Join the debut of Earth & Arts OBX, a celebration of Earth Day and the official opening of Nags Head’s new soundside boardwalk on April 22.

The event, hosted by the Outer Banks Visitors Bureau, is scheduled to kick off with a ribbon-cutting ceremony at 4 p.m. at the Soundside Event Site, 6800 S. Croatan Highway.

There will be live music by Brooke & Nick and HotSauce, a curated marketplace featuring environmentally conscious artists and makers, hands-on children’s activities, and opportunities to interact with local nonprofits that focus on conservation and sustainability.

“We’re excited to share this incredible new gathering spot with the community,” Outer Banks Visitors Bureau Executive Director Lee Nettles stated in a release. “This event is an opportunity to experience the new Soundside Boardwalk while connecting with the people and organizations dedicated to preserving the character and environment of this special place for generations to come. The views from the boardwalk are spectacular and give us all yet another way to experience the natural beauty of the Outer Banks.”

The event will wrap up at sunset.

Reprinted from the Outer Banks Voice

On Tuesday, Feb. 17, the North Carolina Supreme Court heard arguments in the long-running legal battle between Currituck County and the Corolla Civic Association (CCA) over how the county spends occupancy tax money.

The CCA plaintiffs contend that the county has improperly used those funds to pay for police, fire protection, emergency services and equipment for public safety rather than earmarking them for tourism-related expenses. The Currituck County Commissioners, citing the extra needs placed on public safety in the summer tourist season in Corolla, have contended that state law allows public safety spending with those funds.

The state legislature passes a law for any county that wishes to charge an occupancy tax, with a provision outlining how the tax can be used. The Currituck County occupancy tax law was first passed in 1987 and amended in 2004. The Outer Banks Voice – NC Supreme Court to hear Currituck County occupancy tax case

In March 2024, the NC Court of Appeals Court ruled in favor of the CCA and members of the organization. Currituck County then appealed that ruling to the State Supreme Court.  During the Feb. 17 arguments, it seemed clear that key elements of the case are whether public safety expenses are related to tourism and how much discretion the commissioners have in allocating occupancy tax dollars.

In speaking first for the defendants, attorney Chris Geis of the Womble Bond Dickinson firm argued that under the statute, the “[Currituck] Commissioners were given the broad authority to use their judgment to determine what is a tourism-related expenditure” that brings tourism to the county.

As an example, Geis cited occupancy tax spending on the county’s Veterans’ Memorial Park, which he said a “leaves people with a good feeling about [this] place. That is a tourism related expenditure.” He noted that the plaintiffs opposed spending occupancy tax dollars on the Park.

“We have reasonable disagreement here, we understand that,” Geis said, in addressing the Supreme Court Justices. “But this is not an area where the county has stepped outside that line” of violating state law.

Making the case for the plaintiffs, attorney Troy Shelton of the Dowling PLLC firm, stated that “the Court of Appeals saw exactly what happened for what it was,” in ruling for the plaintiffs. “The County’s been breaking the law, and it has to stop.”

In response to one Justice’s question, Shelton said that “I don’t think that paying for police or firefighters attracts tourists.”

“There is nothing stopping the County from going back to the [North Carolina] legislature and trying a new round of lobbying” to change the statute. “That’s what they need to be doing instead of fighting this case,” he stated.

Asked by Chief Justice Paul Newby what remedies the plaintiffs are seeking if they prevail, Shelton indicated that among things, they want the restoration of the occupancy tax funds they say were improperly spent.

You can see the Supreme Court arguments here. Supreme Court of North Carolina: 101PA24 Costanzo, et al. v Currituck County, et al.

This story first appeared in the Outer Banks Voice, Coastal Review Online partners with the Voice to provide readers with more environmental and lifestyle stories of interest about our coast.

The Sarah Owens Welcome Center/Rest Area on U.S. 64 on Roanoke Island will be temporarily closed for a renovation project beginning Dec. 31.

Renovations will include an upgrade and installation of electrical, HVAC and plumbing systems, and general construction and landscaping in and around the building, according to a N.C. Department of Transportation release.

A.R. Chesson Company of Elizabeth City was awarded a $1.4 million contract for the project, which is expected to be complete by mid-May.

Alternate state-owned welcome centers and rest stops in the region include the Aycock Brown Welcome Center on U.S. 158 in Kitty Hawk, and the Tyrrell County Welcome Center on U.S. 64 in Columbia.

The official tourism authority for Dare County’s Outer Banks will soon begin accepting applications for grants to boost programs that draw visitors to the region.

Only Dare County nonprofits and governmental agencies are eligible to apply for the event grants through the Outer Banks Visitors Bureau starting Aug. 1. Deadline is Aug. 15.

Grants must be applied for no less than four months ahead of an eligible event scheduled for Sept. 7 through June 15, which is outside peak tourism season.

The visitors bureau also plans to begin accepting applications for tourism grant impact awards starting Sept. 1 from county-based nonprofits and governmental agencies. This grant assists with programs or services needed due to tourism impacts. The 30-day application period ends Sept. 30.

Tourism grant impact awards of more than $50,000 require a match. Grants are disbursed on a reimbursement basis.

Applicants must contact the grant administrator, Diane Bognich, before submitting an application to describe the project and determine whether the project is eligible. Bognich may be reached at bognich@outerbanks.org  or by calling 252-473-2138

The Outer Banks are known for vast, uncrowded beaches, towering lighthouses, and unique cottages, and while these features beckon millions of visitors, some Outer Banks communities are not as well-known.

Rather than towns, most communities here are unincorporated villages, each home to residential homes and unobtrusive tourist accommodations, a few businesses, and a post office. Hatteras may be one of the best known of these villages.

While it is much smaller than incorporated coastal towns like Beaufort or Edenton, Hatteras is home to centuries of history and a number of notable sites, particularly on the southwest tip of its namesake island.

Hatteras Island was populated in the 16th century by the Croatoan Native Americans. They hunted, fished and ate oysters, depositing the shells in massive middens that are one of the few remaining visible indicators of where they lived. They were one of the many Native peoples that the Roanoke Colony interacted with in the 1580s.

The Croatans allied with the Europeans and counted among their numbers Manteo, the first Native American christened by the English in the New World. They factor into the story of the Lost Colony, since Hatteras Island was one of the many areas where the colonists were rumored to have gone after leaving Roanoke. Due to the shifting sands of Hatteras and the lack of definitive records, the fate of the colonists remains a mystery to this day.

Europeans returned to the area in the middle of the 17th century. Historian David Stick notes in his book, “The Outer Banks of North Carolina,” that the first documented English settlers on Hatteras Banks, Patrick Mackuen and William Reed, likely arrived there by 1711. People on Hatteras lived by fishing, farming, and piloting boats. They also took cargo from the many shipwrecks that regularly washed ashore from the Graveyard of the Atlantic.

Despite a growing number of families living on Hatteras, the area was slow to develop as a proper town. Isolated and accessible only by water, Hatteras did not abut one of the major inlets that was open during the colonial period. As a result, it was ignored by the same legislative assemblies that facilitated town construction at nearby Portsmouth and Ocracoke islands. Although numerous people resided on the southwestern portion of the island by the late 18th century, colonial maps often showed just the empty banks and the cape. The area known today as Hatteras Village finally gained its first post office in 1858.

Hatteras remained mostly isolated through the 18th and early 19th centuries. But while it did not have obvious economic importance, it did have military significance to any group wanting to approach or protect North Carolina by water. This led to the construction of Confederate forts Hatteras and Clark on Hatteras Inlet in 1861.

The forts were surrendered to Union in the first combined action of the Army and Navy during the Civil War. This success, the first by Union Gen. Ambrose Burnside, helped the Union gain control of the North Carolina coast and allowed for future invasions of Roanoke Island and the eastern part of the state.

The post-Civil War period saw the emergence of coastal life-saving stations. These buildings housed crews organized to rescue victims from shipwrecks using the latest technology, such as the Lyle gun used to shoot rescue lines.

Three U.S. Life-saving Service stations lined Hatteras Island by 1905, from Durants near the village to Cape Hatteras at the eastern end of the island. Along with greater lifesaving capabilities came a new effort at political organization. Dare County, one of the last counties formed in North Carolina, was created in 1870 from what had been parts of Currituck, Hyde and Tyrrell counties to help administer the far-flung islands of the Outer Banks. Its southern boundary was the western tip of Hatteras Island.

The modern village of Hatteras began to develop in the early 20th century. Locals built a string of houses such as the Ellsworth and Lovie Ballance House, circa 1915, one of the oldest structures in the village and a survivor of numerous hurricanes over the past century, according to state historic preservation records. The house was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2001.

Growth came mainly from tourism. Greater rail and automobile transportation helped more and more visitors reach the beach from such areas as Raleigh, Charlotte and northern cities. More tourists meant an increase in ferry traffic and the growth of roads that made those ferries accessible, such as the highway that became U.S. 264 connecting Belhaven, Swan Quarter and U.S. Highway 64 near Manns Harbor.

In the 1930s, the conservation movement also brought nature tourism to the island through the authorization of the Cape Hatteras National Seashore in 1937, one of the first seashore-protection programs in the country. Conservation protected a unique ecosystem that continues to bring thousands of birding, fishing, and native plant enthusiasts each year. 

With these dynamics in place, Hatteras became a popular vacation destination. Thousands flocked to the coast every summer and engaged in new recreational activities such as surfing and kiteboarding. Demand led to new transportation outlets. The state began to pave roads on Hatteras Island in the 1950s, but it was the completion of the Herbert S. Bonner Bridge in 1963 that provided a direct land connection between Hatteras and the rest of the country.

Soon, the island became home to shops, restaurants and hotels, as well as the familiar fishing shacks and isolated tourist cottages. A 1990 New York Times travel article that praised Hatteras Island’s beach as “one of the loveliest on the East Coast,” also singled out the village for offering “the color of a commercial fishing hub.”

Hatteras has become one of the most popular tourist destinations on the East Coast, growth that has fundamentally altered life in the sleepy fishing village. About 500 residents now live in Hatteras Village fulltime. There are about a dozen restaurants, several seafood markets, general stores, visitor centers, and the Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum. A number of these businesses operate year-round and cater to both locals and the summer influx of tourists.

Despite these changes, residents largely are thankful that Hatteras retains much of its village charm.

Patricia Peele, a lifelong resident of the island, told Coastal Review that as recently as 15 years ago, it was like “they used to roll the streets up at 9 p.m. on Labor Day.”

Now, there are always tourists, filling a plethora of mini-hotels across the island. But Peele said that despite the changes, she knows that Hatteras is still secluded compared to the rest of the Outer Banks. It is “not built up like a lot of other places are,” and with the protections provided by the National Park Service, growth will likely remain limited.

Still, Hatteras Village faces many of the same challenges as the rest of the Outer Banks, including those related to rising sea levels, limited resources and strong coastal storms.

The Basnight Bridge, which replaced the Bonner Bridge when the 2.8-mile, $254 million project was completed in 2019, keeps Hatteras Island connected to the mainland, and no matter the challenges, people of Hatteras will likely continue to adapt to life on their ocean sandbar — just as they always have.

The two Carolina governors are urging the Trump administration to maintain the moratorium on offshore drilling the president set during his first term, citing possible disruptions to the coastal economy from a disaster without the existing protection.

Trump issued in September 2020 memoranda preventing leases for oil and gas drilling off the coast of North Carolina and South Carolina until June 30, 2032.

