For Anne Arundel County residents, the Chesapeake Bay feels like a birthright. People have made their homes along its shores for centuries, and tens of thousands flock there every year to swim, fish and boat.

To restore the bay’s health and preserve its wonders for future generations, officials have spent billions of federal, state and local taxpayer funds on a variety of efforts, including rehabilitating shorelines around the estuary. Under a 2008 state law, Maryland’s preferred method for such work has been creating “living shorelines.”

Such restorations result in lush shorelines providing more natural habitat for birds, fish, crabs and oysters, with the added benefit of protecting against erosion. They often look like a sandy beach or new marsh — serene spaces where people can watch sunsets and swim or walk along the water.

Only, most never get to.

Virtually all of the bay’s shoreline is privately owned, which means many of these taxpayer-funded waterfront improvements go to properties that limit public access. These benefits pose a question fundamental to the Chesapeake’s future: Can Maryland balance what’s best for the bay with the public’s desire to enjoy it?

It’s an acute tension in Anne Arundel County, where just one of its 533 miles of shore is open for public swimming; a county where there are more than 33,000 registered boats but just six public ramps; where many public waterfront parks lack basic amenities like parking or bathrooms.

It’s estimated that four out of five Anne Arundel residents don’t live in so-called “water-privileged” communities, so when elected officials and environmental groups choose to fund projects in these exclusive enclaves instead of expanding public access, they are effectively “comforting the comfortable,” said Lisa Arrasmith, a longtime water access advocate.

“It’s all ‘Save the bay,’” said Arrasmith, a Hanover resident. “But it’s like ‘Look but don’t touch. Pay for this but don’t play with the water.’”

Leading environmentalists see natural shoreline creation as essential to cleaning up the bay. Progress has been stubbornly slow over the past four decades, but living shorelines offer benefits for bay restoration that cheaper alternatives like retaining walls or bulkheads can’t.

In the Cape St. Claire community, which sits at the Magothy River’s mouth, a series of living shoreline projects showcase how environmental work also created recreation space. The suburb has capitalized on more than $1 million of government grants, including $275,000 from the General Assembly, to restore two eroded beaches. The neighborhood’s community improvement association contributed more than $850,000.

On a recent October afternoon, children played in the sand and a woman launched a kayak. One beach is fenced, and signs declare, in English and Spanish: “RESIDENTS ONLY.”

Beau Breeden, vice president of the community improvement association, worked for years to secure government funding for these beaches. Growing up in Cape St. Claire, Breeden said, he walked across wide beaches that are underwater today. Thanks to state, county and federal grants, Cape St. Claire rebuilt some of this sandy shoreline, which the tides now replenish.

The work involved dumping loads of sand on what was a dwindling strand, planting grasses to stabilize the land and building a breakwater to protect the exposed shore.

For Cape St. Claire’s 8,000 residents, preserving beaches was their priority. But, to access government funds, they realized that the project needed to put the environment first. That meant planting native grasses, installing oyster balls and root wads to create fish habitat and building stone breakwaters to slow further erosion.

“If we had our druthers,” Breeden said, ”we’d just put a beach out there.”

South of Annapolis, the posh Fishing Creek Farm community has received more than $2 million from the county for similar work on its waterfront.

At the end of a cul-de-sac lined with stately houses, a secluded beach guarded by stone breakwaters wraps around a peninsula. A narrow trail leads through a grove of trees that obscures the beach, where a picnic table, fire pit and lawn chairs look out over the water.

Signs greeting visitors to this taxpayer-funded beach read: “PRIVATE PROPERTY” and “RESIDENTS ONLY.”

The leadership of Fishing Creek Farm’s homeowner association declined to comment; the community received county backing this year for another shoreline restoration project that has yet to get underway.

Singling out these projects amounts to “cherry picking,” said Jana Davis, president of the Chesapeake Bay Trust, which administered some of the funding for Cape St. Claire and Fishing Creek Farm, among others.

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Created 40 years ago by the state legislature, the Bay Trust is a largely government-funded nonprofit that helps restore the bay and educate the public about its importance. In the last decade alone, the trust has awarded $173 million to an array of projects throughout the mid-Atlantic.

Davis said benefactors of the Bay Trust’s grants are racially and economically diverse.

And without support from the Bay Trust and state and county governments, Davis argued, most of the shoreline work needed to protect the bay wouldn’t happen. Private landowners would opt for less expensive impervious retaining walls over natural restorations, she said.

