SOUND OFF

E agl ES I S la N d : value and opportunity

NEW HANOVER AND BRUNSWICK COUNTIES ARE BLESSED WITH BEAUTIFUL NATURAL AREAS WITH MILD CLIMATES AND ABUNDANT NATURAL RESOURCES. THESE ARE AMONG THE IMPORTANT REASONS THAT OUR POPULATION IS BOOMING, THE ECONOMY IS GROWING AND THERE IS A RECORD INFLUX OF TOURISTS.

Tourism expenditures were a record in 2021. Brunswick and New Hanover counties received $975.1 and $930.4 million, respectively, ranking 6th and 7th in revenue by county in North Carolina. These dollars support jobs, associated businesses and beach nourishment and add tax revenue.

Growth does, however, have some negative consequences. Increasing population and development have led to increasing infrastructure demands. But it has also led to ecosystem stress, and too often to a loss of green spaces. And once impaired or lost, their economic values are reduced.

Natural areas/green spaces are economic drivers. They provide the community with abundant recreational and aesthetic benefits while also providing many undervalued ecosystem services including flood water storage, stormwater mitigation and buffers to storm surge, and they are highly productive ecosystems that provide both primary productivity and carbon storage.

New Hanover and Brunswick have protected some areas and should be credited for this work, but we have a chance to be even better stewards of significant land tracts that benefit the region in multiple ways. Preservation of Eagles Island is one of several opportunities to protect an important natural area in our community.

Eagles Island consists of 3,110 acres, with the southern, approximately 1,500 acres dedicated to the storage of dredge spoil material from the Cape Fear River. The remainder is mostly undeveloped and owned by a mix of private and government entities.

The island is surrounded by the Cape Fear and Brunswick rivers providing primary nursery areas for many finfish species, including the endangered Atlantic and Shortnose sturgeons. The island is primarily composed of marshlands with minor upland spoil islands. The wetlands are highly productive ecosystems with high biodiversity.

Eagles Island is also historically significant to our area with its former rice culture (Gullah Geechee heritage), naval stores industry and rich maritime history that was and still is important to the growth of the region.

You are undoubtedly asking, what is the issue if Eagles Island is mostly an undeveloped area? The answer for Eagles Island, and other areas, is that development pressure is real and growing, and we have limited natural areas remaining in New Hanover County; Brunswick County is even more rapidly developing.

On Eagles Island, development ideas include suggestions for mixeduse as well as a proposed hotel and spa south of the USS North Carolina Battleship. And even though Unique Places to Save is attempting to purchase this acreage, it is important that we highlight issues and best use of our lands.

I believe that the New Hanover County planning department’s scenario of limited use is most appropriate for Eagles Island. In fact, the Eagles Island Task Force has a plan that mirrors that scenario with ecotourism opportunities and a low-impact educational center that would complement our North Carolina treasure – the USS North Carolina Battleship.

Why is this the best plan? There are two primary reasons.

First, there is conservation of an important natural area that helps store and buffer floodwaters that could also provide ecotourism benefits like hiking, biking, birding and kayaking. In addition, the educational site would highlight the culture and history of our area. Imagine a destination site for a full day of history, culture, education and ecotourism that would benefit the community and businesses.

The other reason to minimize development is water; water makes Eagles Island special but also hazardous. Eagles Island, and much of the west bank, are in a compound flood zone, meaning there are multiple sources of flooding including river flooding from upstream, storm surge and high-tide flooding moving upriver, and local rainfall with stormwater runoff.

R O G E R S H E W

We have experienced multiple storm-related flooding events including Hurricanes Floyd, Matthew, Florence and Isaias. But we also have flooding events that are not storm related.

The 10th-largest flood event measured on Eagles Island was caused by high-tide flooding and onshore winds on Jan. 3, 2022. Water levels measured 2-plus feet above normal. This moderate flood event inundated the roads around the Battleship as well as on Point Peter.

Please note, this will be the everyday scenario in the coming decades based on NOAA sea-level rise projections.

