Purpose: A major concern at many tidal inlets around the United States is how to reduce maintenance dredging costs. This CETN uses East Pass, Florida, as an example of how historic dredging data and bathymetric surveys can be used to evaluate whether dredging can be reduced. The particular alternatives reviewed are realigning the navigation channel or reducing its dimensions. Introduction: Dredging is p􀀲rformed at many tidal inlets around the United States to provide for safe navigation from the open sea to, usually, a harbor or waterway in the backbay area. Dredging is expensive, and a major goal of much ongoing research is to determine ways of reducing the cost of maintaining safe naviga­tion channels through tidal inlets. The purpose of this CETN is to show how historic data can be evaluated to provide guidance on whether changes in navi­gation channel alignment or dimensions can reduce the amount of material need­ing to be dredged. The examples used in this report come from East Pass, Flor􀁊da (Figure 1). This is the only tidal inlet between Choctawhatchee Bay and the Gulf of Mexico and is located along the Florida Panhandle between Pensacola and Panama City. Although this is a relatively low energy shoreline, the behavior and morphol­ogy of the inl_et ann. the ebb- and flood-tide· shoals resemble that of inlets found along the much higher energy Atlantic coastline. The first stage of the evaluation is to obtain historic records of the volumes of material removed each time the inlet was dredged. For Federally maintained projects, such data are available from the Annual Reports of the Chief of Engineers on Civil Works Activities. Unfortunately, the summaries sometimes include a combined volumetric total from several areas within an overall project. Consequently, data from a particular channel may not be listed separately. Different names may have been used over the years to refer to the same site, and project dimensions may have changed. Although the U.S. Anny Engineer Districts keep excellent records, it may be difficult to obtain detailed data for particular channels, especially for work done more than two or th􀁸ee decades ago. If possible, the bathymetric surveys made before and after dredging should be used to calculate the volumes.