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management announced plans in April to begin the process of developing a new schedule for offshore oil and gas lease sales for the outer continental shelf. Called the “11th National Outer Continental Shelf Program,” the public comment period opened April 29. The 45-day comment period closes Monday, June 16.

In the letter to BOEM dated June 16, Gov. Josh Stein and South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster urge removing North Carolina and South Carolina’s outer continental shelf from consideration for the program. 

“Because of the significant risks associated with offshore oil and gas exploration, development and production off the Carolina coasts, every North Carolina and South Carolina coastal municipality has passed a resolution opposing offshore drilling and seismic testing,” the governors wrote. “This position has been reaffirmed by other municipalities and counties, as well as state legislators and members of our Congressional delegations from both parties. We ask you to respect the wishes of our states and our coastal communities and reaffirm President Trump’s decision to protect our coastlines and the industries they support.” 

North Carolina and South Carolina have a combined 513 miles of ocean beaches and 6,251 miles of coastline that are home to more than 2.7 million people and include numerous national wildlife refuges. The coastal economy for the two states in 2021 contributed $9.6 billion to the gross domestic product, supported more than 125,000 jobs, and provided $3.8 billion in wages, led by tourism and recreation, shipbuilding, fishing, and marine transportation industries.

“These industries would be highly vulnerable to disruption from offshore drilling,” according to the governors’ offices.

Outer Banks Visitors Bureau Executive Director Lee Nettles and Community Engagement Officer Jeff Shwartzenberg are scheduled to speak about long-range tourism plans during the next “Science on the Sound” Lecture Series.

The two are to present “Finding Balance: The Outer Banks Long-Range Tourism Management Plan” beginning at 6 p.m. Thursday, June 19, at the Coastal Studies Institute on the East Carolina University Outer Banks Campus in Wanchese.

Recently, Dare County’s Outer Banks tourism spending “has reached record levels, surpassing more than $2 billion in visitor spending in 2023, an all-time high and ranking fourth among North Carolina counties behind only Mecklenburg, Wake, and Buncombe. However, with that economic success also comes impacts that can negatively affect a community,” officials said in a statement.

Nettles and Schwartzenberg are expected to highlight recommendations on how the power of tourism can help improve the quality of life for residents, while protecting the delicate natural environment and preserving the unique history and culture of the area.

The public is welcome and encouraged to attend the program. The program will also be livestreamed on the institute’s YouTube channel for those who cannot make it in person.

This monthly, in-person lecture series brings perspectives from all over the state and highlights coastal topics in northeastern North Carolina.

North Carolina saw its 40 million-plus visitors in 2024 spend more than $36.7 billion on trips to and within the “Tar Heel State,” maintaining its rank of fifth most visited state and setting a spending record.

Coming in behind California, Florida, Texas and New York in domestic visitation, the state has been in tight competition with Pennsylvania and Tennessee for fifth place over the last four years. The previous spending record of $35.6 billion was set in 2023, according to Gov. Josh Stein’s office.

The governor made the announcement Wednesday, coinciding with National Travel and Tourism Week May 4-10. The press release notes that the state’s tourism economy remained strong despite Hurricane Helene, which caused untold destruction in the western part of the state in the fall of 2024.

“Today’s news underscores what we all know: North Carolina is a fantastic place to visit,” Stein said Wednesday in a statement. “As our mountain economies worked to recover from Helene, our Piedmont and coastal destinations remained popular and contributed to the growth of North Carolina’s tourism economy. We must continue to support tourism and small businesses in western North Carolina to help them come back stronger.”

The figures are preliminary findings from research commissioned by Visit North Carolina, part of the Economic Development Partnership of North Carolina, and conducted by Tourism Economics. The study can be found on the state tourism’s website, which links to archived reports dating back to 2005.

The state’s tourism-supported workforce increased 1.4% to 230,338 jobs in 2024.  Tourism payroll increased 2.6% to $9.5 billion. As a result of visitor spending, state and local governments saw rebounds in tax revenues to nearly $2.7 billion.   

“North Carolinians in all 100 counties benefit from the money that visitors spend. From our smallest towns to our largest cities, tourism means jobs for more than 50,000 small businesses and our first-in-talent workforce. These workers address travelers’ needs for transportation as well as lodging, dining, shopping, and recreation,” Commerce Secretary Lee Lilley said in the release.

The statistics published Wednesday report data from a statewide perspective. A supplemental report is expected to be released later in the year that will provide regional and local visitor data, offering a better perspective on Helene’s impact on western North Carolina’s tourism economy, officials explained.

The governor’s office provided the following numbers about the 2024 tourism industry:

• Total spending by domestic and international visitors reached $36.7 billion in 2024, a 3.1% increase over 2023 expenditures.   
• Domestic travelers spent a record $35.6 billion in 2024, up 2.7% from $34.6 billion in 2023.   
• The more than 900,000 international travelers spent $1.2 billion in 2024, up 16.5% from the previous year.   
• Visitors generated nearly $4.6 billion in federal, state and local taxes in 2024, a 2.9% increase from 2023.   
• State tax receipts from visitor spending rose 1.1% to nearly $1.4 billion in 2024.   
• Local tax receipts grew 4.3% to nearly $1.3 billion.  
• Direct tourism employment in North Carolina increased 1.4% to 230,338.   
• Direct tourism payroll increased 2.6% to $9.5 billion.   
• Visitors spend more than $100 million per day in the state, adding $7.3 million daily to state and local tax revenues, about $3.7 million in state taxes and $3.6 million in local taxes.
• Each state household saved $593 on average in state and local taxes as a direct result of visitor spending in the state. Savings per capita averaged $241.  

BUXTON – Just north of Cape Hatteras, businesses along a small stretch of soundside beach colloquially known as Canadian Hole have become a microcosm and barometer of a newly fraught international relationship.

Windsurfers from Canada have reliably flocked to the Outer Banks since the 1980s, and they were later joined by kiteboarders when that sport took off in the 1990s. But the Trump administration’s recent threats to annex the nation’s northern neighbor, followed by the U.S. imposing tariffs on trade, have triggered a backlash among our otherwise would-be Canadian visitors.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection data shows that visitors crossing the Canadian border into the U.S. dropped 12.5% in February and 18% in March, according to an April 18 NBC News report. In 2023, about 20.7 million visitors from Canada visited the U.S.

Although there have been cancellations, local watersports shops say that plenty of Canadians are still visiting the Outer Banks because of its renowned conditions for windsurfing and kiteboarding.

With spring bringing warmer temperatures and a nice southwest wind, the northern watersport enthusiasts are starting to arrive on the Outer Banks for the season.

“I’ve put up a Canadian and a U.S. flag,” said Brian Klauser, owner of Ocean Air Sports in Avon.

Klauser said he had received “tremendous feedback” from his regulars.

“All of my customers are repeat customers. You can set your watch to it,” he told Coastal Review.

And, as Klauser noted, these visitors are dedicated.

“They’re not just coming for a week,” he said. “They’re coming for two to eight weeks, because they love it here.”

Pamlico Sound’s Canadian Hole, a watersports destination between Avon and Buxton on Hatteras Island, is often referred to as the Haulover Day Use Area. With its shallow, wide-open water, mild weather and windy conditions, the spot has earned a reputation among enthusiasts, along with some other Outer Banks beaches, as the premier windsurfing and kiteboarding destination on the East Coast.

All of Hatteras and Ocracoke islands are within the Cape Hatteras National Seashore.

“We get a lot of Canadians in the shop and there’s a lot of return folks we talk to,” Chris Rutledge, a salesman at REAL Watersports in Waves, a Hatteras Island village north of Avon, told Coastal Review. “It’s probably down a little bit, but I’m seeing a lot of people down in Canadian Hole.”

Any kiteboarders and windsurfers from northern climates who may still have snow on the ground appreciate that spring is a great time of the year on Hatteras Island to enjoy their sport, he said. Those conditions remain favorable into fall.

“This area is so special,” Rutledge said. There’s plenty of unobstructed space in the sound to ride, or to catch waves in the ocean, he explained, yet the spot is smaller and less crowded than other destinations.

Despite that difference — and despite the unpredictable tariff-wielding elephant raging in the background — politics is sidestepped by businesses here as much as possible.

“We appreciate our Canadian customers,” said Stacey Saunders, the general manager of Frisco Woods Campground on Hatteras Island. She emphasized in a recent interview with Coastal Review that the business tries to avoid anything political, but she has heard some outspoken opinions from even the campground’s most loyal Canadian customers.

“We believe in your right to free speech,” she said in a comment directed specifically to Canadians and the right to express their political opinions, while she, herself, wanted to avoid politics.

Numerous Canadian customers have blamed politics or a sense of feeling unsafe for deciding not to come back to the Outer Banks, said Saunders. She cited a recent email as an example. 

“I’m sorry to inform you we wish to cancel our May camping reservation due to Mr. Trump,” explained the author of an email that she read aloud. “We will probably return in four years when Mr. Trump is president no longer.”

Saunders said that, so far, there had been only a “moderate” number of cancellations from Canadians, and about 80% have been from repeat customers.

Still, she noted, sites reserved for June and July mostly by windsurfers and kiters are not canceling. The campground, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2025, has a large waterfront launching area that makes it very popular with these visitors.

“They’re very loyal and have been here for years,” she said.

One notable cancellation was a “caravan” of Canadians who had reserved 23 campsites, which equals about 60 people, she said.

“We’ve also lost store revenue,” she added, “because if they’re not here, they’re not purchasing anything.”

But looking on the bright side, Saunders said that the canceled reservations open more sites on the soundside – and potentially for new customers.

An April 10 post on Reddit by ParkingKnowledge6105, said that his group of 25 Canadians, who have traveled to Cape Hatteras for about 30 years for a monthlong vacation, have all canceled.

“It is hard to underplay how deeply offensive the Trump 51st state bs has been. Or the lies about fentanyl or balance of commerce,” according to the post. “You guys have no idea how pissed off Canadians are , and dismayed by how many still support Trump. A lifelong friendship was thrown under the bus.”

Keith Croghan, owner of The Sea Monkey Lodge & Kite School on Ocracoke Island, said the island always has its share of visiting windsurfers and kiteboarders, although not as many at Hatteras Island.

And not yet this year.

“I haven’t seen hide nor hair of Canadians,” he recently told Coastal Review. “So the impact on us is even greater.”

Ocracoke, a small island on the far-south end of the Outer Banks, is — more than most — dependent on tourism revenue.

‘I haven’t seen hide nor hair of Canadians.’

— Keith Croghan, The Sea Monkey Lodge & Kite School, Ocracoke Island

“Yeah, we really feel it when people don’t show up,” said Croghan, who has run the The Sea Monkey Lodge & Kite School for 15 years.

“I would like to consider Ocracoke a sanctuary,” he added. “If any Canadians feel ostracized by all this, tell them they’re welcome to come down and visit our special little island here on the Republic of Ocracoke.”

Lee Nettles, executive director of the Outer Banks Visitors Bureau, also prefers to look beyond the current gloom of uncertain times.

“We, of course, welcome international guests, and we want to continue welcoming international guests,” he told Coastal Review. “But from the last statistics that I saw, Canadian visitors are less than 1% of our overall visitation. So in terms of the real business impact, it remains to be seen, but I don’t expect it to be great.”

Most Outer Banks visitors drive from Virginia, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York and other northeastern states. And, he added, tourists from Canada represented about 50% of total international visitation.

