Pleasure Island, 9/11, & What Might Have Been
By Jon Prestage

How the 9/11 attacks derailed the economic vision for Pleasure Island

CAROLINA BEACH—Most people here do not know it, but 9-11 may have dramatically changed the direction and nature of commercial growth in the central business district (CBD) and helped lead to a fractious political situation that residents, businesses, and property owners are still trying to understand, especially as to how it may affect the town’s future and well being.

A public opinion and marketing consultant, who headed a comprehensive analysis of Carolina Beach that was well underway on 9-11, says the terrorist attacks derailed ongoing planning efforts at the time and set back commercial growth and comprehensive planning for years and may have set the stage for the defeat of the administration of Mayor Dennis Barbour four years later.

Back in 2001 the town was near to closing a deal with the military to open up large portions of what is known as the “blast zone” on the backside of the island. The blast zone is mostly undeveloped land bordering the Cape Fear River that the military controls as a buffer between development on the island and the Sunny Point Military Ocean Terminal across the river. Among the proposals was a full-service golf course and expanded recreational facilities that included enlarging the state park and an extensive network of bicycle and hiking trails. The proposals were seen as a way to make the community much more tourist friendly and as a way of sparking commercial investment, including several major hotel chains. All those plans collapsed with 9-11.

The marketing consultant, Susan K. Bulluck, who authored the 2001 marketing study put it this way: “We talked with the military, the state, and with the various groups that have stakeholders on the backside of the island and they were entirely open to developing a boat basin back there, a golf course, and expanding the state park. 9-11 interceded as we were completing the report and brought back heightened restrictions.”

“Probably because of what happened on 9-11, town officials got sidetracked in their comprehensive planning goals and got snagged on some divisive development issues, such as height. They lost their focus on the broader aspects of what they wanted for the town and how they’d go about getting there. They got into conflicts involving residents versus development versus tourists,” she says. “Were it not for 9-11 they could have focused on the backside of the island, on developing that land, which might have drawn the density issue from the front side and the central business district.”

Former Mayor Barbour essentially confirms at least some of this. He was a councilman at the time. “We were aggressively talking to the military commander of Sunny Point about the golf course” in 2001, Barbour admits. “We had an investor willing to pay for the facility, so the town wouldn’t have to foot the bill.”

Birth of a Master Plan
Barbour says the 2001 market study was undertaken as a first step toward positioning the town to develop a comprehensive master plan. The $10,000 cost of the study did not come from public funds but was provided by businesses and property owners, a funding model the town government would essentially use for a forthcoming comprehensive master planning study.

“We wanted the 2001 marketing study to be independent from the town government and be totally unbiased so that its results would be accepted by the entire community, including businesses, residents, and tourists,” he said. Ironically, perhaps because of the terrorist attack and its affect on the town’s planning vision, and probably other issues, it was not until 2005 that the town was ready to kickoff a comprehensive planning process.

After serving on the council, Barbour became mayor in December 2003, and at that time, he says, he made revisiting the 2001 study a major priority of his administration.
“We went back and looked at its recommendations again,” he says, and also recommitted to developing a strategy for funding and undertaking a comprehensive planning process.

The Process
In 2005, the town quietly began putting together a funding strategy for a comprehensive plan that might have cost up to $50,000. The strategy predicated that half the costs for the plan come from town coffers and the other half come from businesses and property owners on the island.

“We wanted a master plan that represented all the stakeholders and this funding method was one way to help to assure it. We wanted to pull the public into this, and we wanted to do it right. We should have moved faster, but I wanted to make sure it was not perceived as the town government’s master plan; I wanted to be sure it involved everybody,” Barbour says.

How close was all of this to reality? Well, funding issues had been settled and businesses and property owners had agreed to help pay for the plan. The funding was all lined up. Also, an independent planning professional had been consulted.
This was in October 2005. The following month Barbour and his administration, including two council members, lost the election.“You’ll write this the way you want, but we were on track. We had a lot of interest in reconstruction and redevelopment in the central business district, probably four or five developers at one time wanting to do large-scale upgrades and projects in the area. At the same time we were working on the master plan, which was one of the recommendations of the 2001 marketing study. A lot was happening,” he says.

Relevance Today
So a key question today is whether Barbour and his colleagues on the town council were in step with the business community, residents, and landowners in their search for CBD revitalization and growth? Or perhaps another way to put it is how important is it for the town to spark revitalization and growth in its central business district? The 2001 study indicates that Barbour was apparently in step and that all stakeholders in the community considered revitalization as key to the future of the town.

The 2001 study took a year to complete. It included comprehensive statistical reviews of sales and occupancy tax revenues, scores of face-to-face interviews, and four independent surveys of local businesses, residents, and tourists.

“We interviewed every single business on the island. We interviewed people on the beach during each season. We interviewed all of the lodging facilities about their cyclical business nature. We held open meetings with residents to see what they wanted, and we interviewed the property owners from the boardwalk,” Bulluck says of the study’s methodology.

While much is revealed in the 66-page study, undertaken by Bulluck’s firm, Independent Opinion Research & Communications, Inc., of Wrightsville Beach, it demonstrates that five years ago, most residents and business owners recognized a need for comprehensive revitalization efforts to the CBD and to the boardwalk. It also makes clear that sustaining Carolina Beach as a tourist community ultimately depends on this revitalization. Without revitalization tourists will ultimately go elsewhere, which will have a detrimental and spiraling effect on the CBD, its businesses, the boardwalk, the town’s economic vitality, and its tax base. At the same time, the report makes clear that all stakeholders wanted Carolina Beach to maintain a small town character.

