VIRGINIA BEACH — Is there a plan to use the thousands — if not millions — of oyster shells that have piled high at the city dump for the past six years?
City Auditor Lyndon Remias said no in a report released Monday, but Karen Forget, Lynnhaven River NOW’s executive director, says yes.
Forget’s nonprofit launched the shell-recycling initiative “Save Oyster Shells” as a pilot program 10 years ago and collected enough from restaurants to build the Athey Island Oyster Reef in 2008. After that, the city began reimbursing the nonprofit to collect shells for the city with the goal of using them to grow the Lynnhaven River’s oyster population.
Once collected, “they will be cured and later used on a sanctuary oyster reef,” reads Lynnhaven River NOW’s website.
“That’s the plan,” Forget said Wednesday. “That’s always been the plan: To build sanctuary reefs in the Lynnhaven River when the opportunity arises.”
Remias, whose report dealt only with internal city operations and not the nonprofit’s actions, said that is irrelevant. The city must have a plan for the shells because it owns them, he said.
“If we want to say our plan is Lynnhaven River NOW’s plan, that’s fine,” he said. “But we’ve got to figure out what we want to do with” the shells.
The nonprofit’s goal is to put 100 acres of sanctuary reef in the river, an amount equal to 10 percent of what existed there a century ago, according to the state-commissioned Baylor surveys, Forget said. So far, there are 63 acres, about 58 of which were built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, she said.
The city owns the shells that have been accumulating at its dump and must approve or commission any such reefs that are built with them, Remias said. His probe found the city has no contracts with the nonprofit, and he has since found that no city employee has been monitoring the shells’ numbers or tallying the bushels collected, he said.
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“No one knows what we’re doing,” Remias said Wednesday.
Later, he added, “The people who should know, don’t know, and that is dumbfounding.”
Lynnhaven River NOW started planning a 1½-acre reef in the river’s eastern branch in 2013, Forget said, and city management knew about it. It plans to construct a second reef in the western branch in 2018. The first will require at least 40,000 bushels of shells. One bushel contains between 600 and 700 shells.
“I do not think six years is an unreasonable amount of time” to collect the necessary number of shells, Forget said.
The city has spent about $250,000 from an oyster recovery fund with Lynnhaven River NOW on the shell collection program; about another $340,000 from the same fund has been spent on other oyster efforts, according to the city and the nonprofit.
Lynnhaven River Now also worked with the city-run Virginia Aquarium last spring to build a shoreline reef in Owl Creek near the marine center with some of the shells stored at the dump, Forget said. She added that some of the shells have also been used for other, smaller purposes.
Remias said he learned of those uses in media reports following the release of his audit. The city should have had a project coordinator overseeing every aspect of the shells’ collection, storage and use, and that coordinator should have cleared any use of the shells, Remias said.
“It all goes back to: We don’t have a (city) plan and we don’t have a contract,” he said, adding there are operational controls that must be implemented.
Remias said his office will likely come out with another report on the matter in the coming weeks.
Meanwhile, Lynnhaven River NOW posted a response to the audit on its website Tuesday.
“The implication the shell is not being used is huge and it’s not true,” Forget said.
Have a story idea or news tip? Contact City Hall reporter Judah Taylor at [email protected] or 757-490-2750.
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