Dune-Boggle

Well we did our research and decided that using some used Christmas trees would be a great way to rebuild some dunes along the town beach, many of which had been damaged by developers or hurricanes such as Katrina and Rita. Some of the condo owners don’t like the idea but after losing tens of thousands of dollars from flooding, many are coming around. Why spend thousands on tractors and dredges and such when you can recycle free trees and let the wind do the job for free?

Anyway, that was the concept, with some volunteers and some donated stuff and doing some pilot projects to show that the concept really worked as well as it did in Corpus Christi, Surfside, and placed all up on down all the coast of the United States. We even learned you had to stake the trees down so they wouldn’t wash or blow away.

But everything is so complicated these days. We had hoped we could find a few property owners, get with the town poo-bahs, and point fingers in a general direction and go. Oh no, not so easy. You need several kinds of blessings, permits, authorizations and resolutions, not to mention coordinating with the state and federal gringos. Naturally, the question comes up “Why not get one of our grants?”

Now, we had wanted to do this in mid-January or at the latest the end of January. Have you ever seen any bureaucracy, never mind ten of them, get anything done in one month? Over the Holiday Season? A grant takes six to 18 months. One official even said something like “Hey don’t start collecting the trees yet, Sam, we need to work all this out.”

Now this here fellow is really nice, but hey man, if you’re going to pay upwards of 30 bucks for a tree and maybe double or triple that much for a big one, you’re not going to throw it out on the beach before Christmas. Sometimes I just wish the government would stop trying to help us so darned hard!