As the 2020 pandemic showed, Nettles said, the Outer Banks’ reputation for its natural environment and wide-open beaches is sought out as a refuge during stressful periods. That and being an affordable drive-to destination has somewhat sheltered the barrier islands from the same shocks other destinations may experience.

“Everybody’s calling for a soft year,” Nettles said about other tourism areas in the state, “and it seems like we’re in better shape than a lot of folks.”

Over the years, Dare County has proven to possess a remarkable ability to not only recover from various shocks, but also to come back strong.

In 2023, the most recent available data, Dare’s total visitor spending was $2.15 billion, about 9% higher than the previous year. State taxes were $70.4 million and the local taxes were $77.9 million, totaling $148 million for the year. Combined with the visitor spending, the total of $3,891 per capita is the highest of any county in North Carolina.

As far threats of layoffs or funding decreases in the national parks and refuges, Nettles said he doesn’t yet know details and won’t speculate on impacts except to say he has confidence in the management.

“Obviously the national and state parks and our refuges are hugely important tourism assets and are greatly valued by our visitors,” he said.

The Outer Banks tourism-based economy has survived a series of human-made and natural disasters, and not just hurricanes.

“I think the storms come in different forms,” Nettles said.

“We’re no stranger to challenges. We’ve had wildfires, road closures, bridge closures. We’ve had recessions, we’ve had government shutdowns, and COVID,” he said. “All of which to say, tourism has been real resilient despite natural and man-made challenges.”

Bald Head Island ferry passengers may likely see a change to the ferry schedule later this year, but not one that would bump hourly departures to every 90 minutes.

Groups representing ferry passengers have reached a settlement with Bald Head Island Transportation Inc. to operate on a hybrid schedule, one where ferries would continue 30-minute runs between 6 a.m. and 9 a.m., shift to a 45-minute schedule at midday, and then resume half-hour departures at 6 p.m.

Additional runs would be made on weekends between Memorial Day through Labor Day, peak tourism season on the North Carolina coast.

Related: Bald Head Island ferry users say change would cut capacity

The proposal was submitted to the North Carolina Utilities Commission earlier this month with a request that the commission expedite a decision on the revised schedule. The contractor ferry schedule will not change. A system would be put in place to identify when contractor-class ticketholders are eligible to ride a passenger ferry.

If approved, the schedule would become effective Nov. 1.

The settlement, announced Sept. 13, temporarily cools months of pushback on the private transportation company’s initial revised schedule, which company President Chad Paul said would help improve on-time performance.

Paul explained in a presentation to Village of Bald Head Island Council earlier this year that increased demand for passenger ferry and tram service had resulted in ferry run delays.

In its Feb. 19 application to the utilities commission, the transportation company said its annual ridership between the mainland terminal at Deep Point Marina in Southport to the island has jumped from 570,000 in 2010 to 700,000 by 2019.

Last year, a record 782,000 passengers took the ferry. More than 3 million pounds of baggage were loaded by hand aboard ferries each year since 2021 and, last year, more than 4,500 larger items including bicycles, kayaks, canoes and “large luggage items” were transported, according to the application.

But several people who spoke during a hearing the utilities commission hosted last month in Bolivia argued that shifting to a 90-minute schedule would disrupt ferry runs that coincide with start and end times of the only school on the island, increase commute times for workers going to and from the island, and force businesses on the island to shrink their hours of operation.

The village, Bald Head Island Club, Bald Head Association and Bald Head Academy intervened in the transportation company’s application to the utilities commission.

“While each generally agreed that the proposed schedule would improve on time performance by allowing the ferry more time to onload passengers and luggage, traverse the river, and offload passengers and luggage, each also wanted to understand the impacts of reduced ferry capacity due to fewer ferry runs,” a Sept. 13 village release states.

Those groups, referred to as “intervenors,” acknowledge recent changes, including an electronic ticketing system and luggage limits, have improved on-time performance and reduced the numbers of passengers getting bumped to the next available ferry when a ferry is full, according to the release.

The intervenors and transportation company have agreed to set a one-year trial period in which ferries would operate on the hybrid schedule.

After that year is up, the company “has committed to making additional changes” if there are significant capacity issues caused as a result of the revised schedule, the release states.

Under the agreement, the transportation company will axe its current midday lunch break and establish a reservation system for island employees and contractors who ride the ferry reserved for contractors, the goal of which would be to implement by Jan. 31, 2025. The company and intervenors will also hold biannual reviews of the revised schedule.

Bald Head Island Transportation has agreed to track data on the hybrid schedule, file quarterly reports containing specifics from that data to the utilities commission, and hold public meetings reporting that data.

In his testimony to the utilities commission on the settlement, village Mayor Pro Tem Scott Gardner stated that the intervenors “remain concerned” that the hybrid schedule “may not adequately satisfy demand during certain periods of high use” between April 1 through to the week of Memorial Day weekend, Memorial Day weekend through to Labor Day weekend, and the week after Labor Day weekend through Oct. 31.

The transportation company, with input from the intervenors, will consider whether to ask the utilities commission to approve any additional changes to the schedule as needed, according to information filed with the commission.

The settlement agreement also asks the utilities commission to cancel an expert witness hearing originally scheduled for early November in Raleigh.

Dare, Brunswick, New Hanover, Carteret, Currituck and Onslow are the coastal counties to break into the Top 20 out of 100 for visitor spending in 2023.

Following a record-breaking increase of 15% in 2022, spending statewide rose 6.9% to $35.6 billion in 2023, setting another record year in visitor spending, according to data the North Carolina Department of Commerce released Tuesday.

The total spending is the amount spent on lodging, including second home spending, food and beverage, recreation, retail and transportation, and both ground and air transportation added together.

Mecklenburg County topped the list with $5.85 billion in total visitor spending, up 9.6% since last year. Though Camden had an 11.3% increase between 2022 and 2023 with a total spending of $4 million, the third highest increase of 100 counties, the county was at the bottom of the list for total spending.

State officials noted that last year, 98 of the state’s 100 counties saw increases in spending compared with 2022. Orange, Wake, Camden and Warren counties, in that order, led the state’s 6.9% growth in visitor spending. Dare ranked 10 in growth rate at 8.8%.

The two counties that had a decrease in spending are Alexander at -3.4% and Cleveland at -1.6%.

“It’s great to see increasing numbers of people continue to flock to North Carolina to see all we have to offer,” Gov. Roy Cooper said in the press release from his office. “Visitors are investing record amounts of money bolstering our booming tourism industry, and that brings good jobs and income to North Carolina businesses and families.”

The preliminary findings from an annual study commissioned by VisitNC, a unit of the Economic Development Partnership of North Carolina, reflect the economic impact of tourism on local economies across the state.

The visitor spending study, commissioned by Visit NC and conducted by Tourism Economics, provides preliminary estimates of domestic and international traveler expenditures as well as employment, payroll income, and state and local tax revenues directly generated by these expenditures.

The statistical model draws on detailed data from Visit NC as well as data derived from federal and state government sources, nationally known private and non-profit travel organizations, and other travel industry sources.

Coastal counties by rank out of the 100 counties, total visitor spending, and growth rate:

• 4. Dare: $2.15 billion, 8.8%
• 6. Brunswick: $1.17 billion, 7.5%
• 8. New Hanover $1.12 billion, 5.9%
• 11. Carteret: $732.29, 5.3%
• 14. Currituck: $573.35 million, 4.3%
• 18. Onslow $412.12 million, 8.5%
• 35. Pender $199.12 million, 5%
• 39. Craven: $178.11 million, 4.4%
• 44. Beaufort: $142.48 million 5.9%
• 57. Pasquotank: $90.21 million, 6.7%
• 67. Hyde: $61.87 million, 6.1%
• 83. Pamlico $37.76, million, 3.7%
• 87. Hertford: $31.21 million, 6.7%
• 88. Chowan: $30.11 million, 4.8%
• 90. Bertie: $24.47 million, 4.5%
• 92. Perquimans $20.43 million, 3.1%
• 94. Washington $18.41 million, 3.3%
• 97. Gates: $9.89 million, 1%
• 98. Tyrrell $6.94 million, 3.1%
• 100. Camden: $4 million, 11.3%

Other tourism facts for 2023 provided by the state include the following:

• Total spending by domestic and international visitors reached $35.6 billion, a 6.9% increase over 2022 expenditures. 
• Direct tourism employment increased 4.8% to 227,200. 
• Direct tourism payroll increased 6.6% to nearly $9.3 billion. 
• Visitors generated nearly $4.5 billion in federal, state and local taxes, a 5.8% increase from 2022. 
• State tax receipts from visitor spending rose 5.6% to $1.3 billion. 
• Local tax receipts grew 5.4% to $1.2 billion.
• Visitors spend more than $97 million per day, adding about $3.7 million in state taxes and $3.4 million in local taxes.
• Each household saved $518 on average in state and local taxes as a direct result of visitor spending in the state. Savings per capita averaged $239.

Full tables can be accessed at partners.visitnc.com/economic-impact-studies.

Writing in his just-completed Frank Stick biography published here, author Gilbert M. Gaul wrote of the genesis of the modern tourist industry on the Outer Banks.

“Like Stick and others, (Congressman Lindsay) Warren saw the future of the isolated barrier islands as tied to tourism,” Gaul noted.

Speakers at a tourism summit sponsored by the Outer Banks Visitors Bureau Nov. 2 in Kill Devil Hills focused on that prescient vision from decades ago.

The summit opened with a reminder of why Stick and others of his era believed that the Outer Banks offered an ideal location for a national park, illustrated in the bureau’s recently produced “Raw OBX” video site highlighting surfing, fishing and birding and urging “Keep OBX OBX,” a plea to “responsible travelers.”

Summit organizers promised an in-depth look at the health of the area’s dominant industry. Presentations showed an economy that has been outperforming numerous state and national trends, but one that’s also showing signs of slowing.

In 2022, Dare County recorded $1.98 billion in tourist spending, according to figures from Visit NC, the Economic Development Partnership of North Carolina’s website. It was the fourth-highest level of tourist spending of any county in the state, trailing only Mecklenberg, Wake and Buncombe counties. If the $549 million generated by Currituck County is added to the Dare County’s spending, visitor spending here represented 7.6% of North Carolina’s total visitor spending.

The Outer Banks counties also showed a significant rebound from pandemic lows with occupancy tax collections up well more than 50% as of October.

That increase exceeds national and state trends in tourism, said Erik Evjen of Tourism Economics, a global tourism forecasting and analysis firm.

“Here in North Carolina, travel spending has been elevated above the national average throughout,” Evjen told summit attendees. “I know you have a lot to do with that.”

But 2020 and 2021’s double-digit revenue increases are not sustainable, he added.

“I know in this market, you’re interested in hitting year-over-year (increases), but for context, I think it’s important to remember how far you’ve come,” he said, adding that a slowdown is “more of a correction than anything else.”

Dare County’s 6% occupancy tax and 1% food and beverage tax collections slowed to about 5.7% in 2022, compared to 2021. As of September, revenues were up about 3%.

The past year’s revenue increases were generally lower than the inflation rate, Outer Banks Visitors Bureau Executive Director Lee Nettles told Coastal Review, but he noted that it’s important to look at trends over several years, “because the collection growth exceeded inflation then.”

Evjen, whose company works with a broad spectrum of clients in the tourism industry, noted during the summit that comparing revenues to 2019 was important in evaluating progress.

