Billionaire developer Ken Griffin plans to rehabilitate the aging groins along the beach at his under-construction waterfront Palm Beach estate — and town officials hope he is the first of many homeowners to complete the process.
Groins are structures that jut out from the beach. The network of groins along Palm Beach’s coast was built from the 1930s forward to trap sand and help prevent erosion, officials said.
The council voted March 4 to approve the plan for Griffin’s groin rehabilitation project to move forward, but not without lengthy discussion about the process and whether the groin proposal should go to the town’s Shore Protection Board for review.
Council President Bobbie Lindsay and President Pro-Tem Lew Crampton voted against the request for the pair of properties Griffin owns at 1247 and 1265 S. Ocean Blvd. through a pair of companies, Blossom Way Holdings LLC and Providencia Partners LLC. Council members Ted Cooney and Bridget Moran voted in favor, and with council member Julie Araskog absent, Mayor Danielle Moore voted to approve the plan and break the tie.
As the groins in Palm Beach have aged, they have deteriorated and become less effective, town staff said.
Griffin plans to replace all four of the groins along his beachfront.
Altogether, hedge fund manager Griffin has amassed about 27 acres of land on the South End. Part of that property is where he is building a 44,000-square-foot estate with a mansion for his mother on 8 acres. Before the March 4 meeting, town staff in a memo to council recommended approval of the rehabilitation work, which will be done under the town’s beach management agreement with the Florida Department of Environmental Protection. The work also would be completed under Palm Beach’s U.S. Army Corps of Engineers permit, for which the town in December requested a five-year extension, according to an Army Corps public notice.
Griffin will pay for all of the work, hire the contractors and get any necessary easements, and Palm Beach will not take on any liability, staff said.
It’s unclear who owns the groins because of a lack of records, and the groins themselves often sit on a mix of private property and state land, town staff said in a memo to council.
About a decade ago, Palm Beach evaluated all the groins along its Atlantic shoreline, including what it would take to rehabilitate all of them, said Paul Brazil, the town’s director of public works.
The council at that time chose not to do the proposed work because of the cost and the potential liability, he said.
Instead, Brazil said, the council decided that if there was a property owner or group of owners who wanted to take on the task of rehabilitating the groins along their beach, they could work under the town’s permit and town staff would help to facilitate that.
“But it should be at no cost to the town and the town shouldn’t inherit any new liability for doing it,” he said.
Griffin appears to be the first property owner to undertake that process. The new groins cannot trap and hold more sand than the existing structures, Brazil said. “They’ll perform exactly as the existing ones do, but the deterioration will stop,” he added.
Griffin enlisted Thomas Pierro of Coastal Protection Engineering, who has been a Palm Beach consultant for years and is “best-suited to do the work,” Brazil said.
When the town applied for its Army Corps permit, it submitted information about how all of the groins in Palm Beach perform.
Crampton, who lives on Palm Beach’s South End, said the Shore Protection Board should have an opportunity to review and opine on the proposal. He suggested the project return to the council in April for another review. But Moran said she did not see where the shore board would “add value” to the process.
Ronald Matzner is a South End resident and vice chair of the Shore Protection Board who asked that the issue come that board for a review of the town’s comprehensive approach to replacing groins.
Matzner lives south of Griffin’s property and asked the council to consider the effects of more homeowners rehabilitating groins: “Pretty soon you have a war of groins, like the Old West,” he said.
Still, he and others who spoke said they supported the overall concept and appreciated the property owner for stepping up.
Attorney Lawrence Curtin with Holland & Knight represented Blossom Way Holdings and said the groins had been studied for a long time. His client, he said, was following the process the previously established by the council.
The Army Corps reviewed the project previously and found that there would not be any adverse effects as groins are replaced, Curtin said. “I think this is a no-brainer,” Moore said. “I think this should move forward. I think the homeowner is doing exactly what we want homeowners to do, and we wish more of them would, and we hope that this will be sort of the model for doing it.”
While the council did not vote to have the Shore Protection Board review the specific project, Matzner said the board will take a larger-picture look at groins at its March 27 meeting. The agenda for that meeting has not yet been posted on the town’s website.
