Delray Beach has good news and bad news on its hurricane-ravaged beaches.

The good news: According to Rep. Bill Hager, R-Boca Raton, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection will allow Delray Beach to extend a beach renourishment project permit to include the badly battered north end of the municipal beach.

The bad news: Modifying the permit could delay the entire project for a year.

"This is only going to work if it doesn't cost that delay," said acting Mayor Tom Carney. "This project is going to take a lot of effort."

City officials had launched an aggressive lobbying campaign in early January to get the agency to extend a beach renourishment project the city had originally applied for in 2009 before Hurricane Sandy and several northeastern storms pounded the shore and erased 100 feet of beach.

In early October, the city approved funding the $9.2 million beach renourishment project that would restore 2.2 miles of eroded beach to its original state. But the project left out about a half-mile of municipal beach and beach that sits right in front of several oceanfront homes.

Since then, beach property owners and city officials have been trying to figure out how to restore the whole beach.

It's not as simple as just dredging more sand. Dredging has been approved by the DEP for only the original 2.2-mile section of beach because when the city applied for the permit in 2009, it was simply resubmitting an application for the same area it had restored in 2002.

Including the remaining parts of the beach would have taken another year in the permitting process.

"If you expand the area now, the year we saved is no longer applicable," said Paul Dorling, director of planing and zoning, who has been leading the beach restoration effort. "We are following up to see if what we have is an expedited permit [for the remaining area] in addition to the permit we already have. Otherwise we may lose the entire project for a year."

The rest is here:

Good news and bad news for Delray's beaches