“We heard from a lot of clients, they wanted to stop comparing to 2019. They wanted to just focus on year-over-year (comparisons) because that’s what their stakeholders and partners want to focus on,” he said. “We said, ‘just hold off for four to six months … It’s going to start coming down and you’re going to want to compare back to ’19 levels just to help put things in context.’”

Evjen said that as a destination, the Outer Banks is different than most markets. Generally, destinations are more dependent on hotel and motel lodging, whereas multi-bedroom rental homes dominate here, lodging he defined as a short-term rentals.

“Short-term rental demand had been performing extremely well throughout the pandemic,” he said. The upward trend is likely to continue, in terms of both demand and revenue, but competition for tourist dollars is growing.

Coastal North Carolina is considered a drive-to destination for many visitors. As the economy continues to show strength, leisure travel is becoming more diverse, with international travel beginning to rebound and urban areas again showing signs of growth.

“You have increased competition now from some of the larger markets again, that people quite frankly avoided for a couple of years,” said Evjen.

Know who’s coming

Understanding where visitors are coming from and why they are making the choice that they have is important information, summit presenters said.

Adam Zappia of Zartico, a data-collection company specializing in travel and tourism, outlined what data can do.

“It’s understanding where people go, and why they go where they go, and when they’re spending their money,” he said.

Realizing that people have concerns about data collection, Zappia clarified the limits of what his company can do. He drew a distinction from surveillance such as the federal National Security Agency.

“We’re not the NSA. We don’t tell you how many people came to a Taco Bell on a Tuesday,” he said.

But knowing what should be considered important data is useful.

“We need to focus on where people are coming from that are spending more money in destination,” Zappia said. “That is more important than understanding how many people came to a destination.”

He said it was especially interesting that visitors from other North Carolina cities or nearby places such as Norfolk, Virginia, visit more during winter months than they do in the summer.

Zappia said the visitor numbers are down from a 2021 peak, but revenues have remained relatively stable because the average daily rate of spending has increased.

“The reason that we’re not seeing a decline in collections is because that ADR is going way up versus occupancy that’s starting to come down a little bit,” Zappia said.

Zappia’s data appeared to confirm Evjen earlier statement about long-term economic trends here. Whenever you’re looking for growth, you’re looking for where to grow, he said.

“Leisure is stable, even though it’s slowing down,” Evjen said. “You can add overseas travel, business travel, and group travel slight increases from those markets year over year and you’ll continue to be in good shape.”

Note: Coastal Review will not publish Friday in observance of Veterans Day.

Frank Stick was in search of two things when he arrived on the Outer Banks in the 1920s: adventure and money. He found enough adventure to fill a lifetime but like many Bankers on the isolated barrier islands, he scrambled to pay the bills. Once one of the largest landowners, with property from Kitty Hawk to Hatteras, the artist turned developer lost many of his holdings during the Great Depression. Stick eventually recovered and developed the much-admired Southern Shores community with his son David and other partners. A complex man of shifting interests and unwavering opinions, Stick was both a conservationist who played an instrumental role in the formation of Cape Hatteras National Seashore and an avid land speculator who wrote of turning the Banks into a playground for tourists.

This is his story.

Chapter Four: Inventing the Seashore

Read the ongoing series

In the 1930s, with the nation in the throes of the Great Depression and any signs of a land boom now a distant memory, Frank Stick shifted tactics and returned to his role as a conservationist.

Writing in the July 21, 1933, edition of The Elizabeth City Independent, Frank outlined a sprawling new vision calling for the government to set aside a large share of the Outer Banks as a park. Entitled: A COASTAL PARK FOR NORTH CAROLINA AND THE NATION, Frank argued that the government had scores of beautiful parks out West – Yellowstone, Yosemite, Grand Canyon, among others – but barely any presence in the East, and nothing along the coast. Why not a park for the Outer Banks? he asked. The low, slim barrier islands included miles of “shining beaches, peaceful sun-kissed sounds, and bountiful wildlife.”

Frank’s cri de coeur took up an entire page of W.O. Saunders’s broadsheet. That by itself should have signaled to readers that Saunders favored the idea. In fact, a decade earlier the editor had called for a state park in Hatteras in his newspaper. Frank Stick’s plan was far more elaborate, taking the readers through the logic for a park, where it might be located, and how it would boost the isolated Banks and its faltering economy.   

Frank began by telling readers that the “opportunity for healthful outdoor recreation and communion with nature” was an indispensable part of America’s progress as a nation — as important as commerce, politics or education. Unfortunately, he continued, speculators had acquired the majority of the nation’s shoreline for private development. With so much land tied up in private hands, ordinary citizens would have dwindling opportunities to experience the serenity and beauty of the seashore.

At first blush, it might seem odd that Stick, one of the largest title holders on the Outer Banks until the Depression, would single out speculators. However, it is worth remembering that Frank never saw himself as a real estate man greedily buying up the oceanfront. In his mind, he was a conservationist striving for an equitable balance between development and nature. Was it true? Not exactly. He landed on the Banks with a plan and needed to make money in real estate after abandoning his art career. Still, his later developments, especially Southern Shores, did achieve some of the balance he sought.

Frank proposed that the government should acquire up to 100 miles – or most of the Banks – via philanthropic gifts, condemnation, and outright purchases. The Outer Banks, he wrote, were “unique among all lands on the earth,” enjoyed a mild year-round climate, and rarely experienced hurricanes. Contrary to popular narratives, he added, meteorological records showed that the Outer Banks were no windier than the New Jersey coast where he had lived for more than a decade. It was a bold claim and likely made to boost his park plan. In private correspondence, Frank often complained about the relentless wind on the Outer Banks. Indeed, only months after writing his proposal, a hurricane struck the Banks, leveling Frank’s pavilion on Kitty Hawk Bay.

At the time, there was only a small section of paved road on the Banks, paralleling the ocean from Kitty Hawk to Whalebone Junction. Frank envisioned constructing a highway the length of the Banks. With his usual confidence, he explained to readers: “This roadway is no fantastic dream; no expansively enthusiastic scheme to attract public or political favor, but a sensible, well thought out project that would prove inestimable economic and esthetic value …”

Frank calculated that a seashore park would attract 50 visitors for every one visitor to an inland mountain, lake or forest. He wasn’t wrong; a seashore park would draw large crowds. But his numbers were wildly exaggerated. In recent years, even with up to 3 million visitors annually, Cape Hatteras National Seashore ranks well behind the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, with its nearly 13 million visitors. Indeed, none of the National Park Service’s 10 national seashores crack the top 10 in attendance for its many parks.

Frank ended his proposal by suggesting that a seashore park could be dedicated to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the newly elected president. It was a savvy political move but probably unnecessary. The administration was already looking for projects for its New Deal relief programs and had embraced legislation calling for the development of recreational areas and public parks. Within a year or two, the Work Progress Administration (WPA) and Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) would employ thousands of jobless and homeless Americans, using them to clear and maintain forests, build camps, repair wildlife refuges, and scores of other jobs. The men would provide a ready source of cheap labor for a seashore park.

The idea of a seashore appealed to National Park Service officials, who, like Stick, worried that the nation’s coasts were being bought up by wealthy Americans, shutting out everyone else. “When we look up and down the ocean fronts of America, we find that everywhere they are passing behind the fence of private ownership,” wrote Harold Ickes, Secretary of The Department of Interior, which includes the National Park Service.

The Park Service sent Marion Shuffler, a researcher, to study the possibility of using the Outer Banks as America’s first national seashore. Shuffler reported back that the economy of the Outer Banks was in serious decline “and tied to a way of life that no longer exists.” He then argued that the future of the Banks depended on tourism, tied to a park. A subsequent study identified a dozen possible locations for federal seashores but settled on the Outer Banks as the best choice.

The momentum was now behind Frank’s proposal. All he needed was for the politics to align.

~

Frank Stick didn’t think of himself as a political person. He called himself “a lefty” but that appeared to be a joke. He complained about some of the New Deal programs and criticized government bureaucrats who never acted quickly enough for his mercurial tastes. If anything, his politics veered more Republican than Democratic.

In a strange twist, in 1940, the FBI office in Charlotte opened an investigation of Frank after they received information that “Frank Stick is an individual who is in favor of dictatorships and opposed to the democratic form of government in this country,” records show. Edward Scheidt, the Special Agent in Charge, asked Victor Meekins, the Dare County Sheriff, to investigate. A few days later, Meekins wrote the agent that Frank had originally been a Republican but was now trying to “adjust himself … to Democratic sentiment.” Meekins added that Frank appeared to be loyal to his country but perhaps became confused at times. “With a world gone hay-wire, he probably is perplexed himself, and scatters remarks without discreetly remembering who is listening.” The Bureau dropped its probe.

After being appointed to a state commission established to promote an Outer Banks park, Frank bristled at the slow pace of those working with him and sometimes took matters into his own hands, traveling to Washington and Raleigh to push his proposal. Over the next few years, Frank worked tirelessly on his vision and was a relentless letter-writer to politicians and key government officials, urging them to move more quickly.

In Frank’s mind, the window for a park was limited. Residents of the Outer Banks had responded favorably to his proposal. But Frank knew there were limits to their enthusiasm. Like him, they had a tenuous relationship with the government. They liked when the government built them roads and bridges. But they worried that the park might be a land grab and restrict their ability to move about freely, hunting and fishing. Their concerns – as well as missteps by the government, and the coming war – would delay the seashore for years.

Park Service officials admired Frank’s energy and dedication, especially Conrad L. Wirth, a Washington, D.C.-based administrator who helped to plan the National Seashore and eventually would be named NPS director. Publicly, Wirth praised Frank. But privately he worried that Frank had “ulterior motives” and might be pushing the park to boost the value of his remaining real estate. It was a classic case of supply and demand. If the government controlled large swaths of the Banks, the remaining land in private hands would go up in price. In a letter to Maud, Frank once noted that if the park were approved, it would be good for them and might help to turn around the family’s fortunes. Of course, Frank wouldn’t have been the only one to benefit. In any event, the two ideas, pushing for a large swath of the Outer Banks to be preserved and encouraging a vibrant tourist economy, weren’t mutually exclusive in Frank’s mind.     

Throughout this period, Frank worked closely with Lindsay C. Warren, the congressman from nearby Washington, in Beaufort County, who represented the Outer Banks. Like Stick and others, Warren saw the future of the isolated barrier islands as tied to tourism. Warren was young, 36, ambitious and eager for headlines. In 1937, he introduced legislation in the House to create the Cape Hatteras National Seashore, and also played an instrumental role in directing millions of New Deal dollars to Eastern North Carolina and the Banks.

When FDR unveiled the WPA and CCC, Warren saw an opportunity and began lobbying the administration. In May 1935, FDR invited Warren to spend a weekend on his yacht, Potomac, along with Harry Hopkins, the President’s right-hand man on the New Deal. Two weeks later, Warren announced that the WPA was setting aside over $1 million dollars to fight erosion and help “stabilize” the Outer Banks.

Like most barrier islands, which are constantly shifting, the Outer Banks suffered from chronic erosion. The problem was especially acute near the historic Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, which was being undermined and was at risk of collapsing into the Atlantic Ocean. Following publication of Frank’s proposal, a cadre of state foresters and geologists visited the Banks to study the issue. They concluded that the Outer Banks (let alone a park) would not survive without human intervention. They proposed a towering artificial sand dune to prevent sand from washing across the islands in storms. The barrier would extend from the Virginia border to Ocracoke Island.