There are other factors that are concerning for large development on Eagles Island: prevalence of wetland soils, accelerating sea-level rise, increasing numbers of hightide flooding days and a high-water table.

These issues lead to numerous management and safety concerns for large developments in this floodplain.

In fact, the New Hanover County Unified Development Ordinance (Article 9) clearly states their concerns for public health and safety in these floodplains, and have a goal of minimizing public and private losses due to flooding in flood prone areas.

The water will come; we need to learn to live with it as the Battleship does instead of in conflict with it.

I ask that we consider the Limited Use Plan concept and couple it with the Eagles Island Task Force vision of a low-impact nature park, which would be a great asset to our area and a source of pride for years to come. It would be a win for the region.

Roger Shew teaches geology and environmental science at University of North Carolina Wilmington. He is a board member of Cape Fear River Watch and a member of the Eagles Island Task Force.

CROWD SOURCIN g

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“WILMINGTON REMINDS US OF SAVANNAH 15, 20 YEARS AGO, BEFORE SAVANNAH KIND OF POPPED

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SOUND OFF economic connectedness

CONNECTIVITY, WHETHER PHYSICAL, INTERNET OR ECONOMIC, IS THE DRIVER OF INCLUSIVE GROWTH.

To some, economic development means shiny new buildings, to some it means more jobs in the area (or filling the more than 6,500 open jobs in New Hanover County), and to some it means people moving to the region congesting the roads. But to all of us, economic development should mean improving the lives of those living in our region.

Development is more than growth; we should strive to create opportunities for residents to improve their lives. The whole point of attracting jobs is to help our neighbors support their families, find work that is meaningful or create an opportunity for their children to live better lives than their parents.

Development focuses on improvement; growth is only expansion.

The New Hanover Community Endowment is bringing financial capital to the work. Wilmington Business Development is bringing coordination and external outreach. The Wilmington Chamber of Commerce is providing support to existing businesses. The city and county are bringing physical infrastructure. But only we as a community can develop and provide the human and social capital.

Research out of Harvard’s Opportunity Insights emphasizes that human capital is more than formal education, it includes social capital as well, specifically, economic connectedness of people in the region.

Prior work, dubbed the Opportunity Atlas, identified large differences in upward mobility depending on where one grew up, especially in their formative years.

The data suggest city and county levels of geography are too large an area and that differences are apparent in terms of blocks rather than miles. New work coming out of the Opportunity Insights team suggests economic connectivity is the strongest predictor of those differences in upward mobility.

Using Facebook data (yes, the data we hate Facebook collecting) researchers are matching up patterns of friends across income groups with income mobility and finding that areas with low-income individuals who friend high-income individuals also tend to have higher income mobility than other areas.

No, correlation is not causation, but the relationship is evidence that connecting individuals in search of opportunity to previous recipients of opportunity may help spread the opportunity around.

Digging into the data for New Hanover County reveals that we are close to the national average for lowincome individuals being “exposed” to high-income individuals and slightly above average in terms of those individuals’ likeliness to friend each other – but only by about 2%.

A D A M JONES

The Opportunity Insights report, recently published in the journal Nature, states that economic connectedness is strongly associated with upward economic mobility, evidence that “it’s not what you know, but who you know.”

Economic connectedness remains a strong predictor even when factoring in racial segregation, income inequality, etc., and we should be introducing folks to each other all around our region.

Southeastern North Carolina is uniquely positioned for economic connectedness because of our geography.

Neighborhoods and homes in our region are organized around the erratic pattern of water access rather than distance to a downtown employment center along an interstate, as in most metro areas. The pattern here provides for closer proximity of high- and low-income groups than many other communities, easing our task of connecting people across income levels.

Part of our economic development efforts should be thinking about how to facilitate friendships between groups through communal activities, strategic connections of neighborhoods through trails and parks, etc., much as the chamber organizes intentional collisions.

Roman philosopher Seneca said, “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.”

We’re already preparing folks; now we need to connect them.

Adam Jones is chair of the economics and finance department and a professor of economics at the University of North Carolina Wilmington’s Cameron School of Business.