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AMY WIMMERThe late Jim Terry, who helped preserve Pinellas' coastal beaches, is given a posthumous award.
As coastal coordinator for Pinellas County, Nicole Elko has to justify the county's need for sand to state and federal agencies, then reassure the towns that line the beaches that the sand is coming - eventually.
Sometimes she wonders: How did Jim Terry do it?
"He had a presence about him. He wouldn't submit budget requests, he wouldn't follow any rules, and that's because he'd been doing his job longer than anybody," Elko said of Terry, her mentor and former boss, the longtime Pinellas County coastal coordinator who died of renal cancer in May. "He managed Pinellas beaches by making phone calls. Now that I'm in this job with papers stacked all around me, I don't know how he did it."
Last week, Terry was honored posthumously by the Florida Beach and Shore Preservation Association with the group's highest honor, the Bill Carlton Award. Named after the group's first president and given only 21 times in 48 years, the award honors people who devoted their careers to preserving Florida's beaches.
The award was presented at the association's annual meeting at Amelia Island. There, Terry's wife of 33 years, Kim Terry of Largo, got a glimpse of how her husband's colleagues viewed him in his 30-plus years with Pinellas County.
Their assessment? "He got the job done," said Stan Tait, president of the association.
"The job" wasn't an easy one. Eleven municipalities line the Pinellas beaches, each with a selfish interest in keeping a large beach with high-quality sand. In Belleair Beach, for example, residents wanted Terry to find them federal sand dollars without forcing them to open their beach to the public; in St. Pete Beach, business owners wanted sand on Upham Beach in time for tourist season.
"One thing that amazes me is how he collectively got all the small governments in Pinellas County to work together," said Phil Flood, a Department of Environmental Protection environmental manager. "That's monumental in itself. Typically the cities don't get along with the counties, and he essentially had all of those working with each other, working with him, working with us, working with the federal government. That was something else."
Terry graduated from the University of South Florida in 1970 with a degree in geology, and one of his first jobs was working for Pinellas County as a "rodman" - the guy who holds the surveying stick. He earned $1.98 an hour.
"I remember we had typed up letter after letter after letter," Kim Terry said, recalling her husband's first job hunt. "Then somebody said, "Why don't you apply with the county?' "
In 1978, Terry began working with county dredge-and-fill projects, an introduction to the years he would spend coordinating the county's coastal programs. By 1985, he was recommended to serve on the governor's Beach Restoration Task Force. Tait estimates that Terry served four terms on the state Beach and Shore Preservation Association board.
"He had run the Pinellas County program for 99 years, it seems, and I can well recall that in the late '70s and early '80s, the beaches in Pinellas County were in pretty bad shape," Tait said. "If anybody was, Jim was the architect of a common-sense beach preservation and enhancement program for Pinellas County."
Terry was known for his cut-to-the-chase style and his ability to find money for his beaches in the worst of times, by his own rules. The state Department of Environmental Protection, for example, increasingly expects local governments to develop long-range plans for beach management and submit budget requests to the state agency.
Terry did what the state demanded, but he often preferred picking up the telephone.
"He had worked with everyone and cultivated the right relationships with all the right people," said Flood. "He knew the people that he needed to to get these projects done."