Report Findings
The profile that emerges from the study of the town’s business community is insightful. For example, 93 percent of businesses responded in 2001 that bars/adult bars/membership bars should be reduced or discouraged. Residents felt similarly. At the time bars and adult bars dotted the CBD and boardwalk, and, according to Barbour, the town amended its ordinances, as a result of the study, in such a way as to reduce the number of bars in town over time. The revisions worked because the total number of bars has decreased substantially. This illustrates how the results of a study and a long range planning approach can alter the character of a community.

The report also revealed that business respondents were especially frustrated over the boardwalk area. They responded to a survey by asking that the boardwalk be cleaned up, condemned, or that the town buy it and take it over. In the same survey, business respondents recognized their own role in the revitalization process by acknowledging their responsibility to improve their buildings and clean up their businesses, although they expressed uncertainty as to how the get funds to make such improvements.

According to the survey, 64-percent of business respondents said that more than 50 percent of their income was derived from tourists. Approximately 42 percent derived 75 percent of their income from tourists. Concurrently, only 10 percent of respondents said that they derived over 75 percent of their business from residents. In fact, the study clearly reveals that most residents go off the island for purchases, although residents own 66 percent of the businesses on the island.

The bottom line is that businesses in the CBD or on the boardwalk depend to a large extent on tourists and non-residents for their income. As the tourist trade decreases, businesses will increasingly suffer and not survive. As this happens, even less tourists will come to the island, leading to increasing stagnation in the central business district and extended blight, according to some.

Barbour says this is his concern: “If things stay the way they currently are and we don’t do anything to revitalize our CBD and boardwalk, we will lose our tourist trade. There is a portion of Carolina Beach residents who are probably not too concerned about maintaining tourist trade because they don’t understand the benefits brought to the town by tourists. The 2001 study makes it clear that if things stay the same, we will lose our tourists to other communities that offer them far more than we do,” he says.  He points to one study that showed some years ago that tourists defer an individual’s tax bill in Carolina Beach by approximately $167.00 annually.

Bulluck spoke about how in 2001 there was a great spirit of cooperation among all the disparate elements in the community who involved themselves in the study.
“Not only were people cooperative,” she says, “they were enthusiastic. The study gave them an opportunity for the first time to be involved and to inform elected officials about what they envisioned for their town. It was a healthy process. People were willing to be a part of it. They realized that the Central Business District was theirs and that they needed to look after it and determine what they could do together to make it better and more vibrant.”

So in the five years since 2001, what happened? Today, if you attend City Council meetings and read local editorials, there seems to be little cooperation between the three groups and a significant amount of animosity exists. So how can the town move forward?

If you are not aware, the beginnings are taking place. An RFP for a master plan is being reviewed by the City Council, the Island Women’s Group is working on beautifying the CBD, and the Chamber of Commerce has created new committees; Marketing, Government/Community Affairs, and Economic Development, to generate working groups for both businesses and residents to come together. If you have ideas, submit them to SCM and we will pass them along to the appropriate organization and consider them for future articles.

In reading the market study, it appears that the findings are still pertinent today. If we have a base of statistical information to build upon, then are we just missing the cooperation? Susan Bullock thinks so.

“I really think that if the people in the community refocus and reconsider the things still relevant in the study, and, if they can come together again, they will find that that the community is actually on the cusp of great movement. Carolina Beach is one of the few islands left in North Carolina that can actually determine what it wants to be. The options to the community are wide open,” she says.

“Severe Death and Destruction Within the Arc”

If you’re new to the area, you may wonder how all that prime real estate sits empty on the west side of Pleasure Island. The land makes up about 2,100 acres and is owned by the US Army to be used as a protective buffer around the Sunny Point Military Ocean Terminal located on the west bank of the Cape Fear River. It’s a port designed specifically to handle explosive military cargo. In fact, it’s the largest ammunition shipping terminal in the nation. Most of the munitions going to Iraq and Afghanistan are shipped out of Sunny Point.

When a similar facility in Port Chicago, California exploded during WW II, 710 people were killed or injured, a whole town was destroyed and the shock was felt 500 miles away. In response, the Department of Defense created new safety guidelines for ammunition terminals. When Sunny Point opened in 1955, each of its three wharves had an undeveloped, circular buffer zone around it with a radius of 2.5 miles (see map). In the event of a catastrophic explosion, the situation within the buffer zone can be described as “severe death and destruction” according to military personnel.

If you talk to people who have been around here for a while, they’ll tell you stories about hiking, fishing, camping and biking along the river in the good old days when the army was unconcerned about people using the area. You’ll also here stories about the post 9/11 security presence resulting in military police roaming the woods on ATV’s, commandos dressed all in black, even frogmen popping out of the water and telling fisherman to leave the property.

Military personnel at Sunny Point have confirmed that since 9/11 they have stepped up security, but they will allow certain uses. For instance, both Kure Beach and Carolina Beach lease land to be used for parks and operations yards. They take each request on a case by case basis with fulfilling their military mission being their number one concern.
 

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