Coastal Services Center

For more than 30 years, the wall of a harbor in Lake Erie adjacent to the Pennsylvania state line has been blocking sand from moving up that state's shore, resulting in severe erosion and bluff recession. Recently, Pennsylvania coastal resource managers successfully used federal consistency—one of the Coastal Zone Management Act's most powerful tools—to redirect a dredging project at the harbor to help restore sediment to the state's starved beaches.

"The issue wasn't the dredging; it was the deposition of the material being dredged," says Shamus Malone, chief of Monitoring and Technical Assistance for the Pennsylvania Coastal Zone Management Program. The state's use of federal consistency "finally changed the pattern of open lake disposal of good sand."

The Coastal Zone Management Act contains provisions requiring that federal activities, such as dredging, be consistent with the policies of state programs. Malone explains that it also provides for interstate jurisdiction, "which in this case is a federal activity occurring in Ohio that affects coastal resources in Pennsylvania."

The Conneaut Harbor originally was constructed by the Army Corps of Engineers in the early 1900s about a mile-and-a-half from the Pennsylvania and Ohio border, Malone says. The harbor continued to be added to over the years and it covers about 500 acres of submerged lands today.

The "real problems started" in the late 1960s, Malone says, when the Corps constructed a wall on the eastern side of the harbor that prevented sediment trapped in the harbor from passing through. While the erosion problem was recognized immediately after construction, the Corps was legally restricted to structurally oriented solutions, which wouldn't have solved the problem, "so nothing was ever done."

Over the years, the resulting erosion and bluff recession in Pennsylvania have been severe. "We've lost a lot of homes," Malone notes. "About 25 to 30 cottages have gone into the lake or been abandoned since the mid to late 60s.... The erosion has been so bad that a railroad spur originally several hundred feet from the bluff crest is now a hundred feet in the lake." Studies conducted by the coastal program have shown the area affected has the most severe erosion rates of anywhere along Pennsylvania's coastline.

While this was an obvious issue for the coastal program, which it discussed with agencies in its neighboring state, Malone says, "we never really felt we had any leverage to move ahead with any sort of controlling measures to ask the Army Corps to modify what they were doing."

That opportunity arose in 1998 when the Corps gave public notice that it was going to do maintenance dredging of the harbor. The proposal was for both the commercial and municipal channels to be dredged, with the dredged material being disposed of in the lake. The 60,000 cubic yards of material from the commercial channel was mostly mud and wasn't suitable for shoreline deposition.

But the 40,000 cubic yards of material from the municipal channel was sand and gravel that would be ideal for onshore disposal, which would provide needed replenishment to the Pennsylvania shoreline, Malone says. Open lake disposal of this "good sand" was "the part of the proposal we found to be inconsistent with the dredging and coastal hazards part of our program."

In a letter, the coastal program asked the Corps to address the consistency issue. The Corps reviewed the policies of the coastal program and "issued a consistency statement that their project was consistent." The coastal program concluded that the open lake disposal of the sediments from the municipal channel was inconsistent with its policies. Staff notified the Corps of their decision and asked if modifications to the plan could be made in lieu of a formal consistency denial, Malone says.

The Corps' "first response was that this was an activity in a neighboring state and therefore outside Pennsylvania's consistency jurisdiction." He says the issue was further complicated by a Corps restriction to "pursue the least cost alternative to carry out the dredging task." The contractor working on the project had estimated $6 a cubic yard for open lake disposal. The company's bid for disposing of the sediment on the shoreline was in excess of $16 a cubic yard.

"They told us they couldn't pursue the alternative unless Ohio and Pennsylvania came up with the additional funds," Malone says. "We notified them that we didn't think it was possible for Pennsylvania to come up with extra funds and that we thought it was the obligation of the Corps to fund the least cost alternative of doing the environmentally correct thing."

At this point, Malone says, the coastal program got a lot of support from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which "convinced" the Corps attorneys that this "did come under interstate consistency and that the Corps needed to modify their approach."

The project was rebid and a new estimate of $6 a cubic yard was received to dispose of the dredged material along the shoreline east of the harbor structure.

The commercial channel was dredged in fall of 1999, and dredging of the municipal channel was completed in June 2000. Malone notes that they "actually moved 55,000 cubic yards of sand instead of 40,000 cubic yards and placed it just east of the harbor." He adds, "It's fantastic. It really has filled in a lot of the area and the material will continue to move down the shoreline."

"We chose the right time to do this," Malone says. "Those channels were getting more and more silted up and were becoming less navigable due to lower lake levels. It was almost imperative that they had to do it. Holding up the process would cause a lot of problems. We didn't want to cause problems, but the Army Corps recognized that it was to their advantage to pursue federal consistency in the right way.... It gave them the mechanism to look at the situation a little differently and pursue an alternative course of action. It really worked out for everybody."

For more information about Pennsylvania's use of interstate consistency to condition a federal dredging activity, contact Shamus Malone at (717) 772-5621 or malone.shamus@dep.state.pa.us.