North Carolina Marina Finds Alternate Funding for Hurricane Repairs

Damaged by Hurricane Florence in 2018 and Hurricane Dorian the following year, the Town of Carolina Beach’s Municipal Marina anticipated that FEMA funding would help pay for its repairs. But when FEMA decided the damage was due to the marina’s age rather than the storms, the Town found another source of funding: The Golden LEAF Foundation.

The Golden LEAF Foundation was established in 1999 and administers half of the money received by the State of North Carolina in a settlement agreement with tobacco companies. It partners with state and local governments to build economic opportunity in the state via grants and other activities.

The Town of Carolina Beach Municipal Marina has 36 slips used by charter boats and fishing boats, plus nine mooring balls offshore for recreational boaters. After the hurricanes damaged its bulkhead and lifted the walkway for the slips, the Town went ahead and made repairs to the dock on the marina’s west side, without FEMA funding. That dock includes 10 slips as well as dinghies and small boats that come from the mooring field and bring people into town.

“The repairs on the west side were easier, because no street came up to it and we didn’t have to close any roads,” said Larry Denning, harbormaster. The town also did some of this work itself.

The next projects, funded by the Golden Leaf Foundation, will address the concrete bulkhead issues and replace the wooden floating docks on the south side, which can also be done without impacting streets, and the floating docks on the east side, which will require temporary closures of two streets. “That east side project will take the longest to do, and we don’t want to be working on that during tourist season,” said Denning. The new docks will have electrical service and sewer pumpout as well.

The preliminaries of the project are being worked out, Denning said. He does expect that they will hire an outside construction company to do this work. Under the most optimistic scenario, the earliest the work could begin in January 2021.

The City is appealing FEMA’s refusal to provide funds, and if it succeeds it will repay the funds used to rebuild the marina to the Golden Leaf Foundation.