Given the array of organizations the Bay Trust works with — including churches, farms and schools — mandating public access would be a non-starter, Davis said.

“Do we say: ‘You have to let people onto your private property?’” she asked. “No, we don’t. Because then nobody would apply.”

Cape St. Claire opens its beaches to the public on occasion, like its annual Strawberry Festival, but doing so more often would strain the neighborhood, which maintains and owns the land, Breeden said.

Anne Arundel County Executive Steuart Pittman said he believed it would be “illegal” to deny a community funding because it’s affluent. He called it “a real problem” that so much of the county’s shoreline is privately owned but echoed environmentalists in saying that it’s necessary to work with landowners to improve shorelines.

Taxpayer money in Maryland also backs public waterfront projects. The Department of Natural Resources, for instance, has funneled $3.5 million in recent years into marshland restorations for a major park project on the Patapsco River’s Middle Branch, bordering low-income neighborhoods in South Baltimore.

Still, some environmental experts consider the tightly controlled access of some Anne Arundel County homeowner associations concerning.

Colin Vissering, an environmental consultant advising on a federally backed coastal flooding project in Cambridge on the Eastern Shore, wonders whether Maryland leaders could require communities benefiting from this funding to allow public access. He pointed to one large project he worked on in a beachfront community in New York City, in which the neighborhood’s refusal to open its beaches contributed to the withdrawal of over $50 million in federal funds.

Still, Vissering, also a graduate student in the University of Maryland’s Center for Environmental Science, said the broader environmental benefits of this work likely outweigh concerns about public access.

“There’s still no law against doing these projects,” he said. “It may just taste bad.”

Take Hillsmere Shores, a waterfront community across the creek from Fishing Creek Farm. The community considered bolstering the riprap that protected its gated, private marina as recent storm surges threatened to wash it away.

But, having seen other neighborhoods get government grants to build living shorelines, Hillsmere leaders decided to apply, said Steve Vanderbosch, who sits on the community improvement association’s board. They proposed replacing environmentally unfriendly riprap with breakwaters roughly 70 feet off shore and backfilling the area in between with sand and marsh plants.

The roughly 1,200-home community raised $40,000 for the project, about $33 per household, Vanderbosch said. The Maryland Department of Natural Resources administered $670,000 in federal environmental funds, and the county chipped in $56,000. The General Assembly appropriated an additional $109,000 through a legislative bond bill.

“We built a muddy marsh,” said Del. Dana Jones, the Hillsmere representative who secured the money for the marina project.

Of several lawmakers who directed state money to similar Anne Arundel County projects, Jones was the only to agree to an interview.

The Hillsmere Shore improvement is more than just muddy marsh. The new shoreline is popular for dog walking and watching the sunset. Herons, terrapins and horseshoe crabs now live in the marsh abutting the marina. Even on windy days when white caps rip down the South River, the breakers quell the waves.

“It’s a sight to behold,” Vanderbosch said.

Stoney Beach, a small townhome community just south of Fort Armistead, secured nearly $560,000 last year from the Maryland Department of Natural Resources and $120,000 of state bond funds for its own shoreline restoration project.

The condo association wanted to fight the erosion of a low-lying shoreline, where heavy rains and high tides threatened nearby homes.

The project also protects a private, community-run park, which today offers ideal habitat for “birds and butterflies” and “the smallest animals on the food chain,” said Darrell Abed, the condo association president.

Planning is underway to seek funding for a shoreline tract there that’s twice as large.

Some researchers have found that natural shorelines bring economic payoff in addition to environmental benefits.

Donna Bilcovic and Andrew Scheld of the Virginia Institute of Marine Science recently found that existing and restored coastal marshland along the peninsula formed by the Rappahannock and York rivers provides close to $90 million a year in benefit for nearby communities, partly, Scheld said, in improved property values.

On hot summer days, Cape St. Claire’s beaches are so popular with residents that they “look like Ocean City on a summer day,” said Frank Tewey, the community manager. The community’s beach attendants turn away non-residents hoping to sunbathe or swim when Anne Arundel County’s nearby public beaches are full.

Breeden, the association’s vice president, wishes the state would expand public access to the bay, which would ease pressure on communities like Cape St. Claire and allow more people to enjoy Maryland’s crown jewel.

And he has no doubt that protecting this privileged access to the bay makes homes in Cape St. Claire more valuable.

The community enjoys an asset many in Anne Arundel County can’t.