This special news feature is part of Coastal Review’s 12-month observance of the Coastal Area Management Act’s 50th year.
WILMINGTON – There was no time to waste.
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The North Carolina General Assembly’s April 1974 passage of the Coastal Area Management Act triggered demanding deadlines to set the course for managing development along the coast.
Today, the act continues to be referred to as “bold,” one that thrust North Carolina into an elite category whose leaders had the foresight to create something that other coastal states look to as a template for how to do it right.
Yet CAMA’s beginning was as humble as it was ambitious.
“There was zero staff, zero institutional history,” explained David Owens, retired professor of public law and government at the University of North Carolina School of Government. “It was a blank slate pretty much.”
Owens, who spent 10 years with the North Carolina Division of Coastal Management, was among a host of panelists who verbally unfolded CAMA’s history, how it has evolved over the last five decades, and how it has led to the creation of partnerships aimed at conserving unique coastal resources and, in today’s changing climate, helping communities adapt to the effects of rising seas.
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From those who were there at the beginning to those who spoke of how the local governments they represent have benefited from CAMA, panelists spoke at the Coastal Resources Commission meeting Wednesday afternoon in downtown Wilmington to commemorate CAMA’s 50th anniversary.
Owens reminisced on the first 15 years of CAMA, breaking the act’s earlier history into two parts – the first few, building from the ground up years to the subsequent years when officials “put some muscle on the bones that had been there.”
One of the big political debates that sprouted during CAMA’s first weeks centered on appointments to the Coastal Resources Commission, or CRC, a then-newly created commission that would be responsible for designating areas of environmental concern or areas of natural importance, to protect from uncontrolled development, adopting development rules and policies within those areas, and verify local coastal land use plans.
What qualifications were they looking for in commission members? How would they be appointed? Officials had to determine the answers to those questions and ensure the first sitting members were on the commission in six weeks.
For the first three years, the commission met two days each month, rotating their meetings up and down the coast. Within that time and starting with a staff of two, the commission adopted guidelines for local land use plans, identified areas of environmental concern and hosted public hearings on those areas, and adopted development standards. Nineteen of the state’s 20 coastal counties adopted land use plans.
State staff gradually grew to roughly a dozen people, and in March 1978, the CAMA permit program was launched.
Into the early to mid-1980s, the CRC beefed up CAMA’s foundation, improving planning guidelines to make them more useful and helpful for local governments. The board took another look at oceanfront development standards established for areas of environmental concern, formulated a method on how to get solid beach erosion rates, and examined social and economic impacts associated with these designated areas.
CAMA programs expanded to include land acquisition, which led to public beach accesses and estuarine system and acquisition programs for natural areas, which led to the purchase of state reserve sites.
CAMA has been amended several times over the years. Today, DCM has more than 50 full-time employees and issues about 3,000 permits each year.
Panelists who spoke Wednesday highlighted various successes DCM has achieved, including 16 U.S. Army Corps of Engineers regional general permits specific to North Carolina that streamline the permitting process, collaborating with other organizations to create and implement nature-based solutions such as living shorelines to combat erosion, and guiding local governments in implementing climate resiliency and adaptation programs.
Through the CAMA program, local governments have received more than $45 million to create or improve 420 sites to provide public access to beaches and coastal waters, said North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality Secretary Elizabeth Biser.
“Fifty years of CAMA has helped to preserve a healthy environment, foster economic opportunity, and protect our public trust resources for the future,” Biser said. “All of these have led to a high quality of life for coastal residents, a coast that draws visitors and their economic benefit, and a living laboratory to introduce students at our public schools to the natural world and the wonders of science. We should all be proud of the accomplishments this partnership has made through CAMA’s history.”
“CAMA has done many, many, many things positive for coastal North Carolina,” Sen. Norm Sanderson, R-Pamlico, said. “It’s also very, very connected to the economic health of this state and the safety of the people who live here. It’s not about our generation. It’s about what we leave for the next generation and the next generation.”
Hyde County Manager Kris Cahoon Noble explained that CAMA affects daily decisions of that local government.
“It is the act that has protected our most precious coastal resources,” she said.
Fresh challenges
The future of coastal management will look different in the years to come as an onset of fresh challenges emerges thanks to rapidly growing populations in the state’s 20 coastal counties, the onset of more intense coastal storms and nuisance flooding associated with sea level rise.
“The changes over the next 50 years aren’t going to look the same as the last 50,” DCM Director Tancred Miller said.
The Coastal Resources Commission is currently locked in a battle with the North Carolina Rules Review Commission over more than a dozen rules that affect day-to-day decisions within the division.
Thursday closed the public comment period on 16 of 30 longstanding rules objected to by the Rules Review Commission last fall and then removed from the North Carolina Administrative Code.
The commission voted in December to classify and adopt the 16 rules as “emergency,” which effectively got them back into the Administrative Code.
DCM had received 171 comments as of Monday, all of which urge the CRC to adopt the rules as temporary, a measure that would keep them in the Administrative Code for one year or until they are reinstated as permanent rules.
The rules include one that designates Jockey’s Ridge State Park as an area of environmental concern and dictates that sand blown from Jockey’s Ridge onto neighboring properties must be returned to the park.
The coastal commission and DEQ filed a lawsuit in Wake County Superior Court against the rules commission and Snyder to settle the deadlock over legal interpretations between the two commissions and restore the rules.
The commission has scheduled a special called meeting at 11 a.m. March 13 to decide whether to adopt the temporary rules.
