Beach renourishment on the First Coast: where, when and what it means for owners.

I’m Krista Fracke. Much of the oceanfront between Fernandina Beach and Flagler Beach sits behind a beach that a public project has rebuilt, and several stretches have had sand more than once. For an owner, that is good news. The Army Corps describes its Flagler County project as built to give up its sand in a storm so the houses, State Road A1A and public facilities behind it don’t have to. The same beach is wider for everyone using it and gives sea turtles and shorebirds more room to nest.

Renourishment means placing sand on an eroded beach, usually dredged from an offshore borrow area and pumped ashore, then shaped into a dune and a wide flat berm. The 2024 Ponte Vedra Beach project, per St. Johns County, rebuilt the dune to 13 to 18 feet, set the berm at 8 feet, and added 40 to 180 feet of beach width. After the 2024 Duval County placement the Corps’ contractor planted 500,000 sea oats and similar dune plants along the 10 miles it had rebuilt.

On Amelia Island the city’s beach renourishment page tracked the 2025 work, the second periodic renourishment of Fernandina Beach under the Nassau County Shore Protection Project. Sand placement started near 2nd Street on May 12, finished south of Sadler Road on July 8, and the beach was handed back to the city for full use on July 23. The page does not post a date for the next round.

The Duval County Shore Protection Project is one of the oldest on this coast. The Corps built it in 1978-80 along about 10 miles from Naval Station Mayport through Hanna Park, Atlantic Beach, Neptune Beach and Jacksonville Beach, and renourished it in 1985-87, 1991, 1995, 2005, 2011 and 2016-17. The 2024 round placed about 1.3 million cubic yards. The City of Jacksonville is the local sponsor, and Atlantic Beach notes that the 2022 federal water resources act extended the project’s eligibility from 2028 to 2040.

Ponte Vedra Beach had a county-led restoration in 2024: about nine miles from the Duval line to the GTM Reserve, more than two million cubic yards, finished in late June, roughly two months ahead of schedule. Most of the money came from the state, per St. Johns County.

South of there the beach is split among three projects. The South Ponte Vedra and Vilano Beach project is a 50-year partnership with the Corps; its first nourishment in 2020/2021 was hit hard by a nor’easter, and the second went down in 2023/2024. The South Ponte Vedra FEMA project between 2539 and 3175 S. Ponte Vedra Blvd. will rebuild a dune with a 15-foot crest and a 40-foot berm, with construction tentatively set for spring 2027. North of it, the Ponte Vedra to South Ponte Vedra project is the newest 50-year partnership: design is projected to start in November 2026, initial construction of 2.15 million cubic yards is potentially slated for summer 2029, and the county lists 10-year renourishment intervals after that.

St. Augustine Beach has the longest record in the county. Per the county’s Shore Protection Project page, sand went down in 2003, 2005, 2012, 2018 and 2024, about 12 million cubic yards across five events, from 4,000 feet north of Pope Road in Anastasia State Park to Ocean Hammock Park. The 2024 round, about 2.5 million cubic yards, finished in September and was fully federal.

At Summer Haven the county’s project page says the Corps plans to dredge the Intracoastal Waterway behind Summer Haven Island in 2027 and put that sand to use on the beach and dune. The county board voted on February 3, 2026 to fund permitting, engineering and design for two Summer Haven projects, one a dune and berm built from overwash sand taken out of the Summer Haven River.

The federal government, the state and the county each can carry part of the bill, in different shares on each project. On a federal project the Corps pays a share and a local sponsor pays the rest. On Flagler County’s project the Corps pays 65 percent and the county 35, and once initial construction is done, emergency renourishment after a significant storm is fully federal. That is what paid for the 2024 rounds at the Duval beaches and St. Augustine Beach, through the Corps’ Flood Control and Coastal Emergencies authority.

The state’s share comes through Florida DEP’s Beach Management Funding Assistance program, which offers local governments up to 50 percent of a beach project’s cost under section 161.101 of the Florida Statutes. To qualify, the beach has to be one DEP designates critically eroded, and it has to be open to the public. DEP updates its critically eroded beaches report every year. The local share in St. Johns County comes from the tourist development “bed tax,” and at Vilano also from a municipal service taxing unit, per the county’s project pages. For the Ponte Vedra to South Ponte Vedra project the county estimates its own share of the 50-year cost at 69 percent.

A placement works its way down the beach, and the closure moves with it. On St. Augustine Beach, the county explains, dredging and placement run around the clock, the active section is fenced off with orange construction fencing, and access reopens as each stretch is finished. At night the work advances no more than 500 feet, fenced before dark. Expect backup beepers and bulldozers when the pipe is in front of the house.

The work can run in sea turtle season. Trained monitors check the beach daily for turtles and shorebirds, nests laid in the work zone are moved to safe spots nearby, and project lighting is shielded. In Duval in 2024 the Corps credited the local sea turtle patrol with relocating nests around the clock, and it shrank the work zone and paused for the Fourth of July. On Fernandina Beach the city kept pedestrian detours around the active area and briefly closed the Seaside Park vehicle access.

Fresh sand from an offshore borrow area is where beachcombers go looking for fossil shark teeth. The shark teeth and shells guide covers what you can keep and where.

Before the state restores a beach, Florida’s Beach and Shore Preservation Act has the Board of Trustees fix the boundary between state land and private upland. Under section 161.141 the mean high-water line is set for the area first. The board then sets an erosion control line after a public hearing, guided by that existing mean high-water line under section 161.161, and mails notice to upland owners within 1,000 feet. Flagler County posted exactly such a notice to owners for its Reach 2 project on its coastal projects page.

Once the line is recorded, section 161.191 vests title seaward of it in the state and landward of it in the upland owner, and later erosion or accretion no longer moves the boundary. The new sand in front of the line is state land. The owner does not lose the beach that matters day to day: section 161.201 keeps the owner’s common-law riparian rights, including access, view, boating, bathing and fishing, and bars the state from allowing structures on the created land other than erosion-control structures. The erosion control line is a different line from the coastal construction control line covered on the dunes and sea oats page.

Flagler is the newest federal project on this stretch of coast. The Corps finished beach construction on August 29, 2024 along 3.5 miles of critically eroded shoreline, with sections north and south of the federal project filled at the same time with non-federal money. It is a 50-year project, built to protect A1A, the evacuation route. Flagler County’s own Reach 2, from about 1,900 feet north of Varn Park to just north of the Flagler Beach Pier, is listed on the county’s page as in progress, alongside a run of dune restorations since 2023.