A governmental stand-off lasting a decade is poisoning a West Australian coastal community as residents search for someone to blame for the sea inching, night by night, closer to their homes.
Shire of Gingin president Mike Aspinall is losing friends in the town he hoped to help save from the coastal erosion eating at its foundations – but he says he is powerless to do any more.
Councillor Aspinall divides his time between Perth and Seabird, 38 kilometres south of the better-known Lancelin.
He bought his house in Seabird in 1995. The town is home to only about 80 people, so naturally he became part of a close-knit community.
He said seeing erosion caused by natural coastal processes, which is a problem in both Seabird and Lancelin, he felt compelled to act.
In 2002, he began asking questions about the erosionat council meetings on behalf of the affected residents, and then decided to do more and run for council. He was elected in 2003 and has been the shire president for three years.
Since then, the foreshore has eroded a further 20 metres and the process has accelerated alarmingly over the past year, to the point that house boundaries are inches from the edge.
Turner Street, running parallel to the beach and once the road access for seaside lots, has crumbled into the ocean.
Cracks are appearing in the earth inside the lines of the flimsy boundary fence built to keep children off the now dangerous cliff.
Power, water and phone lines are less than one metre from the edge.
Residents, many of who are not directly affected, have nonetheless now dug into their own pockets to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars to protect homes by way of concrete-filled sandbags, which should arrive any day.
Those who tried have been unable to sell their homes, in many cases bought decades ago with a view to retirement - and lovingly renovated over time.
The town's doctor until now has been Jim Batalin, a retired GP who bought the property on the beach 20 years ago planning to retire in it. When he did retire a few years ago and moved in, he opened a surgery two days a week to serve the residents, many of whom are elderly and suffer from chronic conditions.
His long-term partner, unnerved by the house's closeness to the edge, has moved back to Perth until the issue is resolved one way or another and he was unable to continue providing medical care for residents without her help as secretary and helper.
"The pounding, the vibration, the whack of the water as the swell hits and undermines the bottom of the cliff – it's quite frightening," he said.
"Every day when I come home I look to see if the wall is still there."
On the other side of the wall is a vertiginous drop that makes him thankful for the stretch of grass between the wall and his house.
He said as his property was the worst affected of the 15 at risk, once he was "out of the equation" the situation would become less politically fraught, but he did not want to leave the community who depended on him or the small band of neighbours lobbying for a solution.
"One for all and all for one," he said.
Seabird Progress Association president Garry Thomas said the shire was happy to pay for sand nourishment works in Lancelin, also suffering from erosion, and should take responsibility for the beach at Seabird as well, despite it being unallocated Crown land.
"They can't do a bloody thing here, and they've known about it for 15 years," he said.
"All it's been is buck-passing, 'it's unallocated Crown land, not our responsibility.'
"That's why we're digging our heels in and will force the issue one way or the other."
The history of the issue is a long one that makes residents' frustration understandable.
In 2002 a $60,000 report, paid for by the shire and the state government, detailed an option for a $1 million groyne - but nothing came of it.
In 2004, the state government and shire clubbed together another $30,000 between them for more modelling on another possible solution.
In early 2006, the state government reported back to the shire its preferred solution, a series of breakwaters together with sand nourishment to stabilise the shoreline. It said if the shire chose not to go ahead with the plans as this would mean ongoing, expensive sand nourishment, and risk to properties.
The solution was estimated to cost about $1.3 million, plus possibly another $30,000 worth of sand per year, and this would be shared between the state and the shire.
The shire would also be responsible for ongoing maintenance, though it could apply for state assistance.
After convening a community meeting to tell residents, the shire told the state to call for tenders for the construction, having resolved to get a real project cost and then decide whether it could afford to pay half.
It couldn't. So later that year the shire resolved to put all works proposed on hold indefinitely.
"The planning decisions made by the state government in respect of the development and gazettal of the Seabird townsite are historic and the consequences of these decisions must be accepted," the meeting minutes read.
"There is no apparent legal imperative on the part of the Shire of Gingin to assist in protecting property owners against naturally occurring coastal processes."
Cr Aspinall told Fairfax Media the cost would have been a "huge burden" on ratepayers.
"It wasn't the cost of the construction itself, it was the ongoing maintenance," he said.
"If there was a storm that did any damage to it we could have been up for that, so you could be up for anything up to another million dollars or $750,000, depending on the amount of damage."
