In 2008 the Town of Longboat Key paid outside consultants in excess of 1.9 million dollars. Over the past twelve years the town has paid Coastal Planning and Enginering over six million dollars Camp Dresser& McKee (CDM) were the folks who recommended that we spend over fifty million dollars to supply the island with Reclaimed Water from the City of Sarasota. CDM's project was a total failure for many reasons. From the outset the CDM project had several engineering flaws that doomed the project from before it ever began. The proposed Acquifer Storage and Recovery wells were infeasable as no other municipality had been able to permit the wells successfully . The taxpayers haved paid CDM over 3 million dollars in ten years.

Coastal Planning&Engineering were the folks who told us we needed impermeable groins on the island. No matter that many other coastal communities have found various solutions for maintaining their beaches, CP&E insisted their plan was the only way to go. Millions of dollars later, once again CP&E's plans were proven to be unviable, and we have spent millions more to design semi-permeable groins. Along the way we missed implementing any sort of erosion controls at the "hot spots" resulting in large sand loss in these areas soon after the most recent beach reconstruction.

As far as I know the Town Commission was never told be CP&E that Manatee County does not allow dark sand on their beaches and the Town Commission was never told by CP&E that the City of Sarasota removed dark sand they had placed on Lido Beach and replaced it with white sand in 2003. The Lido Beach white sand held up well through three hurricanes in 2004.

The white sand used in our 2000 renourishment project actually accreted whereas the dark sand has moved steadily southward disfiguring an ever increasing amount of our beautiful white beaches. As of October 2008 there is no sand remaining at the north end of the island adjacent to the Longbeach Condominiums.

And yet CP&E and the town manager put dark sand on our beaches anyway. Now we are the only community around that has dark sand beaches. Is this any way to promote tourism? Is this any way to maintain quality of life on LBK?

What are we getting for the millions of dollars we spend annually on outside consultants?.

Why do we continue to use consultants who repeatedly give us costly inaccurate advice and information?

As commissioner I will see to it that we have a thorough analysis of our use of consultants. During the economic challenges that may confront our island in the next few years, we need to be sure that every tax dollar counts.