Four county beach districts, four different tax rates for sand

Sand costs money, and the county does not charge everybody the same for it.

The budget advertisement the commission adopts Tuesday prints a millage rate for every fund the county levies, one column each, and four of those columns are coastal districts whose rates are nowhere near one another.

For comparison, the countywide General Fund rate on the same sheet is 4.4999. That one lands on every parcel. A property inside the South Ponte Vedra Beach dune district pays a further 2 mills on top of the countywide rates, which is not far off half again what the General Fund itself takes.

Summerhaven is the outlier on the whole page, coastal or not. Not only among the beach districts. At 7.3392 mills it carries the highest single rate the county levies anywhere, and it raises $134,722 doing it, which tells you how small the taxable base underneath it is.

What the districts do with it

They spend almost nothing directly, which is the point of them. The three dune districts each keep a small sum in their own column and move the rest out. Coastal Highway shows $1,197 under Physical Environment against $83,214 in transfers out, South Ponte Vedra Beach shows $17,411 against $584,277, and Serenata $1,522 against $50,770, and in each case the transfer is the overwhelming majority of the district’s appropriation.

The money leaves the district.

A transfer out is money leaving one county fund for another, which on this beat is generally how a small district’s tax revenue reaches the account that pays a dredge contractor, and the advertisement records the amount and the direction. It does not record the destination. No line item on that sheet lets a reader in the district follow their two mills to a specific load of sand.

Summerhaven does something different again, with expenditures for the year of $3,868, all of it under Transportation, set against reserves of $1,152,637, and it is carrying $1,027,807 forward from last year on top of a $134,722 levy. The district is saving, not spending.

The project the money is for

One sentence on the county’s page names the money behind the South Ponte Vedra and Vilano Beach Coastal Storm Risk Management project. It reads “a combination of USACE, State, County Tourist Development ‘Bed Tax’, and MSTU funds.” The MSTU in that list is the same instrument as the millage rates above.

It is a fifty-year partnership with the Army Corps of Engineers, running from Serenata Beach Club to about 250 feet north of Nease Beachfront Park. The design rebuilds the dune to what the county calls generalized 2015 conditions and widens the flat beach by 60 feet from where it stood that year.

Two nourishments have happened so far, and the first of them, in 2020 and 2021, was severely damaged by a Nor’easter. The Corps repaired that damage between the fall of 2023 and the spring of 2024 using Flood Control and Coastal Emergency money, and the second nourishment ran through 2023 and 2024.

Fifty years is the length of the partnership. None of the four funding sources named on that page carries a stated end date on it.

Twelve easements

The other project on this stretch is a FEMA Category G rebuild. It covers South Ponte Vedra Beach from 2539 to 3175 South Ponte Vedra Boulevard, and it ties into the northern end of the Corps project.

It has its permits. They are a joint coastal permit from the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, number 0340616-003-JC, and a Department of the Army permit, SAJ-2018-00349. An Erosion Control Line has been established through the project area, which is the surveyed line the state sets before it puts public sand in front of private property.

It has some of the money it needs. State emergency grant funding from the Ian, Nicole and Debby declarations is secured, and the county is still pursuing the FEMA share.

What it does not have is the ground. The county’s own announcement on the project page reads: “The County is still working to obtain 12 remaining easements within the project area. Construction is expected to begin late 2026.” A beach fill runs across private property at the dune line, and without an easement from each owner the machine stops at the property line.

The design is specific about what would be built if they all sign. The dune gets a crest 15 feet wide at an elevation of 14 to 16.5 feet NAVD, and the berm in front of it runs 30 to 40 feet wide at 10 to 12.5 feet NAVD. NAVD is the reference surface coastal elevations are measured from. It sits close to mean sea level and is held fixed, so surveys taken years apart can be compared. On those figures the berm is the flat you walk out across and the dune crest behind it sits four feet higher, top and bottom of the range alike.

While you wait

The county has kept its Ocean and Fishing Pier closed since May 13 for repairs to the pilings, expects it to stay closed to the end of November, and has closed the northern beach access point beside it for the duration of the work. The south entrance is the way onto the sand there.

Surfers and swimmers are asked to stay 500 feet clear of the pier while the repairs are underway. That is wider than the standing rule. The county’s own pier page puts the ordinary limit at 400 feet, and that one does not lapse in December. The Wednesday farmers market at the pier still runs 8 a.m. to noon. The gift shop is open.