He said $750,000 per year maintenance costs would guzzle about three per cent of the shire's rates.
To put that in perspective, the shire is also responsible for the towns of Lancelin, Ledge Point, Guilderton, Gingin and everywhere in between, as well as east of the Brand Highway to Victoria Plains.
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Google Maps still shows Turner Street running adjacent to the ocean but it no longer exists.
Cr Aspinall said sand nourishment did work, but again the cost was a factor – sand nourishment in Seabird and Lancelin combined was costing the shire $50,000-$60,000 per year – and so was the issue of land ownership.
He said the difference in Lancelin was that the shire was protecting its own land and infrastructure.
"We can't just go on to Crown land and do what we want to do," he said.
"We've spent quite a lot of money but you're defending private property and to defend private property is expensive, especially when the people that own these properties have not been willing up to this stage to put any of their own money in."
The shire has not given up – in 2011 it approached the Minister for Transport for 100 per cent funding to implement structural works, though this did not eventuate.
In June 2014 it agreed to "take a leadership role in investigating funding and risk options for a proposed sea wall construction" and spent $110,000 on emergency sand nourishment.
Since that time the council has also commissioned two engineering reports itself, at a cost of about $22,000, on possible solutions to the problem to present to the government. The solutions, one a foreshore rock wall and the other a sandbag wall, would both cost in the region of $1 million or less.
It wrote numerous times this year to the government about the urgency of the problem.
Meanwhile, desperate residents have clubbed together funds to engage coastal engineers Subcon to provide more potential solutions and it did, giving two options – a $50,000 stopgap involving concrete sandbags and a $1.5 million solution involving an offshore reef.
They enlisted Moore MLA Shane Love to get Lands Minister Terry Redman to visit on May 1 to see the damage and beg him to fund their project. He acknowledged the situation was "dire" and said he would bring the matter to cabinet.
Frenzied with frustration after waiting yet another fortnight, on May 13 residents turned up at the shire of Gingin offices waving placards, telling Cr Aspinall the shire must act to save Seabird.
The next day the council held a special meeting and authorised emergency funding of $50,000 for concrete matting, an emergency stopgap – but this time it dug its heels in and made the release of the funds contingent on State government action, which has not yet eventuated.
Residents, unbelieving, called it a "whitewash" and are livid that essentially the meeting achieved nothing.
Cr Aspinall said the stalemate was frustrating.
I've been working since 2003 on this with the council. I initiated through council all the plans we've done for breakwaters, offshore reefs – the council's expended a lot of money on it – but when you, as a councillor you can see what a cost it would be to the council to be able to do this," he said.
"Of course unfortunately I become the target, being the shire president you become the target of anything people disagree with."
Local Government Minister Tony Simpson said if local governments resolved to release unbudgeted funds, they could attach any lawful conditions they deemed necessary.
"My department is not aware of local governments placing conditions on such funding, however it is not unlawful to do so," he said.
Minister Redman said he could not comment further on this latest development from the shire, saying only that any action from the government was subject to cabinet approval and that was yet to be issued.
Fairfax Media understands that the proposal did not come up at the Cabinet meeting of May 27 and that it may be on the agenda for the next meeting in two weeks' time, but a spokeswoman for Mr Redman confirmed on Wednesday that all elements of Cabinet were confidential, including agendas, and the only news of progress would be when the government had an announcement to make.
A spokesman from his department said the government had been aware of the problems at Seabird for several decades and it was one of several West Australian locations where coastal erosion was creating cause for concern, though it was the only location where homes were at risk.
The department had not done any environmental modelling in relation to the residents' Subcon proposal but was preparing the necessary approvals for the shire in expectation that it would seek access to Crown land to implement the emergency works at Seabird.
"This approval is separate to any long term solution," he said.
He said state government agencies had for a long time provided advice and technical and funding support to help the shire investigate and develop a response to the growing problem and the government was joining the shire in developing a coastal hazard risk management and adaptation plan for the Guilderton-Jurien coast.
"The costs of coastal protection work can be high and historically the state government has been prepared to provide local governments with advice and assistance," he said.
Cr Aspinall said the shire had always been willing to bear part of the cost but it could not bear it all. He said the government doing nothing would be a worst-case scenario and urged it to act urgently for the people of Seabird.
