Sandy beaches, or sandbags?

North Carolina's public beaches will soon disappear if North Carolina's politicians don't protect them. A rising ocean and periodic storms are carving away the sand on which Tar Heels have strolled and sunbathed, picknicked and played, flung fishing lines and kites, and sprinted into the waves.

Some beaches are stable or even widening. But at others, the surf surges across narrowing strands, licking at the pilings of walkways, houses and commercial buildings.

If the state allows owners to pile sofa-sized sandbags in front of buildings and leave them there, the strand in front of the bags will start to disappear and the strand nearby may disappear even faster. In too many cases, that's what the state has allowed.

But maybe not for much longer. The Coastal Resources Commission seems fed up with sandbag heaps that hog beaches for decades, eventually ripping open to leave their ugly remains exposed at low tide.

The CRC - dedicated volunteers who help state officials enforce the landmark Coastal Resources Management Act - has decided that most sandbags must be removed by a year from now.

Property owners will howl. They'll insist they have a right to protect their million-dollar buildings and warn that if those buildings are destroyed, beach towns and coastal counties can't collect fat property taxes on them.

But the price of letting property owners build sand forts around their buildings is the loss of the public's beaches. In the end, that loss would hit the property owners, too: Who wants to pay thousands of dollars a week to sit in a fancy house with no sand in front? Who wants to own one?

UNCW's Courtney Hackney, the CRC's current chairman, sums up the situation accurately: "Do we want seawalls or beach? And if the state wants beach, then we're going to have to come up with money to renourish the beaches. It's that simple."