end of the last ice age.
The cumulative effect, Robel said, is that Georgia’s coast is experiencing sea level rise at a much faster pace than the global average.
Tybee’s wake-up call came a decade ago when hurricanes battered the island in consecutive years. Neither Matthew in 2016 nor Irma in 2017 were direct hits, but the surge from both those storms showed the island’s vulnerability in spots where dune fields, Tybee’s natural hurricane defenses, had disappeared.
As director of UGA’s Skidaway Institute of Oceanography, Clark Alexander and his colleague have monitored erosion on Tybee for years and deliver regular reports to Tybee City Council on the shifting shoreline.
Today, with sea levels much higher than just a few decades ago, Alexander says Tybee can see the same erosion it would expect over a full year delivered by a single significant storm.
Tybee responded by building two large and lengthy dunes in those areas. They used sand trucked in from inland quarries to make one and dredge sand for the other, and then planted sea oats and other sand-tolerant grasses to solidify them.
Those dunes have shored up the shore, Robertson said, but they are now showing signs of scarping and are in need of renourishment. The city has had to close several dune crossovers — wooden boardwalks — the public uses to access the beach where tides have washed away the sand, creating cliffs several feet high.
Robel from Georgia Tech said he expects Tybee and other coastal areas will need to replenish beaches more frequently and employ new strategies to stay dry.
“Because the rate of erosion increases with sea level ... we will have to either do more beach nourishment, or hopefully use other, more permanent coastal protections in order to handle that,” he said.
No other options
Georgia lawmakers are lobbying hard for the sand dollars, Tybee officials said.
The coast’s U.S. congressman, Rep. Buddy Carter, R-St. Simons Island, has written letters and met with U.S. Army Corps leaders on Tybee’s behalf, as have U.S. Sens. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, both Democrats.
Beyond those efforts, Tybee has few options. The island is spending $1 million to renourish the section of the beach that faces the Savannah River, known as Channel Beach, where erosion is so severe the disappearing sand now threatens homes and a large condominium community. That investment limits what funds Tybee can redirect to the larger project. And adding Channel Beach into the USACE job is forbidden — their federal agency’s scope covers only the ocean-facing shore.
Likewise, Tybee lacks the resources to do the renourishment without federal taxpayers’ help, unlike nearby Hilton Head Island in South Carolina. Hilton Head earmarks a portion of its hotel-motel tax revenues for renourishment — a necessity, as many of its beaches are behind the gates of resorts and luxury home communities. Beaches not accessible to the public are ineligible for USACE renourishment.
Hilton Head tourism also generates four times the hotel-motel tax revenues that Tybee’s does, giving the island greater renourishment flexibility.
About the Authors
Adam Van Brimmer is a journalist who covers politics and Coastal Georgia news for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Drew Kann is a reporter at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution covering climate change and environmental issues. His passion is for stories that capture how humans are responding to a changing environment. He is a proud graduate of the University of Georgia and Northwestern University, and prior to joining the AJC, he held various roles at CNN.