Frank never mentioned erosion or the supposedly ragged condition of the Banks’ sand dunes in his proposal. Nevertheless, he quickly endorsed the idea as his own, contending that a stable dune was needed to protect the asphalt road he envisioned running the length of the Banks. Later, he directed a crew at one of the eight government camps on the Banks that housed thousands of itinerant workers building the dunes.

Years later, in 1973, the NPS would abandon its dune-building activities. Erosion was a natural part of barrier island migration, scientists said, and blocking sand from washing across the islands and elevating the interiors was a mistake. The artificial dune also provided a false sense of security, the scientists wrote, encouraging development in areas prone to flooding and storms. By then, the Service had spent millions of dollars moving around sand. State engineers had spent millions more.  

America’s first national seashore didn’t officially open until 1953. By then, Frank Stick had moved on to new ideas and interests, including new real estate deals. His son David would assume the family lead in helping the seashore into existence, working closely with state and federal officials, writing articles, and giving talks.

Next in the series: Southern Shores

Part of a history series examining each of North Carolina’s 20 coastal counties.

Coastal North Carolina is made up of a wide variety of historic towns, marshes, sounds and beaches but only a small percentage of the coastal area is the Outer Banks, that set of barrier islands most tourists consider when they think about the state’s coast.

Much of the Outer Banks is in Dare County, which stretches from Old Caffey’s Inlet south to Hatteras Inlet, and west on the mainland to the Alligator River, according to “The formation of the North Carolina counties, 1663-1943” by David Leroy Corbitt.

Dare County played a key role in two early North Carolina settlements. It was the site of the Sir Walter Raleigh colonies, the first attempts by the English to permanently settle in the New World. The last of these colonies, John White’s 1587 colony, disappeared sometime between 1587 and 1590.

Eighty years later, the land was part of the original Albemarle settlements. One of the earliest Albemarle land grants was in 1663 to one of the Lords Proprietor, Sir John Colleton, for the Outer Banks island now known as Collington Island. This plantation was not profitable for agriculture and soon failed. But it introduced the practice of livestock cultivation on the Outer Banks, a popular method of economic activity since animals on islands did not need to be fenced.

Life on the Outer Banks changed little for the next two centuries.

A small number of residents on the mainland farmed commercially, but most made their living through commerce, livestock and fishing. There was a modest number of African Americans living in the county. Tyrrell County, of which most of Dare County was then a part, had an enslaved population that was 33% of the total population according to the 1860 Hergesheimer map, one of the lowest percentages in eastern North Carolina.

The area received a jolt in 1861 with the beginning of the Civil War. Union armies captured Hatteras and then Roanoke Island in 1862 in a major operation led by Union general, Ambrose Burnside.

Hatteras was also supposed to be the center of a new loyal government for the state in 1861. The government never received support outside of Hatteras, however, and fell apart within a few months. During the war, Roanoke Island became a center for settlement known as the Freedmen’s Colony, where plantations were seized and handed over to freed African Americans.

Although Freedmen’s Colony on Roanoke Island only lasted until the end of the war, African Americans continued to play a role in the county long afterwards.

While many left due to a lack of arable land, some African Americans stayed. One was Richard Etheridge, who lived on Roanoke Island before eventually enlisting in the Union Army and being deployed to Texas.

After the war, Etheridge came back and led the Pea Island Lifesaving Station, the only all-African American crew in the lifesaving service. Etheridge served on the post for 21 years, dying  on the job in 1900. The Coast Guard, the successor to the United States Life-Saving Service, awarded Etheridge and his crew the Gold Lifesaving Medal in 1996, and a statue honoring Etheridge was dedicated in Manteo in 2010.

In 1870, the eastern section of Tyrrell County pushed for new local representation. Many residents on the Outer Banks were miles away from the county courthouse in Columbia. They received a new county that year named for Virginia Dare, the first English child born in the New World. The formation of Dare County led immediately to the establishment of Manteo, the county seat, where a courthouse was built in 1904.

Versions of the county’s two major lighthouses, Cape Hatteras and Bodie Island, were built that decade and have served as symbols for the Outer Banks ever since. County formation also set in motion a uniquely loose governing structure, owing to the difficulty of transportation in the mostly aquatic county. As David Stick wrote in his history of Dare County, “As recently as the 1940s it was frequently said that there were two ways to do things in North Carolina: either the Dare County way, or the way they were done in the other ninety-nine counties.”

The early 20th century witnessed several significant moments in the history of Dare County. In 1903, the Wright Brothers made the first successful manned, powered flight from a particularly tall dune at Kill Devil Hills. This great achievement led to the county being internationally known, with a triumphant monument built overlooking the beach in 1932. The monument, Wright Brothers National Memorial, administered by the National Park Service, became well known in its own right and was the scene of the climax in the 1983 science fiction film, “Brainstorm.”

The Wright Brothers brought fame and a handful of tourists to the Outer Banks. But a construction project finished in 1928 changed the area forever. Once the first span bearing the name opened, the Washington Baum Bridge turned Dare County into one of the most visited areas in the state. The current Baum bridge was completed in 1994.

That first bridge was soon joined by the Wright Memorial Bridge in Currituck County in 1930 and, later, the Bonner Bridge in 1963. David Stick notes that as a result of bridge construction, the developed areas of Outer Banks beaches expanded from around a mile in the 1910s to 75 miles by 1970.

The past 70 years have seen considerable buildup throughout Dare County.

David Stick, the historian, became a major developer of the community known as Southern Shores. Dare County’s population as of 2021 is 37,826, a 685% increase from 1950, and more than 10 times the population of neighboring Tyrrell County. The only areas that have escaped the influx of tourists and new residences are the swamps on the mainland and the areas protected by the federal government.

Much of the northern tip of Roanoke Island is part of the federal Fort Raleigh National Historic Site, which operates the theater where the outdoor drama, “The Lost Colony” is staged every summer. There is also a wildlife refuge on Pea Island as well as the Cape Hatteras National Seashore, the first national seashore.

Dare County, unlike a number of other coastal counties, has substantial economic activity and nearly as many tourists as its infrastructure can handle. There are more restaurants in one small Outer Banks hamlet than in entire Albemarle region. But Dare County is facing the increasingly evident effects of climate change and rising sea levels. Balancing the desires of tourists with the need to remain resilient and protect natural resources will continue to be a challenge.

Part of a history series examining each of North Carolina’s 20 coastal counties.

Most of the earliest English settlers in North Carolina lived on the northern side of the Albemarle Sound. Their settlements built the foundation of North Carolina and evolved into the Colony’s first towns and political centers.

At this same time, the English were settling slightly to the west of the Albemarle Sound near the Chowan River. One of the first areas in which they built homes and plantations later became Bertie County. This county, which turns 300 years old this year, has been a center of political leadership, agricultural wealth and local tourism ever since the earliest times in Colonial North Carolina.

English settlement of the Cashie River and areas west of the Chowan River began in the mid-17th century. Some of the earliest immigrants such as Nathaniel Batts and Samuel Stephens lived near the confluence of Salmon Creek and Chowan River. Settlers following their lead moved either south from Virginia or west from the Albemarle region. They established corn and then tobacco plantations. These efforts were relatively successful, as farmers could take advantage of the rich alluvial land of the Cashie, Roanoke and Chowan rivers.

Plantations also used these rivers for transportation and connections with Colonial government on the eastern side of the Chowan. In addition to agriculture, the county produced staves and other wood products from its abundant timber resources.

The area that became Bertie County also played a strategic role in the Colony’s early treatment of Native Americans. While the earliest settlers bought land from local Native Americans and coexisted with them, outright theft and exclusion soon became the English policy. Tensions caused by this policy led to the Tuscarora War of 1711-1713. After the English victory, the Tuscarora, who had signed treaties with the Colony, were granted a reservation in present-day southern Bertie County known as Indian Woods.

In his history of Bertie County, Alan Watson notes that by 1801, “finding little sympathy among the white populace and having their land taken in (a) callous fashion, the aged, dwindling remnant of the Tuscarora (at Indian Woods) soon proved ready to move northward.” The Tuscarora sold the last rights to their land in 1831.

Following the Tuscarora War, the region west of the Chowan River quickly gained enough English residents to petition for a new county. In 1722, that petition was granted. A new county was formed, with its eastern boundary being the Chowan River and its western boundary being the “limits of the government,” according to Daniel Leroy Corbitt. Bertie County was named after two Lords Proprietor of North Carolina, James and Henry Bertie.

The centerpiece of town settlement in Bertie County was Windsor, formed at the head of navigation of the Cashie River. Windsor, named for the royal castle in England and incorporated in 1768, was one of the last towns in North Carolina sanctioned by the British monarchy. It joined other Colonial towns established in the 1760s including Salem, Winton and Charlotte. Windsor became the county seat of Bertie County in 1774. The present courthouse off King Street was built in 1889.

Bertie County was an economically successful antebellum county. It became the site of several plantations and plantation homes that have survived to the present day. The most notable was Hope Plantation, built in 1803 by future North Carolina governor David Stone. There was also Rosefield, built in the mid-18th century — present building first constructed circa 1786 — and at one point the home of William Blount, one of North Carolina’s three signers of the Constitution.

Blount later, as a senator from Tennessee, was found to have committed treason by plotting to hand French territory in the South over to Britain. “When will we cease to have Judases?” Abigail Adams wrote in a letter to her sister when she learned of Blount’s plans. Blount later became the first and only senator to be expelled from Congress outside of the Civil War years.

Bertie County was mostly spared during the Civil War. It did not suffer a destructive fire like Winton or a significant battle like Plymouth. But following the war, the county’s economy was devastated like the rest of the state. Planters had to shift away from previous staples and toward newer crops such as peanuts and later soybeans. Bertie County eventually became the leading peanut-producing county in the state.

The political system shifted as well. In the years after Reconstruction, the county was in the 2^nd Congressional District and was represented by two African Americans, Henry Cheatham and George White, during the 1880s and 1890s. Bertie remains one of 20 majority-minority counties in the state.

The 20th century saw Bertie County continue the slow, mostly rural growth that characterized much of eastern North Carolina. Bertie County did not turn toward industry at the same scale as Plymouth or Elizabeth City. However, the county’s agriculture and location near U.S. 64 meant that it did not remain as isolated as Gates County to the north. Instead, Bertie’s towns mostly stayed small and continued with the same stores and patterns that had always characterized town life.

Despite the county’s slow growth, there were several influential people who hailed from Bertie County during the 20th century. These included Negro Leagues pitcher Willie Wynn, actor Jeorge Bennett Watson and University of North Carolina leader George T. Winston. There was also Joanna Houston Ransom, an influential university administrator who once helped lead the association of African American fraternities and sororities known as the Pan-Hellenic Council.

As for important businesses, one of North Carolina’s most well-known barbecue restaurants, Bunn’s Barbecue, opened in Windsor in 1938. Bunn’s received recognition in 2013 as one of LocalEats’s best barbecue restaurants in America. The Bertie County Peanuts company, Powell & Stokes, is also famous. In 2013, according to the Winston-Salem Journal, “the company shipped nearly 200,000 pounds of packaged peanuts as far away as Japan.”

