After having recommended the addition of bamboo and cattails to the town’s list of prohibited plants, Bethany Beach staff members recently reconsidered the idea, in the wake of concerns from property owners attached to their bamboo plantings and council members who were worried about enforcement issues.
“The best way to handle it is to remove bamboo and cattails from the ordinance and stick with phragmites,” Public Works Supervisor Brett Warner told members of the Charter and Ordinance Review Committee on June 14, during a reconsideration of the issue ordered by the council at their May meeting.
“I can see where some of the residents want to use (bamboo) as a border fence. I don’t have a problem with that,” put in Code Enforcement Officer Barry English, backing off his previous strong recommendation that the plants be eradicated as a threat to public health.
The recommendation had come on the basis that bamboo, in addition to being difficult to control, poses a risk to residents and homes by increasing the risk of fire spreading uncontrollably through the town.
“The issue is that when the leaves fall, they fall under the bamboo and ferment,” English clarified, emphasizing that the resulting rotting vegetation still poses a real fire hazard. And it’s a hazard that the Bethany Beach Volunteer Fire Company has been concerned about, Vice-Mayor and CORC Chairman Tony McClenny confirmed.
But between empathy for property owners who want to use bamboo on their properties and concern that enforcement would be unworkable, English agreed that eliminating the previously recommended prohibition on bamboo was the best way to go for the town.
While bamboo is on several lists of invasive species in Delaware, and highly recommended by a number of agencies not to be planted in the state, state law currently only prohibits its being allowed to escape from its property of origin and onto neighboring properties.
While some property owners purposely choose varieties that are less inclined to spread, most have been reported as problematic spreaders, despite whatever containment measures are taken.
“The neighbor can call and ask that the state law be enforced,” Warner emphasized about plantings that escape property lines. But he agreed with English that a town-level prohibition was unworkable.
Part of that concern about enforcement comes because a single species of bamboo — giant cane (Arundinaria gigantea), considered to be comparatively well-behaved — is (unlike all other varieties of bamboo) native to the Mid-Atlantic coastal region. Differentiating between native and non-native species isn’t a task English said he was prepared to handle.
“I’m not a horticulturalist,” he pointed out, concerned that he’d be drawn into disputes between neighbors or asked to determine the species a particular planting.
Cattails also left off prohibited list
Warner said he believed a prohibition on cattails could also be eliminated from a proposed ordinance change because the plants are not a fire hazard and the town only has a few problem spots, which town staff are well aware of and attempting to eradicate already.
He had previously noted that cattails, while attractive to many, are no longer recommended for use in area stormwater retention ponds, since the plants tend to undermine the ponds’ banks. Additionally, some species of cattail are considered native while others are not, underscoring English’s enforcement issues.
But no one is in disagreement about a prohibition on phragmites australis, or common reed, which is already well established throughout the entire region and is highly invasive. Battles to eliminate the plants have waged across the area, and Bethany Beach contracts to have them eradicated.
Both staff members have said they did not recommend any kind of looser language designed to prohibit any planting deemed to be a hindrance to drainage or water flow, or to pose a public safety hazard. They opted instead to recommend that the town specify phragmites as a single species, prohibited along with overgrown grass and dense underbrush.
Warner said attempts to classify and prohibit plants as non-native and invasive could prove particularly problematic, as a number of non-native and invasive species — such as butterfly bush and Norway maple — already exist in abundance throughout the town and surrounding area.
“These are things we’ve planted,” Warner admitted. “They’re all over town.”
Many non-native plants — some of them invasive — have long been used as landscape plants, before the issues of native-only plantings and invasive species became well publicized. While property owners are still being encouraged to avoid planting non-native species and to particularly avoid any invasive species, there is no force of law behind those recommendations.
Thus, the plans to modify the section of town code that prohibits problem plantings essentially fell by the wayside last week, with only phragmites remaining on the list of specifically prohibited plants.
Street and swale drainage still need help
Modifications are still planned for the code, however.
CORC and staff members on June 14 reiterated their support for a specific prohibition on the sweeping or blowing of leaves and other detritus into the streets or drainage swales — a change that was planned to also be considered by the council on June 15 but which didn’t make it into the proposed ordinance.
Warner said he was persistently having problems with particular property owners who blew or swept leaves and pinecones into the street or swales, causing problems with his staff’s hard work to improve drainage in the town.
But CORC opted not to deal with that issue on June 14, instead asking Warner and other town staffers to put together recommendations for exactly how the proposed section of town code would read so that they can review those recommendations at their July meeting.