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NAPLES — Collier County’s beaches took a bigger hit from Tropical Storm Fay this summer than beach monitors expected, leading county officials to consider steps to shore up the county’s coasts.

“I’m not necessarily happy with the performance of our beaches,” the county’s Coastal Zone Management Director Gary McAlpin told the county’s coastal advisory committee this week.

He said a $23 million beach renourishment project in 2006 was based on a design that was intended to keep sand off sensitive underwater habitats offshore but also left the beach more vulnerable to big storms like Fay, which came ashore Aug. 19 at Cape Romano south of Marco Island.

The storm has spawned a second look at the way the county builds its beaches and has prompted a push to plant more dune vegetation to hold the beach in place.

A draft report released this week puts the hit from Fay at almost 209,000 cubic yards of sand that washed away — enough to cover more than 30 football fields in waist-deep sand — along stretches of beach from Vanderbilt Beach to Old Naples. Numbers are still out for Marco Island.

That’s about three times the annual erosion rate between 2006 and 2007 and about a third of the sand that crews added to beaches in 2006.

County consultants are compiling the figures as part of a request to the Federal Emergency Management Agency to help pay to restore the beaches under a federal disaster declaration for Collier County. FEMA will pay 75 percent of the county’s costs.

The beach lost more than 20 feet of width at some spots since Fay, while other spots gained a few feet, according to the report. Many spots lost width but gained in height as the storm pushed sand landward, the report shows. In other words, some parts of the beach have more sand piled on them but still have less room to put down a beach blanket.

The county’s request to FEMA is aimed at restoring the usable part of the beach, McAlpin said.

The amount of sand for which FEMA will foot the bill will be a matter of negotiation, McAlpin said, but the report estimates that putting 209,000 cubic yards of sand on the beach will cost almost $13 million.

The draft report calculates sand loss on each stretch of beach using two methods: one based on shoreline changes and one based on changes to the beach’s profile as it runs from the Gulf of Mexico to the dune.

For each stretch of beach, the county uses whichever method shows the most sand loss in order to maximize the payout from FEMA, McAlpin said.

Overall, the beaches lost 197,000 cubic yards based on shoreline calculations but only lost 50,000 cubic yards based on profile calculations, according to the draft report.

Building the beach wider and taller than in 2006 might make it more resistant to future tropical storms, the county’s coastal engineering consultant Stephen Keehn said Friday.

Monitoring reports have shown that the 2006 project did not cover up offshore habitats, reopening the question of whether the county could build a bigger beach, he said.

It could be a year before work to return the beach to its pre-Fay condition begins, McAlpin said this week.

Federal and state permits are in place, but the county will need a new lease from the Minerals Management Service to use sand from a borrow area in federal waters off Sanibel Island, he said.

By that time, the county might be able to tap a sand source under study near the Cape Romano shoals off southern Collier County, McAlpin told the county’s coastal advisory committee.

Adding sand to the beach is only part of the equation, McAlpin said.

He said dunes planted with vegetation fared better through Tropical Storm Fay than unplanted dunes.

He has proposed requiring beachfront property owners to allow the county to plant sea oats, grasses or vines on dunes on private property as a condition of widening the beach in front of the homes.

Under another proposal, homeowners would be required to plant dunes as a condition of coastal construction setback line variances.

After the 2006 renourishment, crews planted 775,000 seedlings along stretches of the renourished beach at a cost of about $1 a seedling.

The county recently completed planting almost 121,000 seedlings at Barefoot Beach, Clam Pass and Marco Island.

The 2009 plan calls for planting dunes on the balance of Barefoot Beach to Wiggins Pass and on Naples, Park Shore and Vanderbilt beaches.

Some property owners complain that the plantings are ugly and ruin their view but the plantings are critical for a healthy beach, McAlpin said.