The agricultural focus of previous decades has shifted somewhat in recent years, particularly in Windsor. The town of Windsor and its businesses have attempted to turn the small town into a tourist destination. They have done so by taking advantage of the natural environment of the town and its unique attributes. The town has publicized Livermon Park and its connected miniature zoo. It has also built tree houses on the Cashie River that appeal to campers and kayakers.

Bertie County today is in an interesting middle ground between eastern North Carolina regions. It is close enough to U.S. 64 and Elizabeth City to benefit from some beach and town development. But it is far enough away to retain much of its agricultural heritage and small-town charm.

The construction of Interstate 87 has the potential to increase Bertie County’s connections to Norfolk and the Albemarle region. But for now, it appears that the community will continue as a farm county with a niche tourism business for the foreseeable future.

This is the fourth installment in a continuing series on making the North Carolina coast more resilient to the effects of climate change, a special reporting project that is part of the Pulitzer Center’s nationwide Connected Coastlines initiative.

The treehouses were an early sign that Windsor, Bertie’s county seat, was onto something. When there’s a river running right through your town, resilience requires finding creative ways to coexist with the river.

“It’s a source of flooding, but it’s also a source of recreation,” County Commissioner Ron Wesson said of the Cashie River.

So, five years ago, the town took the boring concept of flood adaptation and made it fun — and a revenue-producing tourist attraction. Accessible via an elevated boardwalk, two treehouses were built among the cypress canopy along the river, each with a sleeping loft and basic furnishings, with a shared bathroom facility available nearby.

Now there’s a “village” of three of the rugged cabins, elevated safely — and irresistibly — above the water. They’re so popular, with weekend bookings filled straight through the summer, that the town is proposing to add two more.

“Two of them have trees coming through the middle of them,” Wesson said in a recent interview.

Canoes and platforms are also available to rent for “glampers,” or those who enjoy glamorous camping, rounding out offerings for the region’s nascent ecotourism industry.

Positioned in the center of the Albemarle-Pamlico estuarine system, Bertie County — specifically, Windsor — in the last two decades has suffered some of the worst repeated flooding disasters in inland northeastern North Carolina, an area increasingly beset by changing climate impacts such as flooding from rising sea levels and intense rains.

In 1999, downtown Windsor was inundated with more than 6 feet of floodwater during Hurricane Floyd, destroying dozens of homes, businesses and public buildings. It flooded dramatically again in 2016 during Hurricane Julia. Then, just three weeks later, Hurricane Matthew drove 7 feet of water into the town, destroying nearly 40 homes and numerous businesses.

The one-two punch in 2016 shook Bertie officials into realizing expert help was needed to forestall a future of constant flooding.

But after numerous scientists and engineers evaluated drainage and flooding dynamics in the Cashie River Basin, there were no easy answers.

“We have three major rivers that come together,” Wesson said. “When those rivers back up, it dumps that water into our communities, Windsor especially.”

Potential remedies, such as diverting water to retention ponds or spillways, he said, would help, although it would most likely only reduce the worst flooding instead of preventing it entirely. And although more buildings are being elevated on pilings, even that tactic is not failsafe or always possible.

Considering the billions in mitigation costs the town faces — or accept the loss of the community — town leaders are now making long-term plans to gradually relocate to higher ground.

“There is no real major solution,” Wesson conceded.

On March 17, Windsor was one of 25 communities to be awarded a total of $675,000 in funding through the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality Division of Coastal Management’s new Resilient Coastal Communities Program. The grant funds will go toward assessing the community risk and planning, selecting and prioritizing projects, as well as engagement of citizens in the process.

Windsor, however, is just one of numerous areas within the Albemarle-Pamlico estuary forced to contend with increased amounts and days of flooding. The estuarine system, the nation’s second-largest behind the Chesapeake, has 3,000 square miles of open water, encompasses six river basins and eight sounds — the Albemarle, Pamlico, Back, Bogue, Core, Croatan, Currituck and Roanoke — and spans from the central North Carolina coast to southeastern Virginia, according to the Albemarle-Pamlico National Estuarine Partnership. It’s got enough total estuarine shoreline — 9,115 miles — and freshwater rivers and streams — 9,299 miles — to cross the country three times.

In 2006, there were 2.5 million acres of wetlands and 4.5 million acres of farmland recorded, although losses have been steadily occurring over the years since. And it has the largest amount of pocosin wetlands in the world.

To retired East Carolina University coastal geology professor Stan Riggs, the region needs to appreciate the ecotourism “golden goose” that exists in its rich natural resources: miles of quiet waters, hundreds of acres of swamp and forests filled with wildlife and star-lit dark skies unsullied by city lighting.

“People go on U.S. 64 and they go to the beach,” he said in a 2020 interview. “They never get off the highway.”

By promoting the region, its residents will find another approach to making a living with its land and water.

“This is a new resource out there. All of this used to be farming land and timberland,” Riggs said. “Alligator River — we ditched it and ditched it and ditched it. You can’t ditch it anymore because the seas are rising. Because of sea level rise that’s taken place since 1700 … it’s rising now more and more. That water comes up a little bit higher.

“Half of those counties are at sea level — it didn’t used to be that way,” he said. “We can’t farm them. We can’t log them anymore. So, let’s recreate with them!”

Riggs has worked closely with Bertie County officials in helping the community understand its flood risk. But as part of a nonprofit initiative that he chairs, the N.C. Land of Water — the focus is on the 17 counties in the northeast corner of the state, which have been hit with dual stresses of economic decline and environmental challenges from climate change.

“When I started here 55 years ago, there were working people out there on the water,” he recalled. “Everybody had a little boat, they’d go out on these black waters. Those waters are absolutely beautiful. All those streams that come into the Albemarle — awesome, awesome for kayaking. We can bring people from all over the world to paddle these waters.”

An early success in the NC LOW effort is an outdoor recreation project in Bertie called Tall Glass of Water, which recently opened the first public beach in all the Albemarle Sound communities.

But Riggs’ and NC LOW’s shared mission is one of a growing number of efforts to foster coastal resilience.

Reide Corbett, executive director of the multi-institutional Coastal Studies Institute in Wanchese and dean of the Integrated Coastal Program at ECU, has been providing data and, when possible, scientists to local communities to help them mitigate climate impacts.

“I think it’s critical that communities really start thinking about resilience,” he said recently. “Certainly, we need to think about changes we want to have in place after an event. The discussion about what that policy is has to happen before that event.”

But the first step is for a community to define what resilience means to the people there, he cautioned. Is it bouncing back from storm damage? Or is it being proactive about determining responsive options to the impacts of an event?

Being resilient is not simply putting a building back, he said.

“It involves the ecosystem, your economy, the biosphere,” Corbett said. “The concept of resilience needs to think about that interaction, that codependence and the economy that’s built. We have to frame that concept of resilience … That’s important to us, to educate the citizenry. That’s something that we need to do — sort of frame that concept. That’s something that’s done through education.”

Corbett said he is encouraged by Gov. Roy Cooper’s efforts to mitigate climate change impacts and the state’s recent outreach to communities to assist in their resilience planning.

“It’s going to take time to make significant changes,” he said. “We went years, essentially, with no science. We’ve come a long way since 2010.”

One effort that also involves the Coastal Studies Institute — among multiple other universities and agencies in the state and beyond — recently launched is C-Coast, which stands for the Collaboratory for Coastal Adaptation over Space and Time. A North Carolina-focused program funded by the National Science Foundation to address a range of challenges in coastal resilience, C-Coast is a network of coastal researchers, stakeholders and practitioners who collaborate on work that fosters better understanding of human interaction with the natural coastal system.

“We envision C-Coast having perhaps a core of participants,” said Laura Moore, professor of coastal geomorphology at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and the director of C-Coast. “But we also see C-Coast as a broad network.”

Even though its initial focus is on North Carolina, she added, the work that’s done will be useful to researchers and stakeholders from other regions.

C-Coast’s “theme,” Moore explained, is “connecting short term decision-making to long-term outcomes, and understanding what are the ways in which the connection between the short-term and long-term can be influenced by different actors in the process.”

As an example, Moore said, when a road is covered in sand during a storm, does removal of the sand — an island’s land — inadvertently weaken the long-term resilience of the island’s landscape?

“We aren’t looking to advocate for any particular outcome or particular future,” Moore said. “We’re looking to understand the decision process, how short-term decisions lead to long-term outcome.”

James “Bo” Dame, professor of biology and physical sciences at Chowan University in Murfreesboro, has involved students in research on water quality impacts, ideally as a way to answer specific questions, such as influences of water quality on submerged aquatic vegetation, or the health of frogs and toads.

Dame said that he is about to launch a water quality monitoring program this spring with his students near the Tall Glass of Water project on the Albemarle Sound in Bertie County.

Although the Chowan River, which empties into the northwest end of the Albemarle, in recent years has been plagued with algal blooms during the warm months, Dame said the problem happens closer to Edenton and has not been evident at the end where they’ll be working.

Their work won’t solve the Chowan’s algal issue, he said, but he hopes it will contribute to improving water quality in the area around the site.

Dame said he and the students will probably be sampling about a half-dozen locations on the northwest edge of the Albemarle Sound from Salmon Creek to the U.S. 17 bridge. Although specifics have yet to be decided, water quality monitoring could be looking at levels of phosphorus, salinity, dissolved oxygen, temperature, or clarity, turbidity chlorophyll, nutrients, nitrogen and phosphorus.

Considering Bertie’s relatively small place in the vast and complex Albemarle-Pamlico estuarine system, Dame said that its active role in resilience planning, economic adaptation and sustainable environmental restoration may be a positive contagion to other communities in the region.

The key to the appeal of Tall Glass of Water, which will include not just opportunities to camp and swim, but also to kayak, canoe and hike on trails, is the combination of environment, ecotourism and especially education, he said.

When Dame teaches his young adult students, he finds them receptive and open to climate issues, he said, but it’s still a battle with education and science literacy.

“This project feeds into that and it provides a perfect opportunity to make young people more aware of their environment, to get them out in the mud and whatever you find outdoors,” he said about Tall Glass of Water. “That’s usually when the lights go on. That’s when they get excited.”

Reprinted from Outer Banks Voice

Dare County Board of Commissioners approved during its regular meeting Monday spending $814,640 in Tourism Impact Grant awards on seven projects including building restrooms for the Manteo Town Common Project and range improvements at the Outer Banks Gun Club.

As explained by Outer Banks Visitors Bureau Executive Director Lee Nettle, who appeared before the commissioners at the meeting to request consent for the expenditures, the Tourism Impact Grant awards are designed to fund services that are needed because of the impact of tourism. After a few minutes of discussion, the appropriation won unanimous approval.

The $814,640 includes approval of the following:

• $342,640 for the Hatteras Village Multi-Modal Pathway. The funds will help construct a 3.19-mile, 5-foot wide loop along N.C. 12 and Eagle Pass Road through Hatteras Village.
•  $200,000 for Meekins Field Community Park in Kill Devil Hills. The park will include two multi-use playing fields, playground equipment, three picnic shelters, restroom facilities, splash pad, walking paths, tennis courts, an art wall, expanded parking and upgraded lighting.
•  $150,000 for Manteo Town Common Phase II. This phase involves the construction of restrooms, informational kiosks, seating and other amenities including Wi-Fi service.
•  $40,000 for the sidewalk at Admiral Street in Nags Head. This project will build a safe pedestrian connection along the north side of Admiral Street by the MP 10.5 Shoppes Access from the traffic light at N.C. 158 to Wrightsville Avenue.
•  $30,000 for the Nags Head Skate Park. This involves the design and installation of new skate park elements on the western half of the skate park to better incorporate functional public art and accommodate all abilities and ages.
• $40,000 for environmental improvements to the Baum Bridge boating area. This will replace part of the parking lot as pervious concrete and install pervious geogrid pavement area to protect and restore water quality and minimize the negative impacts of the boating access on the waters of the Roanoke Sound.
•  $12,000 for the Outer Banks Gun Club for range improvements. This will help replace security cameras; install a parking area to help avoid parking on the soft grass or muddy areas; install a concrete pad on the new Trap field; and install a carport structure.

