PANAMA CITY BEACH — Panama City Beach visitors left more behind than cleanup crews bargained for this summer.
To better keep the beaches clean, the Bay County Tourist Development Council (TDC) moved forward Thursday with an initiative to increase garbage pickup and beach raking during peak visitation times in 2015.
“Because of the visitation and just the sheer amount of people we had on the beach, there were things that we need to do to improve,” said TDC Director Dan Rowe.
The agency spends upward of $700,000 annually for beach maintenance, which includes emptying the roughly 1,000 trash bins on Bay County’s 18 miles of beach.
The board’s actions Thursday authorized an additional $200,000 for beach maintenance next year, which will include more frequent garbage removal and sand raking during the busy season, and the installation of 200 garbage “corrals” at beach public access points.
Additionally, the agency will launch a public information campaign to remind guests to properly dispose of their garbage and explore options for a program to extract recyclable items from the garbage collected.
The issue emerged at the TDC’s July meeting following a holiday weekend that brought an estimated 250,000 tourists — and their trash — to Bay County’s beaches.
“On the Fourth of July, the system broke,” said Rowe, adding that cleanup crews could not even pick up garbage due to the number of people that flooded the beach.
As pointed out at the July meeting, however, the TDC’s trash pickup is simply a courtesy service, Rowe said. According to a Panama City Beach ordinance, cleanup is ultimately the responsibility of the upland landowner.
To encourage better beach maintenance for property owners, Rowe also recommended giving upland property owners the option to purchase an additional garbage corral for every 100 feet of beachfront, which the TDC would empty free of charge.
Board member Andy Phillips, who brought the issue before the board this summer, encouraged the agency to reinvest in its number one asset as visitation and revenues continue to rise.
“We’ve continued to allocate additional funds to advertising and marketing ... but we know over the last four or five years we know we have not changed the beach contract,” he said. “We’ve had a major amount of new visitors; you can see that in the bed tax collections. … Let’s take some of that and reinvest it in our number one asset, which is the beach.”