AFTER a northeaster tore away chunks of beach in the Davis Park section of Fire Island last spring, property owners decided they could no longer wait for a federal project promised decades ago to address their concerns about beach erosion.

So the owners voted last fall to come up with the money themselves to pay for their portion of a $19 million beach restoration effort on this 32-mile barrier island. Davis Park’s share of the project to widen beaches and reinforce dunes, estimated at $3 million, would be mostly paid by increasing the average property tax bill in the community by $2,000 annually for the next six years.

“A lot of us have determined that this is the only thing we can do,” said Mary A. Parker, who owns a home in Davis Park. “We’ve been waiting 40 years for the federal project, and people are pretty unhappy that there hasn’t been any action on the federal level.”

Davis Park is among 10 of 17 hamlets and villages on Fire Island that began taxing themselves about a decade ago to repair their beaches and dunes. The taxes, which vary by community, are handled by erosion-control special districts set up through the Towns of Brookhaven and Islip, and they covered the cost of much smaller beach restoration projects on Fire Island in recent years. About 280 Davis Park owners paid an average of $60 a year to their special district until two-thirds of the owners voted last October by petition to support the new plan.

While money may no longer get in the way of hauling more sand onto the shoreline, some environmentalists are raising questions about the Davis Park project and renewing the larger debate over whether beaches should be rebuilt or nature should take its course.

“Beach renourishment leads to a false sense of security in which people believe they are protected from storms, and there is very little incentive to relocate out of vulnerable areas,” said Sarah G. Newkirk, the Nature Conservancy’s coastal program director.

For decades, there has been talk of a federal plan to rebuild beaches along 83 miles of the South Shore from Fire Island Inlet to Montauk Point. But there is much uncertainty about if and when that project will ever happen.

Meanwhile, Davis Park and other coastal Long Island communities are trying to find their own solutions at a time when many scientists say rising sea levels and climate-change storms may accelerate shoreline erosion.

Most communities have sought beach replenishment, like Point Lookout, the Town of Hempstead hamlet on the eastern end of the Long Beach barrier island. In contrast, the City of Long Beach turned its back two years ago on a $100 million Army Corps of Engineers storm damage reduction project that would have included Point Lookout.

Officials from the Fire Island National Seashore, whose boundaries encompass all Fire Island communities, have expressed wariness of such projects.

If the Davis Park project is approved by the Fire Island National Seashore and its parent, the National Park Service, as well as by the Army Corps and other federal, state and local government agencies, dredge crews would pump 1.9 million cubic yards of sand from two ocean sites about 1.5 miles offshore onto almost five miles of public shoreline fronting the communities.

In Davis Park, an erosion hot spot, the project would add about 300,000 cubic yards of sand to more than 24,000 cubic yards of trucked-in sand that the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the State Emergency Management Office provided to repair damage from the April 2007 storm. Davis Park officials are hoping work on the Fire Island project can begin this fall.

While officials from the Fire Island National Seashore prefer to let natural processes run their course, officials have signaled that they will allow the Davis Park project to proceed as long as the community’s experts show it is environmentally benign.

“We wouldn’t do a project like this on our own,” said Michael S. Bilecki, the Seashore’s chief of resources management.

Gerard Stoddard, the president of the Fire Island Association, which represents the interests of owners of 3,750 houses and businesses in the 17 communities, said private property owners were being unfairly saddled with the cost of maintaining a barrier island that protects the South Shore mainland like a levee.

“It’s a failure by government to understand the problem and its responsibility to deal with it,” he said.

But representatives from the Nature Conservancy warn that such projects are futile and damaging, and it wants an in-depth environmental review.

Ms. Newkirk cited a 1996 study by coastal experts that showed nearly two-thirds of replenished sand on Atlantic Coast barrier islands is washed away within two to five years. “And as sea-level rise accelerates, as it is here on Long Island, the rate of these replenishments would have to be more frequent,” she said.

She also said that increasing pressure from private property owners willing to pay for such projects was no reason to allow them. “Up to a point, how they spend their money is up to them,” she said. “What is not up to them is how their activities impact the natural environment.”

While Fire Island property owners are not unusual in wanting to pay for beach replenishment themselves, most of Long Island’s coastal communities and local governments wait for Army Corps projects paid for by federal, state and local governments.

The wait can be long. Congress authorized the federal storm surge protection project known as the Fire Island to Montauk Point Reformulation Project in 1960. A final plan is not expected before next year. Work would not begin before 2010, and Congress has yet to appropriate the money.
In the meantime, sand for beaches is coming from other projects.

At Point Lookout, the Army Corps replenished town beaches around and nearby with 650,000 cubic yards of sand dredged from Jones Inlet as part of a navigation project completed in early March. In an unusual deal worked out by elected officials, the state paid for the $7.6 million project.
But residents want a larger Army Corps project. “We’re very pleased to have the sand, but it’s a Band-Aid,” said Herbert J. Abbe, the president of the Point Lookout Civic Association.

Attitudes are different to the west in Long Beach, Long Island’s most populated oceanfront, with more than 35,000 residents. Charles T. Theofan, the city manager, said there were misgivings about how proposed replenishment would alter city beaches and obscure boardwalk views seaward.

Point Lookout was not alone in getting sand from an inlet project. As part of a navigation project in Fire Island Inlet completed in late March, the Army Corps provided 600,000 cubic yards of sand to eroded beaches at Gilgo State Park and Gilgo Beach Park in Babylon Town. The federal government paid most of the $9 million cost.

Farther east, Suffolk County wants sand from a planned Army Corps navigation project at Moriches Inlet to replenish beaches at its Cupsogue Beach Park, to the inlet’s east, and at Smith Point, to its west.

But in Montauk, a proposal for an oceanfront seawall to keep storm waves from washing through village streets and inundating coastal motels faltered three years ago for lack of town and state support.