Also during the meeting, the four incumbents were sworn in: Bob Woodard and Steve House, who both faced opposition, and Danny Couch and Wally Overman, who were unopposed.  Woodard and Overman were then quickly, and without opposition, re-elected as board chair and vice-chair, respectively.

In his remarks at the opening of the meeting, Woodard — who along with the other commissioners was wearing a mask on the podium — made an impassioned argument for people to follow the mask-wearing, social-distancing and hand-washing guidelines in light of the current spike of COVID-19.

Noting that the percentage of positive COVID-19 tests in the week ending on Friday, Dec. 4 had reached 7.17% and that about one-third of all the Dare County cases since March were reported in November, Woodard stated that, “I once again plead with everyone out therein the community to please do your part.”

BOGUE BANKS – While coastal tourism can boost the local economy, it also can boost nutrients in the groundwater, results of a recent study suggest.

Michael O’Driscoll, associate professor in East Carolina University’s Department of Coastal Studies, and a group of researchers studied how coastal tourism and facilities that treat small communities’ and developments’ onsite wastewater called package treatment plants, or PTPs, affect groundwater nitrogen levels on a barrier island, in this case, Bogue Banks in Carteret County, which lacks central sewer.

“Results suggested that coastal tourism can increase wastewater nitrogen inputs and affect groundwater quality,” O’Driscoll told Coastal Review Online, adding that if groundwater quality is affected with elevated nutrients, there is the potential to also affect surface water quality.

Because many coastal communities treat and dispose of wastewater onsite, the question researchers sought to answer was whether the seasonal increase in population would affect water quality, leading to the pilot study funded by East Carolina University.

Along with O’Driscoll, Eban Bean, an assistant professor and extension specialist of urban water resources engineering at the University of Florida, Nick Mahoney, environmental health specialist for Union County, and Charlie Humphrey with ECU’s Environmental Health Sciences developed the study.

Mahoney focused on the effectiveness of package treatment plants for his graduate research at ECU in geological sciences. He completed his master’s thesis on the topic in 2016.

“The group recognized that there was a growing reliance on package treatment plants along North Carolina’s coast, but there was limited published information,” O’Driscoll said. “This project was developed to help fill in some knowledge gaps to help understand what types of systems were most common, how effective those systems were at treating nutrients, and how they are affected by large seasonal changes in wastewater inputs due to coastal tourism.”

The team tested once a month from February 2014 to January 2015 the nitrogen removal effectiveness of PTPs that use different technologies – extended aeration, sequencing batch reactor and advanced media filtration — to treat wastewater at seven different vacation properties. The state Department of Health and Human Services gave direction and supporting data while volunteers on Bogue Banks provided site access and data that allowed the group to monitor the seven package plants for a year. Carteret County provided additional supporting data and help.

Nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus are vital for plants and animals, but an excess of certain nutrients in water can result in a number of adverse health and ecological effects, according to the United States Geological Survey.

O’Driscoll presented the results of the study during the North Carolina Water Resources Research Institute’s annual conference March 21-22 in Raleigh. He said he expects to have the final version of the study, which is still under review, later in the summer.

According to his presentation, Bogue Banks had a year-round population of 7,413 in 2015, with the largest year-round community being Emerald Isle at 3,726. Those numbers grow dramatically during vacation season.

“In the town of Atlantic Beach, the population can grow from 1,781 year-round residents to approximately 28,000 overnight visitors during summer tourism season. When scaled up for the entire island it is estimated that during summer the island has over 50,000 residents,” O’Driscoll noted in his presentation. “The year-round population has been growing rapidly since the 1960s. For example, Emerald Isle had 14 year-round residents in 1960 and the population expanded to 3,726 by 2015.”

Along with the large population spike during summer comes increased water use and wastewater generation.

“Wastewater is typically enriched with nutrients, so effective wastewater treatment is essential to control nutrient loading in these sensitive areas,” O’Driscoll said in an interview, which is where PTPs come in.

PTPs are increasingly being used in coastal communities because they can manage larger wastewater loads during summer months, when there is an influx of visitors.

“Treatment can vary at different systems and also throughout the year based on how much wastewater is delivered to the system, how warm it is and what the wastewater is composed of. Since most of the treated wastewater goes underground, it is important to understand if the wastewater is treated properly and if the groundwater quality is impacted,” he said.

Because wastewater treatment is not centralized in coastal communities, there can be a large number of individual systems.

“Although each system may have a small nutrient contribution compared to a large municipal wastewater treatment system, in areas where there are high densities of onsite systems there is evidence that the groundwater and surface water quality can be impaired by excess nutrients,” he said.

“If groundwater contamination occurs, those contaminants can be transported by the groundwater system to nearby surface waters such as the ocean, estuaries, ponds and canals,” he said. Nitrate is one form of nitrogen commonly exported from these systems and is mobile in sandy soils. “So it can be transported to surface waters, unless it gets treated in the subsurface or taken up by vegetation or microorganisms.”

If the elevated nitrogen concentrations affect nearby surface waters, impairments such as harmful algal blooms and reduced water clarity are possible and may affect where visitors can swim, recreate or fish. O’Driscoll added that algal blooms can be enhanced during warm, sunny periods if nutrients are present.

He added that PTPs are usually managed by experienced operators and the state and counties have regulatory oversight, which is “critical to ensure that human and environmental health risks associated with contact and ingestion of wastewater contaminants such as bacteria, viruses, and nutrients, are minimized,” he said.

O’Driscoll said that the state is “making substantial efforts to deal with excess nutrients in surface waters, however the past focus has often been on agricultural and urban runoff, and municipal and industrial wastewater treatment plants” but because onsite wastewater systems tend to be spread out across the landscape and inject wastewater below ground, management has not focused on nutrient reduction for these systems.

“There is a growing body of evidence that onsite wastewater can also be a source of nutrients in nutrient-sensitive coastal watersheds. Onsite wastewater treatment systems rely on the treatment processes and the soils to perform wastewater treatment,” he said. “When wastewater moves slowly through the soils and there is a deep water table, systems have a good chance of providing adequate treatment prior to that wastewater effluent reaching the groundwater below.”

Coastal areas may need improved technologies and greater oversight because of the sandy soils that can infiltrate water quickly and the common presence of shallow groundwater, which Is usually less than 10 feet from the surface.

Sea level rise is another factor to consider in North Carolina.

“It is likely that the groundwater table will rise in coastal areas in the future. These changes may affect the treatment efficiency of onsite wastewater treatment systems because rising groundwater levels can cause a reduction in the thickness of unsaturated soils that help to treat the waste,” he said.

Also, more research is needed to understand which onsite wastewater systems will be most effective to handle shallow water tables and coastal storms in the future to ensure that groundwater quality and the adjacent surface water quality are not compromised.

O’Driscoll said that people can lessen their impact by conserving water to reduce nutrient loading, because wastewater nutrient loading is related to the amount of water used.

HUBERT – The North Carolina Department of Transportation is touting its first passenger-only ferry, a high-speed, aluminum-hull catamaran being built here, as a way to provide a higher level of service to coastal travelers and boost tourism on the state’s Outer Banks.

State and company officials hosted last week an open house for media at US Workboats’ manufacturing plant on the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway in Hubert, an unincorporated community in Onslow County near Swansboro. The company is building the 92-foot-long, 26-foot-wide Ocracoke Express passenger ferry that will operate from Hatteras Island to Ocracoke Island’s Silver Lake Harbor. Officials expect service to begin by mid-summer.

“Our goal is to get those tourism levels back to where they were,” White said.

In 2013, shoaling in Hatteras Inlet prompted the Ferry Division to switch to a longer, deeper route between Hatteras and Ocracoke, the most heavily used route in the state’s ferry service. What was once a 35- to 40-minute, 4.5-mile crossing for the Hatteras-Ocracoke vehicle ferry is now about an hourlong, 9-mile trip.

The effects of the change were “dramatic,” according to the state’s feasibility study. Daily crossings in each direction were reduced from 53 to 36, and fuel and labor costs increased by more than $7,000 each day. The change also created long queues at the ferry terminals, making it difficult for visitors to the Outer Banks to make a day trip to Ocracoke. Local business owners blamed their lost business revenue on fewer day-trippers.

“The projected loss of between 31,000 and 50,000 visitors to Ocracoke in the peak months could be attributed to the lower levels of service caused by the longer route,” according to the study.

Almost all Ocracoke business owners surveyed for the study said that long wait times at ferry docks were a major challenge to their business.

Plans call for the 100-passenger ferry to use Rollinson Channel to access the Pamlico Sound and Big Foot Slough to access Silver Lake, making four round-trips daily with the first departure from Hatteras at 10 a.m. and the last departure from Ocracoke at 8:30 p.m., May through September. The round-trip fare will be $15 per passenger.

White said the Ocracoke Express will offer guaranteed boarding, with less wait time at the ferry terminals, compared to vehicle ferries, which will also continue service after the passenger ferry runs begin. The new ferry will also offer amenities such as an air-conditioned passenger cabin with open-air seating on the top deck, concessions and bike racks for passengers wanting to bring their bicycles to Ocracoke.

“You can do the entire thing without a car,” White said, adding that the plan has already sparked private business investment in Ocracoke Village. Some locals are buying golf carts to make available for rent to visitors, she said.

“Entrepreneurs in Ocracoke are seeing this as a wonderful way of experiencing Ocracoke,” she said.

The state in June 2017 awarded the $4.15 million contract to build the ferry. It’s part of an overall $9 million passenger ferry project that also includes parking improvements and visitor facilities at the Hatteras and Ocracoke-Silver Lake terminals. Money for the project is from a grant from the Federal Lands Access Program and an appropriation by the North Carolina General Assembly.

In addition to a faster crossing, the Ocracoke Express will arrive at Silver Lake Harbor in the heart of the village, rather than at the north ferry terminal about 20 minutes and 13.5 miles away, where vehicles from Hatteras Island arrive.

Unlike the vehicle ferries, the shallow conditions in Hatteras Inlet and Pamlico Sound won’t be a problem for the Ocracoke Express. Speed and a shallow draft were the basis for the new ferry’s catamaran design, which drew inspiration from a ferry the division tested in Provincetown, Massachusetts, said Ferry Division spokesman Tim Haas.

“The catamaran hull is perfect for the environment it’s going to be operating in,” Haas said.

The new 95-ton ferry will feature water jet propulsion and four 803-horsepower Caterpillar C18 ACERT marine engines that are advertised as meeting the Environmental Protection Agency’s 2017 Tier 3 emissions standards.

Sheila Pierce Knight, executive director of Jacksonville-Onslow Economic Development, said at the media open house that US Workboats has been “a great success story for eastern North Carolina.”

The Port Angeles, Washington-based company, formerly known as Armstrong Marine, specializes in welded aluminum boat manufacturing. The company in late 2013 announced it would invest more than $8.4 million in the facility in Hubert. Originally a Tiara Yachts manufacturing plant, the site was most recently owned by Brunswick Corp., which built Hatteras Yachts here from 2005 until 2008.

Armstrong Marine completed its first boat made entirely in North Carolina in 2015, a search and rescue boat made for Sullivan’s Island Fire Department in South Carolina.

US Workboats has 24 employees and is adding about three each week, depending on work and space for workers on the vessel, said the company’s Tracy Gable.

Securing the state contract to build the ferry in Onslow County is a source of pride for the community, Knight said.

“It makes sense to have a boat being built for North Carolina Citizens by North Carolina citizens,” she said. “It keeps our tax dollars at home.”

The passenger ferry is one of two builds underway for the Ferry Division. The other vessel is a new river class ferry being built in Louisiana and slated for launch in 2020. The addition of two new vessels is intended to reduce delays and travel times, Haas said.

“Hopefully, we’ll get summer wait times down to a reasonable level,” he said.

The state in October 2017 awarded a $9.7 million contract for construction of the new river class vehicle ferry. That vessel will be 183 feet long and have room for 38 regular-sized vehicles.  It will serve as a replacement for the 22-year-old M/V Thomas A. Baum, a Hatteras-class ferry that carries 26 vehicles.

Once built, the new vessel will be the Ferry Division’s first new car ferry since the M/V Sea Level was christened in 2012.

Learn More

• US Workboats

Imagine data could be plugged into a computer to show exactly how much human presence and interaction the delicate ecology of a popular coastal area could handle before being severely affected.

Would it help with managing national seashores or state parks along the coast?

According to Pat Kenney, superintendent of Cape Lookout National Seashore, yes.

“One of the things – and I’ve been in this business for a long time – that we’re always trying to figure out is: Where is that line, or that sweet spot so to say, that the resources can be preserved for future generations while allowing this level of public use?” Kenney said.

“That is very difficult to determine, but any sort of tools that help us with that would be useful.”

New research out of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill seeks to do just that – help find the “sweet spot” in sustaining ecotourism.

The research is taking place at the school’s Center for Galapagos Studies in the Galapagos Islands, where tourism is booming and the residential population is growing as people flock to the island for higher wages in the ecotourism economy.

The islands are a province of Ecuador more than 600 miles from the mainland. Officials in Ecuador were looking for scenarios of change reflecting the number of tourists and residents the islands could accommodate before they start to lose their luster, according to a press release about the study.

“The Ecuadorian government and the Galapagos National Park are asking the exact right questions,” said Dr. Stephen Walsh, geography professor at UNC-CH and director of the Center for Galapagos Studies. “No one wants a boom-and-bust situation. We want wise, managed growth within the concept of sustainability.”

And while the research is focused on the Galapagos, it can be applied to other locations, Walsh said.

“(Models) could be developed to examine the conflicts between resource conservation and economic development and the impact of tourism, nearby residents, transportation and visitation on the ecological sustainability of special places in North Carolina,” he said.

Such research could be helpful in managing places like the national seashores along the state’s coast.

“Yes, this is the type of information we would find useful,” Kenney with Cape Lookout National Seashore said. “The National Park Service has a preservation mandate first and foremost, and obviously our mission also calls for the use of public enjoyment.

“However, that being said, our main mandate is the preservation of these places for future generations. So any sort of information that would look at managing human use relative to preservation would be useful.”

Kenney noted there are challenges in managing land for public use.

“There’s the political challenges of putting limitations on public use – it’s always a challenge because parks become economic engines for local communities,” he said. “People want to be able to access their parks. So, having good information that can show correlations between too much use resulting in degradation of resources would be important. Having good science to support decisions is really important.”

Dave Hallac, Outer Banks Group superintendent, agreed.

“I would anticipate that that type of science is, yes, something that the park service is very interested in,” he said. “But it’s also something we have been studying and working on I think for many, many years.”

Hallac, who oversees Cape Hatteras National Seashore, Wright Brothers National Memorial and Fort Raleigh National Historic Site, explained that the park service does a lot of research on parks’ carrying capacity, which takes into account things like the visitor experience, the effects on natural and cultural resources and what it takes to manage the park and the flow of visitors.

He used the beach driving regulations for Cape Hatteras National Seashore as an example.

“We actually built a carrying capacity element into our Off Road Vehicle Managament Plan … it’s called vehicle carrying capacity and it’s the maximum number of vehicles allowed on a route at one time (equal to) the length of the route divided by 20 feet,” Hallac said.

“Now whether or not that’s the right statistic – maybe it should be 30 feet or 50 feet or 10 feet – those are the types of things we seek more information on, where we have an incredible opportunity to collect more scientific data.”

Hallac said the park service has traditionally done a good job of collecting data on natural and cultural resources but could use more information about visitors.

“We have a lot of information about the productivity of shorebirds and sea turtles, but we don’t have a lot of information – we don’t collect as much data – on the visitors that come to the park and what their preferences are and what their attitudes and perceptions of the types of experiences that they desire,” Hallac said. “So I think we seek to gain a lot more of that information.”

The research from Walsh’s study could also be a tool for how natural areas are promoted, said Carol Lohr, executive director of the Carteret County Tourism Development Authority.

“The Cape Lookout National Seashore and the horses on Shackleford Banks are … probably the top areas of interest that people – once they’re here – come to see,” Lohr said, noting that protecting the area’s natural resources is important so that visitors have such areas to enjoy.

“I think we are so blessed to have not only the Cape Lookout National Seashore that includes Shackleford Banks and Portsmouth Island, but also the Croatan National Forest, along with Fort Macon State Park, the Rachel Carson Reserve – all that have been basically set aside for recreational use,” Lohr said. “And I think all the administrative branches of all of these areas are looking closely at visitation and the use.”

Walsh’s research could be another tool for local government and land management agencies, she said.

“It appears to be a great resource that we could take a look at and plug our local data in, but the key would be making sure we have accurate local data” on visitation, Lohr said.

Learn More

• Read the research team’s report
• Galapagos National Park

They’re the alternative energy source accused of being bad for tourism and sure to deflate property values.

The stigma attached to wind turbines was preached in heated debates in Carteret County, where a Texas-based energy company recently pulled the plug on a proposed wind and solar facility just outside of Newport.

During the months leading up to Torch Renewable Energy’s decision, opponents of the proposed 40-turbine farm voiced their fears, calling to question potential negative impacts a wind farm might have on the local economy, their health and nearby military operations.

The wind farm’s opponents will likely re-use the arguments to convince the county commissioners to pass stringent zoning restrictions against future wind projects. The commissioners in January passed a 60-day moratorium on such projects while they considered changes to their ordinance on tall structures.

Recent, reputable studies and real-life cases suggest that at least some of the arguments presented in Carteret County may be more hype than fact.

Property Values

Corey Lang

The latest published analysis of wind turbines and their affect on property values determined that turbines operating in Rhode Island have not lowered land and home values.

Corey Lang, a University of Rhode Island assistant professor of natural resource economics, compared over a 15-year period homes near the state’s wind turbines to those further away. There are 12 wind turbines at 10 sites in the state.

Lang examined sale prices of 48,000 homes in Rhode Island.

“We found no statistically significant negative impacts,” Lang said in an interview. “The point estimates were negative, but very, very small. What we can do is, with the confidence in our interval, rule out some very large negative impacts.”

Lang’s government-sponsored study, released last December, examined property values before and after a wind turbine’s construction was announced and also following a turbine’s operation.

He found that turbines may cause a 0.4 percent decline in property values among homes within a half mile of a turbine.

His findings disprove theories that wind turbines deflate property values 10 to 20 percent. But Lang admits there are variances in his study and similar research conducted in other areas of the country.

“This study in Rhode Island was really single turbines,” Lang said. “It’s a very different setting than wind farms with 40 turbines. In terms of what other people have found there have been differences.”

One study conducted in upstate New York revealed there has been a negative impact on property values near wind turbines. According to research conducted by staff at New York’s Clarkson University, property values declined following the development of wind facilities in two of three Northern New York counties.

The research looked at 11,331 property transactions over nine years and determined that property values in one of the counties may have possibly increased.

On average, according to the 2011 study, homes in Franklin and Clinton counties within a half mile of a wind turbine had a loss of property value of anywhere from $10,793 to $19,046, according to the study. The impact was less significant on properties three miles from turbines, where values decreased anywhere from $2,500 to $9,800.

Lang points out that upstate New York is more rural, unlike Rhode Island, which has a dense population. A similar study in Massachusetts, which also has a more dense population, is expected to be released later this year

Tourism

Rather than scaring tourists away, the Lake Winds Energy Park in Mason County, Michigan. has become a tourist attraction. Photo: Lake Winds Energy Park

Opponents of the now-defunct proposed Mill Pond project near Newport argued that Carteret County’s biggest economic resource would suffer if the wind turbine farm was built.

That’s hardly been the case in Ludington, Michigan, where hundreds of visitors tour a land-based wind farm near the Lake Michigan shore.

“It really has not negatively impacted our tourism economy at all,” said Brandy Henderson, executive director of the Ludington Area Convention & Visitors Bureau. “Certainly those who have their homes out near the facility and proposed construction sites, that’s where the most controversy came from. But, the community embraced it overall. We really embrace green energy.”

Lake Winds Energy Park, a 56-turbine facility, is open for public tours throughout the summer, drawing hundreds of visitors to Mason County in western Michigan.

The park’s turbines are 476 feet tall, a sight that drew curious onlookers as soon as constructed on the turbines began, Henderson said.

In 2012, the year the park was completed, free tours offered three days a week during the summer drew 685 people, according to figures provided by Ludington’s Chamber of Commerce. In 2013, 682 visitors toured the park.

“Outside of that schedule a local tour guide provided additional tours that were, I think, $7,” Henderson said. “He also had great success with the tours. All of the tours have been full and very popular. Over the past two years hotels stays have increased.”

Madison County has a population of about 28,000 residents. Its location on a portion of Lake Michigan’s shore makes it a popular place for vacation homes and condos.

Turbines near a different shore, this one just outside Atlantic City, N.J., draw an average of 15,000 visitors each year. The five turbines were the first to be built in that state. They tower above Atlantic City’s sewer plant and are visible to more than 30 million visitors to the city each year.

Wind turbines are also an attraction on the west coast, where, in North Palm Springs, California, tourists pay to visit the oldest wind farm in the United States. Visitors pay upwards of $35 to tour San Gorgonio Wind Park, a sprawling wind farm with about 2,700 turbines.

Health Effects

Noise and and other possible health effects have sparked protests against wind farms across the country.

Concerns that wind turbines may have health impacts related to noise, infrasound, vibrations and shadow flickering have been raised world-wide in the turbine debate.

Numerous studies have been published on the possible health effects caused by wind turbines and critiques of those studies both here and abroad. Still, the verdict is out.

The Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) and that state’s Department of Public Health in January 2012 released a report of scientific findings on potential health impacts of risks that may be associated with exposure to wind turbines.

An independent panel of experts from various academic institutions combed through scientific literature, reports, popular media and public comments received by the Massachusetts DEP. The review was conducted in a state where the goal is to increase its use of wind energy from 40 megawatts to 2,000 megawatts by 2020.

The panel concluded that, overall, existing research shows there is no direct link between wind turbines and health impacts. However, the panel also agreed that more research must be conducted, calling some existing studies inadequate.